#the fact that i do legitimately overuse them sometimes is not the point!!!

[konstantya]

Is this a thing?

[softer-ua]

in regards to what you pointed out a few posts ago, ngl one of my least favorite fandom things is when they make Kaminari the Har Har Stupid Joking ADHD Bi Playboy Who Is Never Serious Trope. like, he's very smart, 'worst in ___ area of a UA course' is very impressive and I don't remember if it even said that or just that he was studying with some other students, worried about his grades overall, calls himself stupid with implied insecurities about it, and didn't think he was very smart compared to the other people in the course. quirk overuse makes him loopy, incoherent, and think everything's funny. and yeah, he's a bit of a flirt and made a few perverted comments and actions that he clearly didn't think through that well. I'm pretty sure he's not ever stated to be bi in the manga because it was written by a coward, so I think people should think more about why they're associating and pairing together the idea of "hot flirty playboy who if legally able would sleep with everyone he meets" with emphasis or joke in the captions of whatever the content is on him being bi. I don't think this is inherently bad, even put together, but the execution feels kind of :/ and shallow. and I mainly just wish they'd pause to consider if there's any reason (subconscious or intentional) why one of those makes them think about the other, and at the very least lean back to see if they're blatantly making those traits centric around each other and tweak how they're showing them a little. Part of this is also because it's basically his fanon sexuality, but then they stick together "oh he's bi and everyone thinks that" and "he's made flirty or perverted comments and actions in canon at some point" and then mentally exaggerate and have this Canon Image of him as *waves hand at above* and I don't think that's happening consciously in most cases but. again. Cookiecutter Bi Party Playboy Who's Made a Date Offer to Everyone In The Building. not a flirty Person or a Playboy who is bi and flirts with more than one genders

I myself headcanon him as adhd and while the exact sexuality depends on my mood I think of/have him as bi in a lot of my content, but it's the same thing with why non adhd people see how he acts and label "adhd!" Especially about comprehension speed and derpy acting and intelligence and attention span jokes/tropes. Again, not bad in and of itself, but the specific parts of his behavior that make them think he's adhd, or that they start making jokes about or Ha Ha ADHD'ing, or that they think is why we project ADHD on him, (which they aren't necessarily wrong about, but like right in a really disrespectful look at how funny this is oh look squirrel way that's only funny when adhd people are doing it and it isn't all mocking like that) when they see other people calling him adhd, are the wrong ones, I think, and it shows in their characterization of him.

I'm not saying that any of those traits are bad in a character, but as a queer adhd girl with very high annual test scores and Gifted Kid Intelligence but extremely poor grades, focus, and brain damage (admittedly nothing like his, it was a longterm passive thing that mainly just made me have a Lot of Really Bad headaches, and closest thing it did to me was make me sluggish and emotional on bad days and also techincally have the potential kill my language bit if left untreated or the surgery messed up, which it didn't, and it won't be a problem again. but even after explaining that it wasn't cancer or any sort of tumor, and after seeing it do very little at all to affect my behavior outside of irritability and performance, because y'know, constant migraines, gone after the surgery but this was before that, Certain People I Was Vaguely Kind Of Acquaintances With started to treat my like I was a fragile glass thing going to to drop dead and revive myself speaking like a comic relief cartoon crazy person at any moment which was. patronizing.) I've since had surgery for, the way the fandom combines them into stereotypes and portrays them really just rubs me the wrong way- "Flirty Bi(tm) Playboy" "Har Har ADHD Can't Focus Or Get Things After They're Explained To Him, He's Still Confused And An Idiot" "Stupid Person With Brain Damage Who Can't Take Care Of Or Think For Themself And Acts Stupid And Funny For People To Laugh At" which tbh is super ableist even and especially when people irl do fit that description, and also reminds me of the Autistic Person Freaking Out And Being Dramatic sense of humor. And I know it's not helped by canon, because it done for comic relief and to limit his powers, but explored more I think it as a limitation could have been used way more interestingly than canon did and also call me biased but that quirk induced brain frying sounds at least as concerning as Izuku's quirk's backlash.

And it's a shame!! Because he's so much more interesting than that! Instead, the fandom gives me the Cookicutter Funny Bi ADHD Flirt Who's An Idiot and I am sad about it.

tbh it reminds me of what happened to percy jackson, esp with the ADHD Idiot Trope thing. which sucks because apparently it originated in the author making up stories around characters like his adhd and dyslexic kid inspired by Greek myths to tell him after running out of actual myths because it was his special interest and he wanted more. and then the series got kind of all over the place and the fandom processed that the adhd and dyslexic main character who does dumb things sometimes but is very combat smart and great at strategizing and leading gets bad grades and has trouble focusing and has, y'know, adhd, and made him the ADHD Idiot and erased his Gifted Kid girl friend's traits and ADHD and dyslexia into No Nonsense Calls Him an Idiot And Thinks He's Stupid And Has To Tell Him What To Do And Manage His Life For Him and honestly that just kind of sucks and it reminds me of what happened to fandom Kaminari. and now that I think of it people have jirou like that around him a lot too.

im fine with you answering this publicly if you want or have something to add but probably tag as ableism and maybe a biphobia mention content warning for people who don't have the energy to deal with thinking about those kinds of negative things rn because I kind of Went Off About It

I love this! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences 💚(and double thank you for tag suggestions)💚

I couldn’t agree more that a lot of fandom has messed up Kami’s character, which is why I’ve kinda been posting more about him cause he’s just stuck in my head.

I think a lot of fandoms have trouble with characters like this, people have a hard time with duality in characters and fast/fun posts are easier to make if you flatten a character down.

The did it to Kami, they did it to Percy, they did it to Ron Weasley, they do it to Thor, the list goes on. If being the Smart One ™️ isn’t your thing and you can be goofy than you get pigeonholed into the idiot trope.

I feel for Kami a lot(probably because I have adhd/brain damage too)

It sucks when you’re smart but it’s not the traditional, measurable kind of smart(even if by national comparison Kami technically is).

I got terrible grades growing up, and I pretty much got the absolute lowest gpa you can get and still graduate. But absolutely no one would have known if I didn’t tell them, because I’m not dumb.

(It’s okay if you are “dumb”, I love me a head empty just vibes friend. You’re 100% valid, stil worthy of joining discussions, and should be listened to and taken seriously. This just isn’t about that tho)

I joke sometimes that I’m clever and witty but not smart, because that’s exactly what it feels like.

I have lots of thoughts and ideas that I think I articulate pretty well, I am excellent at finding the humor in things and expressing it in a way that’s funny to others too, and there is almost zero problems I can’t find a work around. And the people in my life love it, and they love to use it.

But eventually everyone in my life finds out that I’m not smart. They see the way I have to pause to Google how to calculate a tip, that I don’t know the name of all 50 states or even where to find them on a map, or I legitimately just can not spell (if you ever see a post where it looks like I used a weird word choice it’s probably because I tried 4 times and autocorrect+Google couldn’t help me and voice to text wasn’t an option)

No one ever questions my intelligence until they find out about my adhd and/or catch me struggling with it. After the mask comes off it’s like they can’t even hear me anymore, nothing I say could be true or matter because I’m now just the goofy accident prone spacy girl. My family literally calls me Spacy

And ya know what sometimes I just let people think that because it’s easier, it’s easier than explaining that I’m dyslexic and that I didn’t have a single geography/history clas until 10th grade and shocker the capital of Iowa doesn’t come up much by then. And it’s easier for me to laugh off losing my keys again than dwell on the fact that sometimes it feels like I’m losing my marbles.

And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if after this post I get a lot more “fact checkers” and push back on anything else I post.(not talking about people who want to genuinely engage,y’all are always welcome, I’m talking those people who don’t wanna look it up themselves but no longer trust me to know what I’m talking about)

Kami is a sweet brilliant boy. He’s in a nationally high ranking school, he loves the weather channel, he’s careful about his quirk that could easily hurt his friends in combat, he has a very high emotional intelligence level, he wears dorky shirts with electricity puns on them, and he pays attention to his friends and remembers a lot of little things about them.

He wants to be a hero and he takes that seriously, and the series has tried time and time again to tell y’all that smiling and laughter are an important part of that. Kami excels at this part! So what if his history grades don’t rival the top of the class, the top 5 students would struggle hard to do what Kami does.

Iida can’t relax, Momos rather shy, Todo struggles with social cues, Midoriya is canonically not funny, and jfc where to even begin with Katsuki. I’m certain they’ll all grow up to be excellent heros in their own right, but none of them are going to bring the level of joy and camaraderie that Denki can. You can’t test that into someone.

Kami also just notices people differently and has any easy way of joining in with them, he doesn’t struggle approaching Katsuki or Shinso. Sure he doesn’t hit the the nail on the head the same way Deku does but he’s the only one who has the guts and skills to try. Also he’s not that kinda friend, he’s not looking to a save these guys but pal around with them

I think Kami 100% realizes what a special case and tough nut to crack Bakugo is, I don’t think he’s just careless or too dumb realize his life’s at stake or whatever.

I think he’s purposely testing Bakugos boundaries all while trying to not be a threat to Katsukis actual ego and calling Bakugo out when he needs it in a way that not to serious. Kami knows how to be just goofy enough that he’s approachable. He’s also keyed in that the way to Bakugo is through Deku, meanwhile everyone else is stuck believing the opposite.

Kami also realized how important music is to Jiro and saw an opportunity to let her display her skills and combin the two worlds she lives, and he wasn’t afraid to get some back lash from her for it.

Like Deku Kami isn’t afraid to be uncomfortable. You really can’t teach that level of social ease, you can teach the posture and feed people a couple of lines but it’ll never hit the same. Funny approachable people have spent a lifetime learning the craft, usually out of necessity.

It’s actually what gives me the biggest adhd vibes from him, because adhd is (speculated to be) a dopamine deficiency disorder. People with adhd are constantly trying to raise their dopamine levels, and that means looking for praise and reward and nothing makes the human brain light up faster than postative human connections.

Adhd children struggle a lot with connecting with peers and often find making people laugh a fast way into people’s circles and makes it more likely people will overlook being interrupted or spaced out on.

Also adhd people are pretty much forced by their own brain structures to be genuine in all they do, low dopamine levels make it very hard to do things you don’t enjoy because there no promise of dopamine from the activity and you don’t have enough to spare, plus impulsiveness makes it really hard to not show when you do or don’t enjoy something.

I agree that Kami is also painted as overly perverted at times, he’s a little flirty but in a fun casual way but it’s not the foundation of his personality and it’s really mellowed out over the course of the series.

And while I subscribe to the bi hc from his interactions with Jiro and Shinso, we should all be very mindful that we don’t lump these characteristics together. The are separate facets of his personality that are not dependent on each other in anyway.

Kami deserves all the respect and love, I can’t wait to see our electric king again 🖤⚡️🖤

[vohalika]

The Clitical Discordening

So by basically shitposting vaguely into the wind, I got involved with… something. Oh boy.

What the hell is going on?

Two days ago, a blog called “defenderofcrqueers” run by an 18 year old acequeer French girl called Sofia, calling herself tired of predatory lesbians, started a series of call out posts on a BeauYasha Discord Server which, from what I have been able to gather, is actually called Clitical Hole

The blog and the posts have been deleted

The first post was reblogged 40 times by the person who made it. 40 times. I counted.

In the posts, Sofia made serious accusations of transpbobia, biphobia, and aphobia, which some of the screenshots provided corroborated

There was also a section labelled xenophobia, which contained someone saying “fuck the French”

Put a pin in that

In between that were also “general violent behavior” or “objectifying the cast/each other” and liberate usage of trigger warnings, most memorable being “tw: lesbians”

Those posts very clearly already read as people shooting the shit with each other, making fun of being called predatory lesbians, talking about their personal relationships in sometimes maybe bad phrasing or poor taste, but that’s, you know, a matter of taste

The ratio between benign stuff and serious accusations was roughly 50:50, balanced enough for it to not be clearly discernable whether it was serious or not

Again, the blog itself reblogged this 40. Times. It got maybe 100 notes total.

I found this because a friend linked it in our 4 people discord after she got it from the mod of another discord

This led me to make two posts; one just vaguely making fun of how badly you can fuck up a call out post, and another explaining to an anon what had happened.

I stand by all of the points made in there, under the assumption that this was someone trying to do what has recently been done to a Fjorester discord server and failing miserably, while the members of the server largely treated it as a joke

Parts 2 and 3 were published, too, not reblogged 40 times. They contained more of the same, with some of the usual ace discourse you see all over tumblr in it

You know, claims that aces want to be oppressed to badly, acehets aren’t lgbtq, just the usual stuff you see everywhere which made it look pretty genuine.

Members of the server in question largely considered this a joke and trolled the author of the posts on the blog.

There were hints of a 4th post coming, including racism and antisemitism. You know, things a tad bit more serious than a bunch of lesbians being horny towards each other.

After sleeping on it for another day, I made a third post. Again, everything is now deleted, but keep in mind there were serious accusations and some pretty disgusting things in the screenshots.

This post was updated after the “saviorofcrqueers” blog and everything on it was deleted

Now I’ll have you know that my 3 posts on the subject had maybe 30 notes between them, largely by the same people. That’s fewer times than the blog self-reblogged the first post!

And yet somehow my posts were screenshotted and posted by the server in question, leading to of its members to contact me to clear the air

I will stress that these members have been nothing but polite to me

After talking things over with them and asking a few choice questions I’ll get into later, a new blog, “notallwhatitseems”, which is still up at the time of writing this, reblogged my most current post, owning up to all of this having been a prank to get back at the server for insulting her home country of France

So everything about that server is fake?

Well. Mostly?

For the record, I am not a member, have never been a member, and have no interest in ever being a member. It is not my ship and the general tone is not my vibe. In fact, they are very much against my ship, out of everything the fake call out included the 52 pages of BeauJester hate are probably the least manipulated and the most real, and you know what? That’s their prerogative. As I said in my first post, back in my days, people would raid tags with hate and then get raided back. Making your own community to hate on rival ships to your community is progress here. Godspeed.

(Ship hate, of course, rarely exists in a vacuum and can feature other shit, blah. I’m talking about it in isolation here. This is seriously not the most pressing issue by a long shot.)

The general tone of what I’ve seen from the server, even when it was kinda funny sometimes, is also just, plain and simple, not my cup of tea. Very frequently in what I consider to be poor taste. And that is fine, too. I’m not here to police how anyone talks to their friends in a private space outside of, you know, actual bigotry. To quote one of the people who got in contact with me:

So the two members who got into contact with me after seeing my post on the server. Source S is more of an outsider looking in, source Y is, from what I can tell, very much involved with this and was featured in some of the screenshots.

They both, independently of each other, confirmed to me that the transphobia and biphobia weren’t real, either manipulated or taken out of context, and that there’s actually a lot of trans people on the server. They also both reported that no one knew what the alleged racism and antisemitism would have been; probably members of color or Jewish members making fun of themselves.

So. Is that legit? I’m inclined to say sure. Three people confirmed this. Until anyone else comes forward, this is as far as it goes.

Except for the aphobia.

Source S told me unprovoked that there is indeed very standard aphobia going on in that server. I asked source Y about it, here’s what she said:

However, I would be amiss not to mention that the only person in this situation who identifies as asexual has said the following:

And, like. It is probably not my place to speak over what an actual ace person thinks about this, is it?

Wait, is that?

It sure is! I figured if I was already talking to primary sources here, I could as well talk to the primary primary source. Which I will now post unabridged.

At time of writing, there has been no response to that. And that conveniently also answers the probably most pressing question:

Why are you even posting this?

Or, in the words of an anon I received this morning in Germany and also France:

Anon, I’m not gonna delete shit.

Why? Because I think this is kinda important.

As you can see in the conversation up there, it really, really rubs me the wrong way when you abuse call out posts as a prank. Like, yeah, I am aware the whole concept has been meme’d to death on tumblr anyway and really bad call out posts have a long tradition. However, you kinda gotta put this into context, don’t you?

We’ve had a discord server called out for saying vile shit in this fandom before. First of all, the willingness to even hint at (and then reblog yourself for 40 times) another discord server being similar kinds of bad, toxic, and possibly harmful is pretty callous. Like, yeah, the post got no reach and I have even less, but throwing a community you apparently care about under the bus like that is, you know, not a very nice and actually kinda callous thing to do.

And second, fake accusations of bigotry hurt everyone affected by that bigotry. Yes, even in tumblr call out post format. The comical overuse of trigger warnings, a concept that is wildly mocked and misunderstood in the first place, is already in very poor taste. Manipulating content to believably depict pretty violent transphobia? Crosses a few lines.

Like, if you’re gonna do it for a joke, stick to posting the things that made members of the server celebrate themselves in the comments as “the funniest bitches on the internet”. And maybe don’t reblog it yourself 40 times, that shows a certain kind of conviction, doesn’t it?

I’m not gonna comment any further on the motivation behind this; as I said, my brain does not compute patriotism and I find it equally likely that “Sofia” is fucking with me, as she was with everyone else. I entertained the thought of this post being fake kinda from the beginning because the identities so perfectly fit several things being called out; xenophobia against the French at the forefront, of course.

Like, the only thing that made me believe in this being a genuine but misguided attempt at a legitimate call-out was the apparently manipulated content out of context and the fact that the OP apparently believed in their own post enough to reblog it 40 times.

So what my issue is here comes down to a crying wolf kind of thing: A fear that this goes down as a great prank, and the next time someone comes forward about fucked up things going on in a fandom space, everyone has gotta wonder if the tw: lesbians insulted France again. Something that by my estimation happens about five times an hour on the internet anyway.

Everyone, call out responsibly.

  (Yes I know I am basically contributing to how this incident will be remembered here. But at least it’s, you know, full of a whole lot of context.)

(Also, Sofia has used two throwaways, so at least that’s something she’s smart about. It’s why I don’t feel too bad about not censoring her name here. I expect the “notwhatitlookslike” blog to be gone by morning. Well, maybe afternoon, it is a little late in both Germany and France.)

[dragon-ball-meta]

Just discovered your blog today and am enjoying it immensely. I do have some questions about which is more "valid" between the DBS anime and manga though. The manga at least on a surface level has a tighter adherence to the manga's continuity, such as the lack of Gregory, no showing the Trunks' first SS transformation from the anime version of his past, and the SS Caulifla and Kale fusion churning out a SS fusion, which would seem to be what Old Kai meant when warning Goku and Vegeta 1/2

“2/2 But those are ultimately minor I suppose and perhaps they have explanations like "Trunks wasn't transforming for the first time in the Super flashback". I'm not a Toyo stan by any stretch and can't stand how he butchered my boi GOATku among other things but it seems like the manga would be just as valid/canonical as the anime. Toriyama works closely with Toyo as with the anime team and calls the manga a continuation. Sorry if this has been asked before, and keep up the good work“

Well first and foremost, welcome. Glad you’re enjoying this blog. As for the question, I’ve touched on it before, but I’ll dip into it again.  There’s definitely a bit more of a hierarchy than people want to admit, at least in terms of which would be “more canon” when it comes to the mediums of Super. To that end, I like to look at continuity, characterization, and lead platform.  See, the thing about Super, as it stands, is that it was never meant to have an ongoing manga. At all. It was written, conceived, and meant to be an anime series with Toriyama’s involvement. The “manga”, as it were, was originally meant solely to be a preview/promotional series for said anime, something to hint at things to come. That’s why the Beerus arc is so short and rushed.  When it came to the Resurrection F arc, however, that was when Toyotaro pitched the idea of letting him turn the series into an actual, full-fledged series, something Toriyama was ok with more or less because it meant that at least he wouldn’t have to draw it, and because he was interested in seeing how the anime and manga writers respectively would adapt his storyline ideas.  In that sense, the anime was the original, intended medium and means by which the series was meant to be carried forward, hence why I would consider that the lead platform. Beyond that, let’s look at continuity. Truth be told, neither manga nor anime are 100% flawless in it, making references to things that were filler in the name of comedy, or simply forgetting or ignoring a detail or two from the past. But even in cases of references to filler, I’d argue that they don’t INHERENTLY represent continuity errors per se, as they don’t directly contradict events depicted, and on occasion don’t even necessarily indicate that the exact filler events actually happened; in some cases, they’re just in-jokes or references for longtime fans and viewers.   Trunks’ “first time” transformation also doesn’t necessarily pin it as his first time in continuity, so much as simply reuse the animation and have the boy transform in a moment of grief. Don’t recall any direct reference to that being his first transformation at all. Similarly, I wouldn’t say Gregory inherently means Filler Gregory is meant to be who this one is, as Gregory in Super really doesn’t speak or have anything close to the same personality.  Similarly, Android 18 being as mad as she was about the mispronunciation of Marron as Maron can be seen as a nod to Krillin’s filler ex-girlfriend without actually acknowledging her. (As well as clearing up the whole “she’s named after her” thing since even the pronunciation is different in Japanese.) They’re not necessarily baking these things into continuity, just referencing them. One big problem the Super MANGA has, however, in an internal continuity issue. Toyotaro often feels a need to EXPLAIN things that don’t necessarily need to be explained, in an effort to feel like he’s fleshing things out more. The problem is... he often writes himself into a corner that way, as he doesn’t seem to run his ideas by Toriyama or check them against the man’s notes as much as he should, and thus finds himself in trouble later. Case-in-point: His decision that Super Saiyan Blue’s use had a mandatory cooldown period between uses, or else the multiplier the user receives from the form drops exponentially each time. Seemed a good way to potentially limit the form at the time, keep it from being “overused”, except... they very quickly found themselves in situations where it would HAVE to be used, to say nothing of the narrative issue of having Vegeta be in a reduced state of Blue by the time he faced Hit, thus making Hit’s win less shocking, and Hit himself a bit less formidable, to say nothing of downplaying Goku’s skill and reaction to it; he should have had a far easier time naturally, after all. This also causes some issues with Vegeta’s tactic vs Zamasu of popping into SSG for a speed advantage and then quickly in and out of SSB to strike, as that should have lowered the effectiveness each time, and THAT was done to deal with ANOTHER restriction Toyotaro had baked into the form of it draining ki almost as quickly as SSJ3 had back in the Buu arc, and that Godly Aura was actually just wasted ki. All of this then had to be negated via Toyotaro’s own version of SSB Kaioken, which was just... “Perfected” Blue. Which is just Blue without an aura. Which then leads into Goku knowing how to use Hakai despite not actually being a God of Destruction, not having ever even practiced it to know if he could do it, and only allegedly having seen Beerus use it once offscreen, which has to be inferred by the reader.   These are actually just a FEW of said issues in the manga version of things, but in my opinion, the biggest signifier and offender comes in the final category: Characterization.   It’s no real secret that Super does retread some characterization ground, but there’s a reason for that. New viewers, same characters, etc. Vegeta was sort-of given a full arc already, but due to popularity and ‘demand’, he has to be given a central role and can’t sort of fade back like Piccolo, Krillin, Tien, etc. were able to do once their respective arcs were done. (This also allows their own mini-arcs in the anime to feel more fulfilling as they’re not constantly shoved in your face, and they can touch on things happening or building up in the background of episodes, BUT, let’s move on.) As a result, one of the purposes of Battle of Gods, and how it was handled as an arc and the eps that followed it, was to establish a new sort of rivalry between Goku and Vegeta so as to renew that arc/dynamic for this particular series.  

And that’s where the manga... sort of falls flat. Vegeta is kept in prominence despite a lack of any sort of established/renewed rivalry with Goku; BoG was done in shorthand, after all, and the events following that, as well as the entire Resurrection F arc, were skipped wholesale. In fact, Vegeta himself seems to have gone through a VERY radical personality shift in that... he’s... nice. And I don’t mean nice-ER, he’s outright nice. He shows open affection for his family, he literally runs over to embrace his baby in happiness and rejoices that it’s a girl, he engages in pleasantries with the rest of the cast before the Tournament of Power and asks about their wellbeing, he’s got almost none of his original character traits other than a flair for the dramatic... and bear in mind, Vegeta still has that hardass-ness to himself in the End of Z, which these events are supposed to lead into. And this isn’t even touching on how the narrative seems to shift frequently toward him being THE hero of the series, often actually placing Goku in near-helpless situations and having Vegeta inexplicably bail him out, or just have Goku be in awe or starstruck at how awesome Vegeta is now. The Future Trunks arc, for example, has Vegeta healed only to the point of being able to stand, yet when Goku is shrinking back in fear at the sight of TWO Fused Zamasus coming at him, Vegeta... transforms, swoops in, rescues Goku, AND nukes both Fused Zamasus with a single blow. (It doesn’t “win the day”, no, but it’s a mite riduculous). The current arc is also trying to wholesale shift focus away from Goku onto Vegeta in a leading role, which is a distinctly non-Toriyama move.   And now, let’s talk Goku himself. HOO boy, where to begin...   For all the talk of flanderization of Goku in the Super anime (which I could write entire rants on but I’ll refrain for now), the manga does him ten times worse. Almost every negative fandom meme or interpretation of Goku is reinforced in this arc, sometimes even to the point of literal, direct lampshading of it. For example: Goku in the anime makes a comment on how he doesn’t see why Bulma would “kill” Vegeta if he’s not right there when Bulma starts labor, as he was dead when Goten was born and Chi-Chi doesn’t hold ill will over it. The manga? It quite literally has Goku state he wasn’t around for the birth of Goten OR GOHAN. He couldn’t even be bothered to be there for the birth of his son he was alive to see. When Whis pops baby Bra out via magic so Vegeta can attend the ToP, Goku is... apparently still so dumb that he legitimately wonders aloud if that’s how ALL babies are born. Goku, in this same tournament, has ZERO strategic or technical skill, and relies solely on brute force and powerups (which is actually how VEGETA typically fights but I digress) and even has both Roshi admonish him for it and even has Goku agree with it and declare himself a “bad student” and say that he’s “done letting everyone around him down”. This manga also has Goku and Gohan’s relationship visibly strained, with Goku seemingly trying to cut himself out of Gohan’s life completely as the kid has no interest in fighting. To top this off, rather than attending the tournament in a gi fashioned after his father, whom Gohan canonically does admire, the manga has him deliberately ask to have another carbon copy of Piccolo’s. Hell, Gohan is so far from Manga!Goku’s mind here, that it doesn’t even occur to Goku to ASK Gohan if he wants to fight in the ToP after Buu falls asleep. In fact, Piccolo suggests it... and Goku PROTESTS the idea, saying the kid’s got no stomach for fighting and they should look elsewhere. The only time Goku seems to show an interest in Gohan is when he shows off his power in a fight vs Kefla. This is distinctly, demonstrably, simply NOT Toriyama’s Goku, in any way, shape, or form.   Now, to speak on the other characters and their characterization... when it does exist, it’s one-dimensional and also often based around fan conceptions and memes. Krillin? Comedic coward who can’t fight. Goku even says that he thinks Krillin’s sole usefulness in the ToP might come in the form of him “being really good at running away”. He’s literally only in because Toriyama said so, and is literally immediately ringed out before he can so much as move. Tee hee so funny. Tien, who has no personality of note, is then also immediately out. Piccolo is just Gohan’s coach, really. Android 18 shows no emotion at all, even for her brother’s apparent death; this is later played off as her knowing he didn’t have his bomb anymore (something even Krillin somehow forgot???) so knowing he couldn’t have self-destructed... even though there are other ways to do that besides a bomb but w/e. 17 literally shows more care and affection for 18′s husband than she herself does as well, and their bond is pretty much non-existent. Chi-Chi and Goten pretty much do not exist. Trunks’ reunion with Gohan, meeting his family? Never happens. And Bulma... OH BULMA. What he did to that woman is criminal. She mostly plays the role of the worried Soldier’s Wife, fretting as she awaits her dashing husband’s return from war! The Bulma that wouldn’t take no for an answer? The Bulma that always insisted on going to the front lines to try to see things for herself? The Bulma who would be eager to see this future and see if she could find the notes of her other self and what else she may have discovered? That Bulma does not exist in this manga. HELL, the Bulma who was the smartest woman in the world barely does; what was Pilaf noticing one small math error in an equation in the Super anime becomes Pilaf “WELL ACKSHUALLY”-ing both Bulma and Future Bulma here and PERFECTING Time Travel so they can go to any point they desire, with Bulma being visibly upset about being upstage-aaaaaand she’s pregnant. It’s just... not good at all in this arena.   Now one last thing to mention: Toriyama himself actually did explicitly state that his canon Broly movie, which he did write himself, was set to follow the events of the Super anime specifically, with him saying the manga would probably continue telling its own story. And indeed, there are things about the Broly movie that do tie into what people thought to be just “filler” in the anime, such as the number of wishes Shenron had left tying into the episode where they summoned him and then fought over wishes. The fact that he DOES specify that he wrote it to follow the anime, however, seems like a firm establishment of heirarchy to me personally. I’m sure some will disagree but... that’s life. lol Anyways, hope that helped clarify my stance on it, at least.

[nobodyfamousposts]

Why We Won’t Hate Adrien If He’s Not Perfect

Here me out:

For all my salt and griping, I don’t hate Adrien Agreste. He’s not a bad character. The problem is that he has potential that is not being utilized in favor of coddling him—to the point where all the GOOD things that can come out of his character aren’t happening and his potential is being wasted for the sole purpose of having him be as the writers say, “perfect”.

I don’t want Perfect Adrien. I want dorky, socially awkward Adrien who sometimes drops witty one-liners and has no idea how to deal with situations. And I want it to be okay that this Adrien exists.

But do you know the worst part? It’s the same Adrien as canon. It’s the same Adrien the show initially presented us. The only difference is how they are choosing to use him and how they are choosing to frame him.

Consider for an example, the difference between the Airbender series Sokka and the live action movie Sokka. It’s the same character. Same concept. Same background. Same overall story. But what separates them is the completely different execution between the two that makes one the snarky and brilliant guy we all love or at least are willing to tolerate for his better moments, and the other a bland cardboard cutout we want to forget exists.

The first one is better because (other than the fact he has an entire series to grow instead of a 2 hour movie to try to work that in between overused narration and horrible CGI/effects) he starts out flawed and is recognized as flawed. We see his issues as early as episode one and they don’t go away immediately. He gets growth, but his growth makes sense in the context of his adventure. Even when he missteps and regresses, there’s cause for it. And at no point does his potential as a character feel truly wasted. There’s a reason why Sokka is perhaps the most popular character in the series for all that he’s the only “non-special” one.

Adrien could have been that! They wouldn’t even have had to do much to make that happen!

Show him struggling to actually engage with people! Insert a few clips here and there of him relying on anime tropes and messing up interactions for it if that’s where he’s really gotten all his knowledge of school and socialization from! Hell, his “forgiveness” and “be nice to your bullies” lectures would make SENSE in that light if he’s taking it from the viewpoint of anime where the good guys always forgive the bad guys and the bad guys always get better for it! All they had to do was SHOW that issue while having it BE an issue instead of ignoring it or laughing it off shortly after and bada-bing! We’ve got a character for Adrien that plenty of people can actually relate to!

Show him being frustrated with his modeling and being stuck indoors. Not just “sad Adrien is sad”, but actually FRUSTRATED. Have him complain! Have him vent to Plagg! Hell, have him vent to NINO! He’s his best friend, THAT’S THE EXACT SORT OF THING HE’S THERE FOR!

You want to keep him lecturing Marinette, fine. But explain WHY! Have there be a REASON that she is the only one he will try to actively lecture about things that’s not just about her being wrong and needing to be the “bigger person” even when she shouldn’t be! Maybe it’s because he hates conflict as a whole and he knows that out of everyone involved in said conflict of the day, Marinette’s the only one he can be sure will LISTEN TO HIM and take what he says into account instead of blowing him off or yelling at him outright. It’s not fair to Marinette to constantly be put in that position, but at least it would EXPLAIN IT rather than just have it be that Marinette is always in the wrong somehow.

You see what that does? We have Adrien having the exact same issues in canon, but by simply framing them differently, we have a more rounded Adrien!

The things we all seem to dislike about Adrien right now aren’t actually bad things. Him lying to Ladybug about the cause of an akuma, him being a brat when he gets rejected, him lecturing the person who shouldn’t be the one lectured—these can be GOOD for his character if they were just acknowledged differently in the show!

Let’s bring up the previously mentioned Sokka for example. Remember how he started out as a foolish chauvinistic wannabe warrior who hated all Fire Nation to the point of automatically assuming anyone strange was one of them by default? The wannabe warrior got curb stomped by Zuko. The chauvinist dismissed and got his butt kicked by girls! The guy who hated all Fire Nation people encountered a group that was indiscriminate of who they were actually hurting. And what did this cause? GROWTH.

All those things, all those traits would easily make everyone HATE Sokka. He could EASILY have been the Scrappy of the series! And I have little doubt that as the movie had shown, if it was just anybody writing him, he would have. Except he LEARNED. He started training to actually BE the warrior he wanted to see himself as. He started using that quick wit of his to make plans instead of snarky comebacks! He started seeing past the Fire Nation to the PEOPLE he was actually encountering. Sokka’s flaws were clear and apparent. They were acknowledged as among his character traits and they were treated as actual problems he had to address if he was going to continue this adventure with the Avatar without being the one holding everybody back.

Adrien could have been done the same. They wouldn’t have to lose the Sunshine Child status. They wouldn’t have to lose his angst and inner turmoil. They just had to USE what they were having him do instead of gloss over it while showing us shots of Adrien looking like someone kicked his puppy every so often to remind us we’re supposed to feel for him.

I for one would not have hated Adrien for being a brat in Glaciator if they had acknowledged it as an actual problem and had him legitimately apologize. I would not have hated Adrien in Copycat if they had him admit to lying to Theo or at any point tell the truth to Ladybug that the blame was his rather than hers. I would not have hated Adrien for his lecture in Malediktor if he had acknowledged that Chloe had done some pretty rotten things, but yeah, throwing a PARTY is kind of much. I also would not have hated him in Chameleon for telling Marinette not to out Lila because it isn’t working, it’ll make her target them, and she already got akumatized just because Adrien asked her NICELY to pretty please stop lying to him. So I don’t get where this insistence is coming from that he has to be absolutely perfect with all of the genuinely poor choices he’s made being shown as “good things”.

That’s not to say I do hate Adrien now—because I don’t. I just don’t see where the incessant NEED to protect Adrien from negative consequences is coming from. If they had let Adrien be human and make mistakes, I for one would not hate him for it. No doubt some people would, but there will always be those. I can bet though that plenty more fans would be forgiving for it. And there would be a heck of a lot less salt for us to throw at him that would make people actually debate Felix being a better option simply because the writers wouldn’t be nearly as inclined to waste him in an attempt to coddle the character.

No offense, Felix.

[nightcoremoon]

here's some controversy that has nothing to do with social issues.

a lot of people hate the band five finger death punch. saying those words provoked a visceral response in half the people reading this, and a "who?" in the other half. they're a groove metal band; similar to slipknot, mudvayne, disturbed, all that remains, system of a down, korn, and killswitch engage. they're one of those really controversial bands that are hated because they're ~not real metal~ by dumbshits who think that NWOBHM is the only valid metal genre. even though england ruined metal and punk but that's a conbfetsation for another day.

now, if you just don't like metal, that's fine. I don't expect everyone to like every genre. so obviously you won't like them, or any band in the genre. obviously. and these are not the people who are being targeted with this post. no, this goes to those who love metallica, ozzy, megadeth, slayer, pantera, testament, opeth, tool, manowar, meshuggah, children of bodom, cannibal corpse, fear factory, mercyful fate: this is to the people who love metal. now, I say this as one of us, but metalheads are one of the most judgmental groups of people in history. and frequently I find that metalheads make the same remarks in regards to their opinions on five finger death punch.

they do nothing but covers. they just yell and cuss. forty year old men with teenage angst. bad musicianship. they look stupid. they fuck their sisters and daughters. they sold out to the military. they're gay. they do too many ballads. they're redneck bait. they're toxic masculinity and macho personified. they rely on guest stars to carry their songs. they're talentless hacks.

these are all complaints I've heard multiple times from multiple people. and frankly I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hearing the bullshit complaints rather than the ACTUAL REASONS why they aren't the best band in the world. which I'll go through now.

they have an overreliance on breakdowns as if they were a post-hardcore band but they're not. breaking benjamin also skirts the line between post-grunge metal and post-hardcore and have many breakdowns, but the difference is that BB's breakdowns have math rock roots and use different patterns that syncopate well. five finger's breakdowns are... eighth notes. it's the difference between, say, black veil brides- who have excellent syncopated breakdowns- and as I lay dying, who have shitty and boring breakdowns. the only difference is that AILD has blast beats (and is fronted by an abusive asshole), and five finger has... ivan growling threats or whatever because they think that it sounds cool to have metal blaring while he says shit like "you wanna disrespect me? I will slap you so fucking hard you'll feel like you kissed a freight train, fuck you," or "if there was ever a time for you to back the fuck up it's right fuckin here and right fuckin now" or "it's not the size of the dog in the fight it's the size of the fight in the dog," or "in the end we're all just chalk lines on the concrete, drawn only to be washed away; in the time that I've been given, I am what I am", etc, all preceding screams. and no these are not exaggerations, these are literally exact quotes. there's also one that plays radio chatter from the military while he goes "hut hut oorah", which is different slightly. and in any case, they have done nearly a hundred different solos over their career, there is NO REASON for them to have such a ridiculous amount of breakdowns. they rival memphis may fire in that regard, but MMF actually has great breakdowns. churko is a metal producer, NOT a hardcore producer, and they sound empty when you strip out the vocals.

sometimes they will overuse a chorus, and hit the pop music pitfalls of having a song that's over half chorus. I'm sure they did this so the label would be happy with singles because the music industry is a commercialized garbage fire and holding it against the artists would be so fucking stupid especially since tool (the best metal band in existence) fucking said it best, "all you know about me is what I sold you, I sold out long before you ever knew my name, I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit, then you bought one; I've got some advice for you little buddy, before you point your finger you should know that I'm the man and if I'm the man then he's he man and you're the man as well so you can take that fucking finger and shove it up your ass". translation; the fact that you know a band at all means that they sold out to even exist in the first place because that's what selling out is. so even this complaint I have that sometimes they have repeated chorus is more of a complaint about a music industry which dumbs things down to sell radioplay to the lowest common denominator, which EVERY SINGLE ARTIST IS GUILTY OF. so moving on.

sometimes they'll have songs which are fairly simple from a harmonic/mechanical standpoint. opening verse chorus verse chorus solo bridge chorus chorus ending. verse goes some mix of eighth and quarter notes and rests in 4:4, solo is just the vocal line of the chorus, bass and drums are nonexistent and only serve to be a melodic backbone, and the music only exists to serve the lyrics... oh wait I can make the exact same arguments about metallica, rage against the machine, pantera, disturbed, and a hundred other bands. those guys aren't hated as much as five finger. hmm. wonder why.

the lyrics are often angsty. namely that they deal with honor, government corruption, mental illness, we live in a society, religious corruption, abandonment issues, recovering from toxic relationships, hey wait a minute these are all just insanely common topics for metal songs!

they usually play in the same key- wait shit every band has a favored key.

they do a lot of covers- wait shit they have literally more ALBUMS than covers.

(yeah that's weird to me too, but they only did a new level by pantera, from out of nowhere by faith no more, bad company by bad company, mama said knock you out by LL cool J, house of the rising sun by the animals, gone away by offspring, and blue on black by kenny wayne shepard... that's 7. they have 8 albums now.)

so shut the fuck up forever about the cover songs. metallica and the deftones and a perfect circle all had fucking cover ALBUMS, van halen only has a career because of the kinks, and every single rock band in the world is just ripping off the beatles, pink floyd, black sabbath, the who, led zeppelin, and cream. pick a legitimate reason to hate on a band, hypocrite.

alright what else...

"they're gay"

I'm not gonna dignify that with a response.

"they suck"

so does your favorite band. boom roasted.

"they're bad at music"

I'd like to see you do better then.

"they sold out to the military"

no they support the veterans and the troops; they fucking hate the military if you pay any attention at all. they believe in the good parts of the military that the government pays half our taxes to make us believe. you're not better than anyone else just because you see through one specific piece of propaganda because odds are you're blinded by another dozen. they write songs about how war is hell and how when vets come home they should be treated better. and anyway when you're in the dog eat dog world of the music industry hey guess what you need a market to sell to or else it's back to baskin robbins. I don't blame them for one second. if I had the option of endorsing cops to pay my bills you bet your ass I'll fly a blue lives matter flag and sell my soul to make money, and then donate shit to the black lives matter movement. flying a flag is worthless if I can do actual good with the money that those dumbasses send in. and name better irony than fighting to abolish a group that pays me to do it go on I'll wait.

"you're just a fanboy"

a) it's fangirl but metal elitists don't give a shit about the LGBTQ and b) just because I like a band doesn't in any way diminish the validity of my statements and any bias I might have is easily countered by whatever bias you might have and c) they're not even my favorite band you idiot I just think there's way worse out there just like I think it's unfair to say nickelback is the worst band in existence when drunk mom rock like hinder buckcherry savingabel and kidrock exists, and limp bizkit is standing right there, and d) they're not even the worst groove metal band, just look at fucking lamb of god, and e) if I was a fangirl I wouldn't have pointed out the flaws you fucking brainless troglodyte, and f) even if they were my favorite band in the world it doesn't matter if you think they suck because music taste is subjective anyway you goddamn moron. those guys write their own music, play their own music, perform their own music, and they love their fanbase more than most other bands. andrew biersack and kellin quinn and pepper keenan and glenn danzig and liam gallagher and axl rose and van halen and ted nugent and kurt cobain HATE their fans, or at least are huge fucking assholes. but not five finger. jeremy played until he literally broke his back; he's as devoted as phil collins, and if he made like atreyu and sang while drumming he'd be singing from a wheelchair, or like dave grohl when he broke his leg right in the middle of a concert, went to the hospital and got set and put in a cast, THEN CAME RIGHT BACK TO THE FUCKING SHOW AND PLAYED GUITAR AND SANG IN A CAST AND WHEELCHAIR. oh but wait, people say phil collins and dave grohl suck too, and turn around and suck mustaine's dick even though he's the biggest asshole in thrash metal behind tom araya and drunk james hetfield. point being, just because x doesn't like y doesn't diminish z's opinion.

"the singer fucked his daughter lol lol his grandchild is his son too lol lol his daughter is his wife lol lol it's funny because rednecks and incest lol lol" he's from colorado not alabama you dumb motherfuckers, and all the lol incest in georgia jokes are rooted in good ol yankee classism. also the guitarist is hungarian so the american redneck jokes don't even fuckin work. shut the hell up, you have all of the intellectual capacity of a common bog leech.

you can dislike the band. you can say you don't like it. you can say that you'd rather listen to different music. that's fine! that's okay! listen to justin bieber if you like him, listen to taylor swift if you like her, listen to new kids on the block if you want! I don't care! but stop expressing your opinions that you stole from someone else as fact. all you're doing is meme bandwagoning so you can find a community because you don't have the social skills necessary to meet people through the things you love so instead you try to pull serotonin out of making other people feel as miserable as you do.

with that being said, fuck all of the annoying dudebro douchebags who listen to the band and show 5FDP next to the confederate flag, blue lives matter flag, don't tread on me flag, punisher skull, trump sticker, and the crossed assault rifles on the back of your truck. you're all shit for reasons other than your music taste.

[cadetcama]

And That’s The Tea

An exploration of MJ realizing she has a crush on one Peter Parker (and the realization that he might like her too...) 

A/N: This has NO FFH SPOILERS. I don’t really even know where I’d put it in the timeline if I had to, but rest assured, there are no spoilers here.

-- -- --

Everyone has pet peeves. Quirks. Idiosyncrasies. Whatever you want to call them, everyone’s got them. Michelle Jones is aware she probably has more than most people. She’s not a big fan of people in general so it makes sense that most things people do would be a source of irritation. Overuse of exclamation points. Sending eight texts back to back when one, longer, two sentence text would do. Being late or not showing up at all. Pun T-shirts.

For MJ, there is a distinct difference between pet peeves and someone who is legitimately a bad person. People talking too fast is one thing. People who think racism, homophobia and misogyny are okay aren’t worth her time unless it’s at a protest (and she does go to quite a few).

She could go on and on about her different pet peeves. She generally used them as an excuse to not get close to people. (“He drinks his coffee too loud. I can’t be his friend”)

But somehow, MJ realized that there was one person who seemed to be the embodiment her peeves - Peter Parker. He always talked like he had just had 15 cups of coffee. He wore almost exclusively science pun shirts. He was late to almost as much stuff as he missed and his excuses were all laughably bad. She would frequently pick up her phone only to see a string of no less than 15 texts from Peter all about the same thing and all with too many exclamation points. Sometimes he would send her three texts in a row that were nothing but exclamation points.

By all accounts, he should be her least favorite person for the sole reason that he was a walking list of her pet peeves.

But he wasn’t.

In fact, he was almost the opposite.

She wouldn’t go as far as to say he was her favorite person, if only because Michelle wasn’t ready to admit that to herself. For someone who prided themselves on their self-control and observation skills, her lack of awareness as Peter Parker became not only her friend but one of her favorite humans was nothing short of alarming.

But he was.

From his messy curls to his constant fidgeting to his inability to string a coherent sentence together let alone keep a secret (hello, Spiderman), this dork had wormed his way into a place in her heart that she didn’t even know existed and took up residence.

And now she cared.

About him.

About his well-being.

About Star Wars, and LEGO, and other lame stuff that he liked and it was gross.

She didn’t even mean to but evidently, caring about people means you listen when they talk about things they care about and you retain the information.

She has no idea what she could ever use the amount of useless information that she has catalogued on Peter Parker for but like it or not, she has it. It’s not like someone’s ever going to pop up and say “quick! There’s been an emergency and the only thing that will help is knowing what Peter Parker’s favorite and most-used emoji is” (its the gasping cat emoji for reasons that are beyond even her. Second in line is the spider emoji because he’s an idiot who is about as subtle as the bus he caught with his barehands)

It’s the downside of being very observant - having a crush and suddenly knowing everything. She has this wealth of information that she just sits on, occasionally adding or amending as needed, resigned to just wait out this annoying crush on her nerdy, backpack-losing, easily distracted, flakey friend until hopefully it goes away.

(It doesn’t)

It’s not till several months into MJ’s awareness of the crush that she realizes that it may not be one-sided and… she’s not the only one who’s been observing the other.

She and Ned are at Peter’s for homework night when May brings in snacks. She tosses juice pouches to the boys and hands Michelle a mug of steaming tea.

“Here you go, Michelle. You prefer tea, right? We picked some up at the store over the weekend.” May said it like it was nothing, but MJ saw Peter’s ears start to turn red as he intently focused on his textbook.

“This is great, May. Thank you.” Michelle smiled and glanced at the little tag that was attached to the tea bag. “This is actually my favorite type too.”

“Oh, is it?” May looked delighted. “Peter picked it out. I wondered why he was so determined to —“

“Thanks, May!” Peter cut in, the rest of his face now matching his ears, as he looked pointedly at his aunt. She left the room, leaving the tray of snacks and an awkward silence.

“Thanks for the tea, Parker.” MJ said after what felt like an eternity. Normally silence didn’t bother her but this one was torture. “Though, I don’t remember ever telling you I prefer this brand.”

“You…You didn’t.. I just— I noticed it, the logo, on the tag a few times.” He was tripping over his words so badly, she was worried he might hurt himself. “And I just — well, I figured if I saw it a few times, it must mean you like it so… so that’s what I got. When we were at the store.”

What neither of them said, though MJ’s positive they both knew it, is that this type of tea isn’t sold in a lot of places in Queens, or even New York really. As far as she knows, there’s only one tea shop in Manhattan that sells it. So no matter how he managed to get it, Peter Parker had put in a lot of work for a tea she had never talked with him about. And Peter was a generous guy, sure, but she would bet he had never gone to such lengths to get Ned a…whatever Ned likes that isn’t available at the corner store.

She didn’t know what to do with this information, other than sip the tea and continue to digest the revelation. Even as Peter and Ned continued on with the calculus homework, Michelle sat on the floor, staring into her mug, a warmth growing in her stomach that had nothing to do with the hot tea she’d just taken a sip of.

Peter was paying attention and retaining information about her just like she was doing with him. The only difference was Peter was putting his knowledge to use (good use too, if she was being honest. She really did love this tea). She looked up from the tea, and caught Peter staring at her. They made eye contact and he flushed, looking away.

MJ smiled to herself: she didn’t need to be an expert in Peter Parker to know what that meant. She had a crush on this boy who was a walking, talking, swinging list of her pet peeves and it seemed that he had one on her too.

She downed the rest of her tea and straightened her shoulders, gearing up to jump back into the discussion on their homework.

Maybe dating Peter Parker would be a good way to put her knowledge of him to use…

Well…, she mused, only one way to find out.

[nandalorian]

Since I posted my thoughts about how Roswell has adequately represented queer men on the show and completely shit the bed on their representation of most everything else, I need to address the epically fucked-up treatment of female queerness and the queer female gaze in the context of Isobel and Rosa. This has been bugging me for a few weeks, and the reveal of Noah as the fourth alien pretty much cemented my feelings on the matter. I know there are people who feel the way I do about it, but if there’s another post on the subject I just haven’t seen, please link me. And if you disagree completely about this too, that’s cool. Let’s discuss.

While in my last post I applauded the show on its treatment of Michael’s bisexuality, I still don’t feel great about the introduction of a Michael/Alex/Maria love triangle. It’s one thing for Carina to double down on her defense of love triangles and insist they are not an overused and biphobic trope in popular media--news flash, it is, and in this case it’s also potentially damaging to the one black woman on the show, who will almost certainly bear the brunt of fans’ ire for “stealing Michael away” if they go through with a Maria/Michael relationship. I’m sorry if I don’t take a random straight white woman’s insistence to the contrary as gospel. Saying your formative years were shaped by straight love triangles doesn’t change the fact that it’s an insulting trope to women and an outright damaging one to queers, not even taking into consideration how the two intersect, or further when you consider POC characters, etc. You can’t compare straight relationships with queer ones, in the same way you can’t compare white experiences with nonwhite ones. To insist otherwise denies a whole system of privilege that drastically shapes and influences people’s lived experiences. 

But that isn’t what I want to address, because it’s another thing altogether to come for female sexuality and queerness. If I was willing to maybe give Malex a pass on the good-intentions-written-badly front, this is a hill I’m ready to die on. Isobel’s arc in season 1 of RNM demonstrates a lack of understanding that these are identities equally vulnerable to attack, exploitation, and misrepresentation--maybe even more so--as male queerness. That the outrage about Malex drowns out this other but no less important conversation kind of reaffirms the point I’m trying to make.

More under the cut.

Female sexuality has always struggled to find positive representation in popular media, no matter the time period or culture. Compared to male sexuality, it is not taken seriously, always played against the male gaze, or disregarded altogether because it excludes men. Queer female desire challenges societal structures around male desire and sexuality because it just… doesn’t require men to function and in fact actively rejects them. This is obviously a problem because the patriarchy loves it when men are shown to be extraneous and irrelevant. 

A lot of us know what it is to be invalidated as queer women, socially and sexually. Put your hand up if you’re a woman (in which I include cis and trans women, of course) or nonbinary individual who desires women and has been told, oh, you just haven’t met the right man yet, or oh, you’re just putting on a show for male attention. We have all been there and experienced this kind of erasure to various degrees of aggressiveness. This refrain is especially loud for bisexual women, who suffer erasure and ridicule from queer and straight communities alike, but the fact is, women’s sexuality has always been portrayed as less than or dependent upon that of a man’s. That isn’t to say bisexual men don’t also experience bi erasure. They do, and this is as much a product of homophobia as it is the primacy of the queer male gaze even within queer spaces and contexts. But in this case I’m addressing that of female and nonbinary bi-erasure and biphobia.

Furthermore, the role of queer women in society and popular media has always been underrepresented compared to that of gay men, or seen as more harmless or less significant, groundbreaking, or offensive for a couple of reasons: namely that a lot of people have played down or played off the existence of female sexuality and desire because they doubt its validity to begin with, or it’s “allowed” because it’s desirable to the male gaze. In some ways this has worked in our favour because subversive or queer female behaviour and desire in media have been able to fly beneath the radar, but it’s still a symptom of a greater problem.

I include this preamble because the writers of Roswell New Mexico have stunningly managed to ignore or remain ignorant to this context. The straight women on the show are shown to express their sexuality in upfront or positive ways, even opening up conversations about kink and reversing gender roles, but often in problematic ways too. The show sometimes fails the Bechdel Test or reduces characters, especially WOC like Maria, to having no purpose but to desire male characters and be desired by them, or portrays them as unable to want sex without quickly falling in love the way Maria seemingly has done with Michael. They’ve known each other for over a decade, and yet Maria only catches feelings after they’ve had sex, a night that, supposedly, meant nothing to her but quickly is revealed not to be the case. Interesting.

But beyond even that, my beef is with the whole Isobel-might-be-bisexual-and-in-love-with-Rosa-Ortecho storyline. I was excited about it at first; I couldn’t believe our luck that we had not one, but two bisexual characters on the show, and one of them was a bisexual woman married to a really awesome and seemingly caring South Asian man. But it was not to be, and this to me is ridiculously tone deaf and offensive in light of the fact that she was possessed by a male alien the whole goddamn time.

This tells us two equally disturbing things about the writers’ take on the queer female gaze and queer female sexuality: a) according to them, in this context, it literally doesn’t exist, and b) it is wholly a product of and subject to the male gaze.

From the promo for 1x12 it looks like they are going to delve a little bit into the mindfuck around consent due to Noah effectively brainwashing/tricking Isobel into marrying him, but one aspect of this I’d be surprised if they acknowledge is how he has also robbed Isobel of agency over her own sexuality. Not only has she been in a nonconsensual relationship with Noah this whole time, but he’s stripped her of the ability to discern whether her desires are her own, including the possibility that she is bisexual. As a woman, how can Isobel take her own sexuality seriously/see it as valid when she’s been forced to reconcile with the fact that, until now, it hasn’t been?

And that’s not even scratching the surface of the fact that a man used a woman, against her will and without her knowledge, to kill another woman. All over the simple fact that Rosa didn’t desire him/Isobel by extension. This stupid-as-fuck storyline is literally about weaponizing queer female sexuality in order to do violence against women. 

Just think about that for a second.

To make matters worse, Noah is a South Asian man and represents a community that is already marginalized in white media and society. Brown men have, in white culture, been relegated to two-dimensional stereotypes, rejected as love interests, and often portrayed as villains, and instead of positively developing an Indian character in a multiracial relationship and using that representation for good, he’s been made to violate his wife and use her to kill another woman. My girl @insidious-intent has written a really fantastic post to that end and I’d encourage you to read it. According to Carina, hiring Karan Oberoi to play Noah was colourblind casting. But viewers aren’t naive enough to buy that it’s ever that simple, or it shouldn’t be. I don’t see how you can write a nonwhite character the same as you would a white one and not expect it to have deeper or more damaging implications.

So my point, or at least one of them, is this: the failure of Roswell New Mexico to its queer viewers isn’t just that they’ve desecrated a ship as sacred as Malex or, at best, totally failed to do it justice. Roswell has failed us by invalidating and retconning female sexuality, and if this isn’t something we should all be angry about, straight and queer viewers alike, I don’t know what to tell you. While people are justified in expressing their anger to Carina about Malex, I think it’s also important to acknowledge and protest JUST AS LOUDLY the queer female angle. When you are thinking about how to represent, express, and phrase your disappointment to the production team, remember this goes far deeper than Malex. She has let us all down in ways that have nothing to do with our ship potentially not becoming a reality by the end of this season. She’s let POC viewers down just as resoundingly hard, both distinctly and factoring in the intersectionality of their writing choices.

All writers make mistakes. I want to put that out there. And I also want to put it out there that the issues around queer and POC representation are serious and disappointing, but not insurmountable if the writing team shows a willingness to learn, improve, and listen if the show is greenlit for season 2. But that isn’t what they’re doing. Carina has taken a stand, via Twitter, that they’ve done nothing wrong, and that is a big red flag that the writing team isn’t as woke as it likes to pretend and definitely not interested in listening to criticisms about their politics or how they try to convey them. So are her efforts of trying to silence bisexual viewers with legitimate criticism, or POC viewers doing the same thing. She and the writers would rather praise themselves for their token representation than acknowledge, listen to, and learn from real people expressing real concerns and sharing lived experiences.

[thelittlepalmtree]

What is a healthy ship?

I think about this a lot, because we through the word “toxic” around constantly. I actually love the word toxic to describe relationships that are draining, because like radioactive or poisonous materials, toxic behavior may be unnoticeable on a given day or it may have a big affect all at once. However, because of overuse of the word, I’m going to talk about healthy vs unhealthy.

So first of all, let’s identify things that are risk factors: A relationship between a boss and an employee (even after that dynamic has ended), a relationship with a significant age gap, a relationship between people of different social strata, a relationship between a person who has financial control of another person, and a relationship with a history of aggression/dislike of one another, a relationship between a therapist/social worker/doctor and a client, a relationship between a teacher and student, a relationship between people of different physical abilities, etc.

Obviously these risk factors vary in many ways. That’s because what makes a relationship unhealthy is a clear and dramatic divide between the partners. This is true of every relationship. That’s why teachers, doctors, therapists etc have strict regulations and ethics because the people they serve are in their power. Abusing that power is wrong. Now you can have some risk factors, and not be in an unhealthy relationship. In fact most if not all relationships have some risk factors for an unhealthy dynamic (common).  For example, people of different social strata can have healthy relationships, they just need to work that out and find ways not to let that into their relationship. And there are millions of healthy relationships where one partner has financial control of the family, but is not abusive.

Then there are gray areas. Personally, I think that a relationship between a boss and an employee isn’t inherently abusive as long as they are no longer boss and employee (look at Aunt Hilda and Dr. Cerberus on TCOS, Ben and Leslie in Parks and Rec). But there are so many factors involved that if one of my friends told me she had a crush on her boss, I’d tell her not to pursue it and I heard a boss was trying to pursue a relationship with an employee I’d immediately be uncomfortable. But a lot of it depends on the job relationship, have they always been boss and employee? How dependent is the employee on the good graces of the boss? Is the boss using rewards or punishments at work to control the employee in the relationship? Is the boss directly managing the employee? I have a similar thing about age differences. Often people are quick to condemn a 20 year old dating a sixteen or seventeen year old, but there are so many factors that you really have to look at it on a case by case basis. Similarly I know people who have very strong and loving relationships with a 7-10 year age difference that met when the younger one was in their early 20s and the older one was in their 30s. Personally, that isn’t something I’m interested as a 20something trying to date, but that doesn’t mean that every relationship like that will be terrible.

That being said, there are some risk factor that are always bad (absolute). A relationship between a therapist, counselor, personal aid, or any profession that gives the professional intimate and necessary knowledge of the person is wrong. If you need that explained think about Elijah Wood in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Did he skeeve you out? Yeah, that’s why the “my therapist is hot and I want to date them” plot is often very cringe. A relationship with an adult and a child, is always going to be bad (If you’re wondering where that line is, you’re too close to it). A relationship with a history of abuse is always going to be a relationship that is unhealthy. 

The thing is, if the relationship hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t have one of the clearly wrong risk factors, whether it’s actually abusive or not is really up for debate. A lot of time we throw the word abusive around for ships we don’t like. Sometimes it’s about misinformation, where people assign an absolute risk factor to a relationship in which there is no absolute risk factor. A big one for this is buckynat, a ship I adore. I’ll go into the age difference (which is one of many things that does not make sense):

the primary canon for the ship is in the comics based on Black Widow: Deadly Origins (the last comic to give specific dates for Natasha’s life)  they met when Natasha was twenty eight and Bucky was thirty nine. Not a significant age difference when you consider that at this point they both have anti-aging bastardized super serum that will keep them both alive for sixty three more years and counting. While other comics have alluded to changing the timeline, they have not actually provided different dates or information (there’s also some discrepancy as to whether or not Natasha was continuously with department X or not).

In the MCU (not that it matters now) it would probably not be hard to establish Natasha as older than the date given in CA:TWS and it would actually empower her to say that she has a version of the serum (where right now she’s just a normal human) and undo the horrible concept that she was sterilized as a graduation from the red room (in the comics she can’t have children because the serum makes pregnancy impossible unless you take immune system suppressants). If they didn’t want to go with this plot line, they could also just have Bucky and Natasha meet in the early 2000s right before she defected (Iron man 2 came out in 2010 if she met Bucky in 2004 when she was 20 she’d still have six years to defect).

And yet there is some strange insistence that if Bucky and Natasha even look at each other in the movies it will be some sort of pedophilia because of a throwaway line in CA:TWS, and based off of almost no evidence from either of the two reservoir of content we have. And rather than just say “I don’t like this ship” it’s been called unhealthy from every angle. Ironically in the comics it was one of the healthiest and most supportive ships which is why so many people fell in love with it. (but that’s for a different blog)

 Then there’s the assigning a gray area risk factor to a ship and insisting it always means that relationship will be unhealthy. I have to admit, I can be guilty of this. And I’m calling myself out right now because I do this to the reylo ship all the time. The thing is, these are legitimate reasons to not ship a ship, they’re gray areas and if you’re like me, the very existence of these risk factors makes the idea of the two characters being together seem cringe-y. So my Reylo analysis below:

The risk factor that makes Reylo seem unhealthy is the fact that Rey and Kylo had very few positive interactions in the first film, and in fact their most in depth conversation was while Kylo was hurting Rey. But, given the circumstances, it is possible they might get together. Think about Katarra and Zuko, who were on different sides of the same war, and then later became good friends (and personally I shipped them like crazy). It’s commonly accepted that in movies with grand fantastic implications, that two people who are on different sides can later become friends when one of them makes a major personal change.

Now, in the second movie, it seems fairly evident that that character change has yet to happen. But speaking from personal experience, it takes a lot for someone to be a better person. While it’s not a good idea to get together with someone to change them, it’s not like that’s an impossible thing to do, but also Kylo and Rey are not together and have yet to get together in the films. So presumably most of the shippers are hoping for Kylo to make better choices before the two characters get together.

That’s the thing about shipping. No one ships the version of Reylo where Kylo is a whiny bitch who wants to take over the metaphor for the original nazi army metaphor (they’re called storm troopers people) and he spends all day emotionally manipulating Rey just to make her feel bad. The ones who do ship it, like that Kylo and I guess Rey have to become better people first. They don’t ship things as they are now, they are excited about the potential happiness these characters can find.

While this isn’t a good way to live your life (i.e. don’t date someone who isn’t their best self right now), it can be a fantasy for someone. I get it, the idea that the person you like isn’t great yet but eventually they’ll get their shit together. The thing that makes it nice is the fact that it never happens in real life. So if that’s what you’re into, cool. You do you. If your version of the ship is okay, we’re good.

Then there’s the last method of calling a ship unhealthy. That is taking a number of common nearly universal risk factors and using it as evidence to say the ship is unhealthy. To me this is the grossest misuse and one of the most common. It is almost always used against canon ships that get in the way of the popular ship and it can honestly push people out of the fandom. The example I’m going to use here is the ship Karamel, because once again I did not ship it at all. But I saw so much Karamel hate that I’m familiar with the ridiculousness of the some of the arguments. Analysis below:

Where to start with this one. Honestly everything was thrown at this ship. The fact that Mon-El was kind of a dick in the beginning. The fact that his parents were bad people. The fact that he told her he liked her multiple times. The fact that Kara took some time to show interest in him. Yes, if a relationship is abusive, these might have been early red flags, but this relationship was not abusive. It wasn’t the best relationship ever. But Mon-El never disrespected Kara’s choices or ingnored her when she said stop or no.

The truth is, sometimes people have crushes on people and it’s not mutual. In this situation, they had to remain a part of each others’ lives, and honestly, I’m glad that Mon-El was honest with his feelings. Because for him, Kara’s friendship was really important, and she was constantly pushing him to be open wit his feelings and to be more emotionally mature. So when he was honest, even though the conversation was risky, I think it was the right decision.

Here’s the problem with labeling this relationship as abusive. Obviously, the implication is that Mon-El is abusive. When you are in an abusive relationship, it isn’t a choice. It’s something that happens to you, because an abuser will constantly lie and gaslight you so that you have no real understanding of the facts and therefore cannot really make a choice. If you say Kara was in an abusive or “toxic” relationship just because she’s in a relationship you don’t like, you are taking away her choices. The best part of Supergirl is that Kara has to struggle to make choices whether they be right or wrong. She’s the one in control of the plot, she’s the driving force. So to then take all that away because you disagree with her choice in partner, really ignores her power and turns her into a passive, incapable woman. Whether or not you like her relationship with Mon-El, it is clear that she is the one that sets the boundaries and she is the one that drives it.

So then there are clearly abusive ships. I’m not going to do an in depth analysis but I think the best example is Jarley. The tamest incarnation of this ship Suicide Squad in which the Joker tortures her and then pushes her in a vat of toxic chemicals. It’s also a relationship between a therapist and a patient. A truly unhealthy relationship is one that satisfies most or all of the following criteria:

The couple is actually together in the canon (otherwise how would we actually analyze that dynamic?)

The couple has an absolute risk factor

There is evidence in canon of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse (this is not having an argument or teasing each other, for more info go here)

There is evidence of gaslighting or maniuplation (these must be intentional)

There is a clear power disparity between the characters

It’s important that we don’t over-label ships as abusive. First of all because there are a lot of people who are in abusive relationships or have been in abusive relationships all over the world. If they see that just any relationship that people don’t like is qualified as “abusive” it will become so much harder to then see their own relationships with clear eyes. I legitimately realized that my parents had been abusive to me because of some of the discourse here on tumblr. But if I was fifteen in the marvel fandom right now, it would be really hard for me to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy relationships. 

It’s also really important to make a distinction. Not all ships are created equal. There are dark corners of fandoms where parent/child ships grow and pedophilic ships are popular. And several fandoms have very popular incest (sibling) ships. These relationships are not okay. We need to be able to call them out undeniably. And every time you call a ship you don’t like unhealthy when it isn’t, you’re giving people a reason not to believe you when you do call out an unhealthy relationship.

Our words matter, and how we treat each other matters. It’s important to remember that there are no easy answers here. And also it’s okay to just not like something. You shouldn’t feel the need to justify it and you shouldn’t feel the need to declare it from the rooftops. My favorite ship is Buckynat. I’ve never once gotten mad for seeing a “how do you like buckynat?” “not my cup of tea” post. I get so upset when I see a “How do you like buckynat?” “oh it’s so TOXIC” post. In the same way that if you liked chocolate ice cream and your friend told you that chocolate ice cream is contributing to misogyny and trauma for women everywhere, you’d be a little up in arms.

If you read through this, thank you so much, you probably don’t need it. If not, well, you’re not here are you?

[incomingalbatross]

...Yeah, this could definitely be an Entire Literal Essay, actually. This is...not the short version, but it is the shortest I can manage.

So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.

In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.

...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??

But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.

(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)

The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.

The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”

Personally, I kinda miss alternative labels like TVTropes’ “True Companions” or “Platonic Life Partners.” Characters don’t need to be spouses or siblings to be important to each other. They can be solely and purely—though not “just!”—friends.

Thesis statement: The popularity of "found family" is a great thing, especially as it celebrates the importance of non-biological, non-romantic relationships. However, an overemphasis on this relationship model can lead us to undervaluing philia in favor of storge, in much the same way that an overemphasis on shipping can lead to undervaluing philia in favor of eros. It can also lead to an erasure of the differences between philia and storge, treating these two types of love as interchangeable instead of celebrating the distinctive aspects of each.

[fae-ryn]

You open up Ao3. You have a new comment! That’s exciting, right? Except the commenter says your romantic leads don’t seem to actually like each other and you’ve repeatedly used the wrong ‘your/you’re’. And that hurts.

Negative comments on fics suck, especially when you know you’ve got difficulties in areas the commenters mention. So here’s how to deal with them.

There are two main types of negative comment. One is almost definitely cussing at you and probably mentions how bad the source material is/the fandom is/how awful you are as a person for writing [insert really anything here]. Ignore these. They’re just annoying people trying to make you angry and engaging with them is pointless.

The other will bring up the commenter’s legitimate concerns. Sometimes these are things you know you’ll be addressing soon, such as characters acting strangely or something that would be a plot hole if you didn’t already have an explanation. Other times a commenter has missed something in the story that is leading them to question you now, in which case you can often explain yourself and both parties leave happy.

But sometimes this isn’t the case and you need to address the fact that someone does not like what you have dedicated hours or days of your life to writing.

It works best for me to read the comment, then find something else to do for a while. My immediate response is to be angry and defensive, and that’s not useful so I do something so I can move past the anger.

Then read it again. Why is the commenter giving you this negative criticism? You want to know what they’re trying to tell you. Are parts of their complaint personal preference as opposed to legitimate problem? You can’t fix that, so ignore those parts for now. Why was your initial response [whatever it was]? If it was anger, is it because criticism can hurt or because you know it’s a weak point for you?

Then take the comment and divide it into things you can and want to fix now, things you can’t fix period, and things you can’t fix for this fic but want to get right in the future. For something like a grammar mistake such as mixing up it’s and its, the problem can be fixed easily and goes into the 'can and want to fix now’ pile. Just be more careful of it in the future, and if you have time and feel like it go back and fix previous chapters. The 'can be fixed’ pile should be reserved for future plot points and minor errors, things that are relatively easy to edit. If you have to go back three chapters and rewrite all of them to fix it, it goes into the 'can’t fix for this fic’ pile. If it only requires rewriting one chapter or part of one, it’s up to you if you want to or not. Things the commenter disliked on a personal level go into 'can’t fix period’.

The next step is up to you. If you want to and think you can calmly respond to the comment and thank them for what was useful or explain some of the problems that they have, go ahead. You can explain how you plan to fix the problem or just say you’re trying to improve in certain areas. This step is entirely optional and I’d advise against doing it if you think you will come across as angry or defensive. Part of giving critical commentary is trusting that the writer will not lash out at you for it. Don’t be that writer.

Take your 'can and should be fixed’ and fix them. Take your time to understand why you’ve made the mistake(s).

Take the 'can’t be fixed period’ and forget about them. Everyone’s preferences are different. Trying to please everyone is more likely to harm your writing than actually do any good.

Keep the 'can’t be fixed in this fic’ and remember them for next time. If it’s something like being bad at action scenes try writing a one-shot that is mostly or entirely action. Write several until you’re happy with it. If your plot lacked direction, try to understand where you went wrong. Googling 'How can I write a story with a clear direction’ might prove helpful. If you fell into using overused tropes, look out for them in your next story so you can avoid them or try subverting the trope instead. If you were accidentally xenophobic it might help you to understand where your prejudices are coming from and read posts by [insert minority group here] before you try to write from their perspective.

The final step, once you’ve learned everything you can, is to step away from the situation and move forward. Dwelling on it past learning from it gets you nowhere and spending your time wishing you could rewrite a fifteen chapter, 100k word story is pointless. You’ll get to the end and realize it still isn’t perfect because it never will be. If you’re doing this right you’ll always be improving and your previous work will never be as good as what you’re currently doing. You have to accept that. Learn from the comment, don’t let it convince you to stop writing.

I get it. Criticism hurts. It takes something you poured your entire self and hours if not days of your time into and says 'You’ve done something or somethings wrong.’ That doesn’t feel good and while it gets easier to respond to it won’t ever truly be a comfortable experience. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to lash out or to ignore it though. If you aren’t in the right mind frame to deal with it then hold off until you are, but don’t decide that you will always by default know better than your commenters or you will stagnate.

[mykingjon]

Rhaegar, Elia, Lyanna and the matters of succession

*DISCLAIMER: This post does NOT take Rhaegar’s morality, or the outcome of Robert’s Rebellion into consideration, I judge no one and keep my opinions to myself; I’m merely searching for a reasonable truth about why the writers created this plot. I do not tolerate any kind of hate speech; I am a fan of constructive criticism, though.*

Hey guys! There are so many metas about the news of Rhaegar/Elia’s marriage annulment, I know. It definitely set sparks among the fandom. I am not here to defend Rhaegar, or call him names. However, for the past year, I’ve been mostly digging into the history of law on my university. Marriage law heavily included. There are many aspects of the annulment we might not be taking into consideration, as long as D&D read about the matter in the medieval history of course, as well as read the books carefully (Y E A H), which eventually led them to the route they took. Again, I am not trying to defend their decision with this plotline, or the character’s actions, merely wondering about what lead to it in showmakers’ minds. I might be reading too much into it and they simply wanted to make Jon legitimate, and were not very sensitive about Elia, Aegon and Rhaenys, as well as the future of royal dynasty, but all I can do is hope it was otherwise (might be proved wrong in 7x07, but hell, I want to get it off my chest). Healthy discussion and pointing out mistakes in my logic is encouraged.

So, we certainly know Elia’s and Rhaegar’s marriage has been consummated (obviously). It could not be set aside by the High Septon as an unlawful one. Their son, Aegon, was second in line for the throne before the Robert’s Rebellion. The two children Elia and Rhaegar had were securing the dynasty’s position, and Rhaegar believed they both had a great part to play in the Great War. Later on, Rhaegar decided he has to get out of his marriage for some reason, be it love, prophecy, anything you want to name. I want to discuss something entirely different, which is: how would the Faith actually grant his request, if the Prince and the Princess already had children? And also, how would the line of succession look after such a turn?

I’ve seen many people deem it absolutely impossible for a consummated marriage be set aside, and from the religious (New Gods) point of view it probably is, to some extent. However, royalty rules their own lives as they please, and the Faith have been eventually forced to agree to many compromises (just like in medieval Europe), based on Targaryens’ Valyrian heritage (the overused example: brother/sister marriage). So, although the relations have been complicated at first, after hundreds of years of Targaryen rule, Faith was not really considered as a force to be reckoned with, but rather a neccessary ally Kings had to create dialogue with if they needed their blessing in something exceptional. Therefore, in the times of Robert I, among Westerosi nobles it is widely believed that if a King wishes to set aside his wife, even if they both have children, he can easily do that. In AGOT, we have proof for that. 

First one, we can find in Bran II, just before he sees Jaime and Cersei together. Cersei complains about the fact that Ned agreed to become the Hand of the King. She’s scared that Robert will actually listen to him out of love two men bear for each other, and that she will be set aside for the sake of “another Lyanna”. Robert is known to have many mistresses, and father many bastards, so surely she is not speaking merely of that kind of relationship between her husband and a woman Ned would choose for him. She is actually speaking of Ned Stark finding Robert a new wife. Now, if she is presumably the mother of his three children, how could her position be endangered by something like Lord Stark’s opinion of her, or her house, if she is protected by how lawful her marriage is in the eyes of gods? Clearly, if the King wants to set her aside for another woman, he can. The Faith’s opinion is not even considered.

“ My husband grows more restless every day. Having Stark beside him will only make him worse. He’s still in love with the sister, the insipid little dead sixteen-year-old. How long till he decides to put me aside for some new Lyanna?”

Some might argue that Cersei is paranoid, because she is scared of a potential enemy, as well as of the reveal of Joffrey’s real parentage. However, there are also the members of the two great houses who share her opinion, and even found a potential new Lyanna Cersei fears. In AGOT, Arya III, after trying to catch the cats, our girl overhears a conversation which proves the same point. Two unknown to her figures speak of how close Ned is to discovering the truth, for he has a bastard and a book. Before they start this topic, they also mention that lord Renly Baratheon and ser Loras Tyrell plan to bring 14-year-old Margaery to the court. She’s believed to be sweet, meek and beautiful. Both men want Margaery to be bedded and wed by King Robert, although he has a Queen, as well as heirs.

“The Knight of Flowers writes Highgarden, urging his lord father to send his sister to court. The girl is a maid of fourteen, sweet and beautiful and tractable, and Lord Renly and Ser Loras intend that Robert should bed her, wed her, and make a new queen. “

They even hope that Robert will see Lyanna in Margaery:

“The maid was Loras Tyrell’s sister Margaery, he’d confessed, but there were those who said she looked like Lyanna. “No,” Ned had told him, bemused.”

So, to conclude: during the reign of Robert I, there undoubtedly is a possibility for a lawful wife of a King, with whom he (presumably) has children, to be set aside, with no solid reason at all. Surely, just before his reign, there also was such a possibility. One can argue that Rhaegar was no King; yet, he was the Crown Prince of house Targaryen, and his ascention has been long awaited by the most of Westeros, because of his Father’s ways. I would not be surprised if he was treated like a King by the Faith under such circumstances, even if he did not have Aerys’ support in that matter. According to ASOIAF wiki, neither wife nor husband have to be present to make such an annulment, and just one side of the marriage (read: a man) can request it (presumably by sending a raven, if neither of them have to be present). It is uncommon; but not impossible, even book-wise.

Okay, so we know that Rhaegar could somehow persuade High Septon to annul his marriage to Elia, and he didn’t have to travel all the way to Tower of Joy, even if the Prince didn’t start his preparations for running away with Lyanna during the year between Tourney of Harrenhal and the actual event. I imagine that his official reason could be, of course, the good of the dynasty. Elia couldn’t have more children, or else she would risk her life severely, and in the terms of royalty, the more the heirs, the more secure they feel on the throne. Sure, Aegon and Rhaenys would be more than enough for house Targaryen to have a bright future after Rhaegar’s death. But we know there was also something else driving the Crown Prince, and that kind of official reason for an annulment could be accepted by the Faith, instead of “I need a third head of the dragon to save this godforsaken land”, “I love Lyanna Stark, I have to marry her asap”, or anything else you want to name. In medieval Europe, the inability to bring children to the world, or even as much as not being able to have sexual intercourse, was believed to be reason enough to annul marriage among the high-born. The main god-given task behind all the marriages was for the husband and wife to want to bring as many children as possible into the world. Conclusion: the annulment could be arranged in the world based on our medieval one.

But what kind of sense would it have, right? If Rhaegar annuled his marriage to Elia, he would bastardize his “promised prince” Aegon, and his daughter Rhaenys. He would risk his dynasty all the more with taking two heirs out of the line of succession, especially in the turbulent times of the Mad King. It just wouldn’t make sense, for the dynasty, Rhaegar, and even High Septon.

In medieval times, there were many obstacles to subdue in Catholic marriage law. I will not name them all, ‘cause there are a lot of them, but they were divided into those which annuled the marriage the second they were discovered (example: kinship to some extent), and those which could prevent the very existance of the marriage  ONLY before the sacrament, vows, etc. took place (example: age; yes, in medieval times people were sometimes not sure how old were they). The inability to provide more children could be used as an obstacle to annul the marriage by someone as important as Rhaegar (especially with the fact Robert could set Cersei aside with no reason at all, or the made-up one), yes, we know that already; but even in this series of events, in medieval Europe, there was an institution to protect the children from such a marriage. They were said to be “conceived in a good will”, so, in a belief that a marriage was and always will be valid. Aegon and Rhaenys could still be kept in the line of succesion, even if their mother would never become/stop being Queen (which is a bummer, of course, but hear me out). 

This seems like the most logical option that writers could follow if they decided to erase Elia and Rhaegar’s marriage completely. It was a HUGE compromise on the Faith’s side - the dynasty would not loose its heirs and the Realm - two heads of the dragon, and Rhaegar was free to do what he wanted, for whatever the hell reason he wanted. But then again, we already decided that Targaryens were bending everyone to their will, Faith included.

So, the line of succession then, would be: 1. Aegon, 2. Jon, 3. Rhaenys, 4. Viserys, 5. Daenerys. Pretty secure, huh?

The only person who lost social position in this, was of course, Princess Elia. But whether you morally accept with what was done to her in the terms of her marriage, or not, that kind of option seems like the most possible one. *prayer circle Rhaegar was not batshit crazy and actually took Realm, his children, and his whole life before Lyanna and Jon into consideration before doing something like that to Elia, all the while bending High Septon to his will, even in the show-verse*

Of course, we all know that the war ruined Rhaegar’s plans, whatever they might have been. I am just trying my VERY best to understand what was the writers’ logic behind that decision, because frankly, as somebody who watches the show, as well as read the books, I never took that option into consideration. Polygamy, the royal decree to legitimize Jon - yes, that was on my mind. But annulment? That was quite a shock to me, as it must have been for everyone. At first I completely couldn’t get my head around that, but the deeper you get into that, the more sense it makes. Well, I hope we’ll see how George handles it!

[texanredrose]

I am sick now (happens when I return from training like this) but here, for those curious, a quick list of things I learned while gone for three fucking weeks mucking about a forest in Wisconsin.

What I Learned:

My Battalion should never lead Soldiers in combat. Ever.

Fleece blankets from Walmart can legitimately save your life.

Taking a bunch of Southerners and dropping them in a northern forest with no heaters in 22 degree weather (-5 C) results in a ton of lost motivation and frostbite injuries.

I now know how my body reacts to a pinched nerve. As terrible as it sounds, I’m grateful for it; some of the only times I felt warm during those first few days/weeks was when my body suddenly decided ‘hey, you’re on fire now’.

This is a M2 mounted in the CROWS system.

It typically takes a Soldier a 40 hour course to learn how to install and operate this stupid thing. Seeing as we lacked instructors and qualified personnel, I had to figure it out myself with just the TM. It took 4 hours. I’ve yet to determine if this means I’m exceptionally smart or the majority of the military is exceptionally dumb.

Also, blanks are stupid.

This is a Wrecker.

I learned to drive this thing with a fully loaded trailer attached, total weight around 10 tons. I also put it on a flatbed much like this one. It was wonderfully terrifying, but I asked for it, because there’s usually 1-2 people per 200 who know how to operate this damn thing, and it’s kinda super fucking important for it to be usable in a real world scenario, so I decided I should learn and the Sergeant in charge of it was willing to teach me.

This is a LMTV, with trailer.

Now, I already knew how to drive one of these. What I learned was that, yes, I can in fact drive this bitch on a highway, fully loaded.

If I break a weapon down past the operator maintenance level, I can still put it back together. If I can’t, there’s something else wrong that I can’t fix. I either need tools or actual training.

Given enough exposure to stupidity and an ax, I can chop down a tree. 

Also, my anger management issues are well under control; I managed not to kill anyone. Success.

I now know how to play Spades and Rummy. I am actually extremely good at the latter and I’m pretty sure the people who taught me regret doing so.

There are some Dumb Orders you can fight, and some you can’t. I’ve always known this; what I learned over the past three weeks is that my unit is filled with spineless pansies who can’t distinguish between the two and cede every fight.

Just because someone went to school for something, doesn’t mean they know jack shit about it.

Also, just because they have been doing it for ten years, doesn’t mean they know jack shit about it.

I have lost a lot of faith in other people being competent.

If I ask why a thing was done with a tone of voice hinting I disapprove, and your first reaction is to insist you didn’t do it, I’m not going to believe you.

It’s possible to condition people to respond to certain stimuli in a specific manner without actively trying to do so. (We didn’t intend to turn our platoon into Pavlov’s dogs, but somehow managed it anyway.) We’ve got the majority of my platoon calling everyone ‘fuckers’ and ‘assholes’ and using the phrase ‘pain in the dick’ purely through overuse. Mainly because myself and my buddy dealt with far too many fuckers and assholes, the whole lot of them being pains in the dick through sheer stupidity. The result of this gradual generalization of language is that now, no one can tell if we’re being genuinely demeaning or just using ‘assholes’ and ‘fuckers’ in a nondescript, gender neutral sense.

Older NCOs still feel the need to clarify that ‘guy’ is gender neutral for Soldiers in a given element.

Despite strict haircut standards to differentiate sexes, I manage to pull off the gender neutral look anyway.

I still can’t tell when I’m being hit on.

They changed the MREs. I’m not sure if I like this or not. On the one hand, I don’t like some of the new meals, but on the other, I am now certain they’ve been produced sometime this decade, which I honestly have never been able to say for certain in previous years.

I will straight up shoot some of these motherfuckers myself, just to keep their dumb asses from pulling bonehead moves. Nothing fatal, of course, but I’m not going to just sit back and let these morons do really dumb shit that’s going to get someone killed.

I am one of the Four Assholes of my unit. We’re like the Four Horsemen, except brutally honest and not so much hell bent on the Apocalypse. Although, if it all starts to burn, we’ve already figured out who brings what for s’mores.

There are NCOs who are so insecure in their position and ability, they actually get upset when I tell them to ‘go away’ and feel the need to question every decision I make, even the ones that are obviously the best decision to make, thereby making themselves look more like idiots than their previous conduct.

I can still bring a grown adult to tears through words alone. I don’t even need to raise my voice.

Yelling is still cathartic, though.

I still sneeze when exposed to CS gas, though I don’t suffer the same effects as most others.

Hiding in a connex with weapons pointed at the door is actually not a bad idea.

If you are hiding in a connex with the door slightly cracked, a slim smart phone makes a rather unobtrusive periscope.

Sleeping at an incline is good for no one’s health.

Water moccasins are not always intent on killing you, but you should not approach them.

It doesn’t matter what state you’re in; deer will always think crossing a road at night is a good idea.

Those signs with the heights written on them by tunnels and overpasses? They are not for show. 

If someone says they know a ‘secret way’, sincerely weight their credibility before you follow them.

When stuck in mud, either start digging or get out of the way so others can.

If you’re driving an offroad vehicle and you think you might get stuck up ahead, don’t let off the gas.

Drifting a humvee is possible. I think I knew this at one point but forgot and rediscovered it.

With a smile and a compliment, you can convince any Officer to let you go back to work, regardless of your symptoms.

Setting things on fire is also cathartic.

I need to get my promotion packet together.

I need to be more careful about what I say to Privates.*

That’s a quick summary. To say the least, it was an eventful three weeks. 

*There will be a fic about this, because the whole situation is just... too fucking perfect to not immortalize it in a story. But, yeah. I need to be more careful.

**All pics are just images from Google; without service, my phone was just a big expensive clock and I totally forgot it could take pictures at times.

[leftpress]

Trump and everyday anti-fascism beyond punching Nazis

The goal of everyday anti-fascism is to increase the social cost of oppressive behavior to the point where those who promote it see no option but to hide.

Photo: Mobilus in Mobili 

January 23, 2017 |  Mark Bray

Either change their views Or change your friends If you have a racist friend Now is the time, now is the time For your friendship to end

— Racist Friend, The Special A.K.A.

Much attention has been directed toward the anonymous avenger who slugged the white supremacist “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer at the Trump Inauguration protest in Washington D.C., and with good reason. Yet the punch heard round the internet was far from the only anti-fascist action taken in DC this weekend.

In order to develop a broad anti-fascist agenda that aims to rip this weed out by the stem, we mustn’t overlook more seemingly mundane, even trivial, examples of what I argue amount to everyday anti-fascism that rely on developing an anti-fascist outlook that can hopefully stem the tide of bigotry unleashed by “everyday Trumpism.”

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EVERYDAY FASCISM

If we want to promote everyday anti-fascism, we must first be clear on what everyday fascism can look like (admittedly it can take many forms), and who the everyday fascists are. Although the alt-right makes a lot of noise, those who self-identify with that rather new label are few.

Yet as Trump rose to power, their ideas filtered through the campaign to ignite reactionary passion among many white Americans who felt alienated about the loss of their “place in the sun.” A country that they imagined would remain white, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative with an eternal manufacturing economy is rapidly disappearing.

In this context, Spencer and the alt-right have made Trump their figurehead in the movement to push back waves of (albeit incomplete) progress that American social movements have made in establishing societal taboos against explicit manifestations of racism, sexism and other oppressive behaviors that have been dismissed as “political correctness.”

This has taken many forms — from Trump and his supporters dismissing his boasts about sexual assault as mere “locker room talk,” to his disdain for the Geneva Conventions and general opposition to torture, to his comfort with labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists, to his outrage at being named the Time Magazine “person of the year” rather than the “man of the year.”

Much of Trump’s popularity stemmed from the relief that many Americans felt in hearing someone in an unquestioned position of authority and prestige say the very things that they had been thinking for years, but that were considered too taboo by society to utter or act upon. Especially after Trump’s election, the strength of that taboo was damaged, as more than 867 “cases of hateful harassment or intimidation” were reported within the first ten days after the election.

When we think about everyday fascists, we must bear in mind that the fascist regimes of the past could not have survived without a broad layer of societal support. Over the years, historical research has demonstrated that the process of demonizing the marginalized required the privileging of the favored, making many the explicit or implicit allies of Mussolini, Hitler, and other leaders.

If fascism required societal support for the destruction of “artificial,” “bourgeois” norms such as the “rights of man” in developing its hyper-nationalism, then today we must be alert to the ongoing campaign to delegitimize the ethical and political standards that we have at our disposal to fight back. This is evident in many of the arguments of the far right, but I found one useful articulation of it in the opening of an article from a crappy, generic far-right blog:

One of the best things about Donald Trump’s glorious, GLORIOUS election win is how it proved that all the main smears that SJWs [Social Justice Warriors] and “journalists” throw at wrongthinkers — Sexist, Racist, Islamophobe etc — have lost most of their power. After all, Trump was hit with these slurs non-stop during his presidential campaign, even by “respectable” media outlets, and still ended up beating Hillary Clinton decisively. It’s about time too, because not only are smears like Racist and Sexist overused, they’ve basically become intellectual poison.

After Trump’s victory, we have a dangerous mix of mainstream conservatives who don’t want to appear racist and alt-right “race realists” who all accuse the “left” of so over-using the term that it is rendered meaningless — in other words, no one is racist anymore (or we’re all racist now?). There is a major difference between the previous paradigm, where the left accused the right of being racist, and then the right accused the left of being the real racists because they focused so much on race, and a developing paradigm where the alt-right and those they have influenced try to drain the power of the accusation.

The everyday fascists are the ardent Trump supporters who “tell it like it is” by actively trying to dismantle the taboos against oppression that the movements for feminism, black liberation, queer liberation and others have given their sweat, tears and all too often blood to establish as admittedly shoddy, and far too easily manipulatable, bulwarks against outright fascism.

These social norms are constantly contested and are unfortunately subject to re-signification in oppressive directions, such as when George W. Bush sold the war in Afghanistan as a crusade for women’s rights. Yet the fact that politicians have felt the need to engage on the plains that popular resistance have established means that they left themselves open to political attacks on grounds that they at least tacitly acknowledged. A major concern with Trump and the alt-right, however, is that they hope to drain these standards of their meaning.

Liberals tend to examine issues of sexism or racism in terms of the question of belief or what is “in one’s heart.” What is often overlooked in such conversations is that what one truly believes is sometimes much less important than what social constraints allow that person to articulate or act upon. This issue is at the center of questions of social progress or regression and its contours are established through the seemingly infinite networks of human interactions that compose our society.

While one should always be wary about painting large groups of people with a broad brush, it is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia and many more hateful traits. When “Americans for a Better Way” mailed letters to five mosques in California calling Muslims “a vile and filthy people” and threatening genocide during the height of the presidential campaign, we can see how the broader foundations of everyday fascism embolden those who attempt to terrorize the marginal.

EVERYDAY ANTI-FASCISM

When leftists think of anti-fascism they tend to focus on the movements around the many Anti-Fascist Action groups popularly abbreviated as “antifa.” They have undoubtedly play tremendously important roles in resisting the far right around the world and protecting the vulnerable. Here, however, I am interested in the more subtle forms of everyday anti-fascism that deprive the far right of their bases of support in popular opinion. In order to understand what I mean by everyday anti-fascism, let’s first take a look at what I call an anti-fascist outlook that provides their foundation.

At its core, anti-fascist politics are about denying fascists a platform in society to promote their politics. This can be done by physically confronting them when they mass in public, by pressuring venues to cancel their events, by shutting down their websites, stealing their newspapers, etc. At the heart of the anti-fascist ethos is a rejection of the classical liberal notion adopted from Voltaire that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” After Auschwitz and Treblinka, anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death to stomp on the right of Nazis to say anything.

In theory, American liberalism is allergic to the notion of “discriminating” against anyone based on their politics, and sees the role of government as that of referee in a game that all political tendencies are invited to play (despite the empirical inaccuracy of this dream). Unless they break the law, Nazis can be Nazis. That’s just their “opinion,” which is just as legitimate as any other in an imagined free market of thought. In contrast, anti-fascism is avowedly political in its determination to deny the legitimacy of Nazi opinions and take seriously the ramifications that such views can and do have in the world around us.

An anti-fascist outlook applies this logic to any kind of interaction with fascists. It refuses to accept the dangerous notion that homophobia is just someone’s “opinion” to which they are entitled. It refuses to accept opposition to the basic proposal that “Black Lives Matters” as a simple political disagreement. An anti-fascist outlook has no tolerance for “intolerance.” It will not “agree to disagree.” To those who argue that this would make us no better than Nazis, we must point out that our critique is not against violence, incivility, discrimination or disrupting speeches in the abstract, but against those who do so in the service of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, class oppression and genocide. The point here isn’t tactics, it’s politics.

If the goal of normal anti-fascist politics is to make it so that Nazis cannot appear uncontested in public, then the goal of everyday anti-fascism is to increase the social cost of oppressive behavior to such a point that those who promote it see no option but for their views to recede into hiding. Certainly this goal had not been fully accomplished by a long shot prior to the rise of Trump, but his election and the growth of the alt-right (at least on the web) has made this task all the more pressing.

The anti-fascist outlook was put into action in many ways during the inauguration protest — from the more visible example of socking Richard Spencer to burning the Trump baseball caps of attendees at the alt-right “Deploraball,” to getting in the faces of Trump supporters heckling the Women’s March. Two signs I saw at the Women’s March epitomized this perspective. They read: “Make Racists Afraid Again” and “Make Rapists Afraid Again.” These slogans point to the fact that, while ideally we could convince all racists and rapists to change their ways, the pressing task for the protection of the vulnerable is to make it so that they think twice before acting.

To clarify, I certainly agree that changing hearts and minds is ideal and that it can happen. One striking example occurred with the case of Derek Black, the son of the founder of the Nazi Stormfront site, who disavowed white supremacy through conversations with friends at the New College of Florida.

But apart from the rareness of this development, one point should be remembered: that Derek Black’s white supremacist ideas and the anti-racist ideas of the New College students did not meet each other on an equal playing field. Derek Black was embarrassed about being a neo-Nazi and that fact only came out once others publicized it. Why was he embarrassed? Because Nazism has been so thoroughly discredited that he felt like he was in a tiny minority at odds with everyone around him.

In other words, the anti-racist movements of the past constructed the high social cost that Black’s white supremacist views carried, thereby paving the way for him to open himself up to an anti-racist outlook. Hearts and minds are never changed in a vacuum; they are products of the worlds around them and the structures of discourse that give them meaning.

Any time someone takes action against a transphobic, racist bigot — from calling them out to boycotting their business, to shaming them for their oppressive beliefs, to ending a friendship unless someone shapes up — they are putting an anti-fascist outlook into practice to contribute to a broader everyday anti-fascism necessary to push back the tide against the alt-right, Trump and his loyal supporters. Our goal should be that, in twenty years, those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public.

We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.

Mark Bray is a political organizer, historian, and the co-editor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press, forthcoming) and the author of Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero, 2013). He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College.

Related Stories on LeftPress:

► THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF ANTI-FASCISM

► MASSIVE CROWD CONVERGES IN DC OUTSIDE OF ALT-RIGHT ‘DEPLORABALL’

► HOW TO CANCEL NEO-NAZI BAND, BLOOD & SUN SHOWS

[lindyhunt]

HubSpot's Guide to Becoming a Better Writer

When I was nine, I wrote a short story for my avid reader base … a.k.a. my mom and dad and dog, Maggie. It was about roller coasters and featured my best friend Abby, but that’s about all I remember from my first literary masterpiece.

I’ve always loved writing, and I’m so grateful that I get to write every single day (albeit about marketing and not theme parks). I mean, I get paid to do this. How cool is that?

But just because I landed my dream job doesn’t mean I’ve stopped improving my writing. In fact, I feel more motivated than ever to discover new habits and master new writing skills.

Writing is an integral part of life. Regardless of what your job is, writing is a key part of being a great employee, student, and communicator.

We believe everyone can become a better writer — even those of us on our blog team here at HubSpot. Consider us your partners on this journey and this guide as your beacon. Use the chapter links below to jump ahead to a particular section, or keep reading to dive right in.

Writing skills improve grammar, spelling, punctuation, language, and writing style. There are also different writing skills required for different types of content, such as memos, letters, and emails.

Lastly, mastering the art of writing and the discipline required to be a writer is a skill in itself, too! (And, believe me, these skills are sometimes the hardest to master.)

Why Writing Skills Matter

Writing is a form of communication, and becoming a better writer is essentially becoming a better communicator.

We communicate all day, every day. Even when we’re not opening our mouths, we’re communicating through our body language, facial expressions, physical movements — and with our written words.

Whether you’re sending an important memo to your team at work, writing a letter to your child’s teacher, building a presentation for a potential investor, or simply emailing your doctor, writing skills help you communicate in a clear and confident manner.

Where Writing Skills Matter

Writing skills are universal. They’re applicable to almost every part of our lives.

At work, writing skills help us communicate with co-workers, managers, and customers. They help us create effective emails, presentations, blog posts, social media posts, and marketing campaigns. They also come in handy when you might be applying to new jobs using resumes and cover letters.

Writing skills also apply at home. Perhaps you’re writing an important letter to your child’s teacher, or maybe you have to state your case when applying for a bank loan or attempting to purchase a home.

Becoming a better writer can help you in a myriad of ways — and make you sound smart and confident.

Improving Your Writing Structure

Sometimes I like to think of writing like making chili … weird, I know, but let me explain.

My dad is a self-proclaimed chili master. He always says that there’s a lot that goes into making a good chili: your choice of meat and how you prepare it, your choice of beans, your level of spiciness and what seasoning you choose, how long you cook it, and — finally — what you put on top. (Cheese and sour cream, anyone!?)

Weird story, Allie … what’s the point?

My point is that there’s a lot that goes into writing, too. And when you combine its components correctly (commas, gerunds, metaphors, etc.), your writing becomes a very powerful recipe.

Now, let’s talk about those individual writing “ingredients”. Below, I’ve provided a handful of tips for each component — some featuring a pretty list with bullet points.

Featured Resource:

The Marketer's Guide to Writing Well

Grammar Skills

You’ve heard people talk about grammar … probably something along the lines of: “Sorry, I am SUCH a grammar freak!” Or, the infamous you’re vs. your debate.

  The official definition of grammar is “ the study or use of the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to express meaning.” I like to think about it as the way you use words and put them together.

Grammar encompasses a lot of rules and techniques. Here are a handful of my favorite grammar tip lists.

TechRepublic’s “10 Flagrant Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Stupid”

FluentU’s “8 Important English Grammar Rules That Anyone in Business Should Understand”

Writing Forward’s “Ten Grammar Rules Every Writer Should Know”

Some writing skills are repeated in these lists, but that means they’re that much more important!

Spelling Skills

Remember when spelling was its own subject in school? As we grew up, it was phased out of our daily learning, but spelling is still a vital writing skill.

We all struggle with certain words (Feb-ru-ary, anyone?), but certain misspellings can completely change the meaning of a phrase or piece of writing — and mean massive confusion for co-workers or customers.

Below, I’ve aggregated some of the most common misuses and misspellings (as inspired by this list from the B2B Insights blog).

Continual vs. continuous

“Continual” means always occurring, whereas “continuously” means never-ending.

i.e. vs. e.g.

i.e. stands for “id est” meaning “”in other words,”” while “e.g.” stands for “exempli gratia” meaning ““for example””.

Elicit vs. illicit

“Elicit” means to evoke some sort of response, whereas “illicit” means “illegal.”

Alternately vs. alternatively

“Alternately” means to take turns –or alternate, whereas alternatively” presents one or more options.

Refute vs. rebut

Refute” is to disprove with evidence, whereas “rebut” is to disagree.

Farther vs. further

“Farther” refers to physical distance, whereas “further” refers to a greater degree of something.

Alright vs. all right

Alright is actually not a legitimate word … use “all right instead.”

Uninterested vs. disinterested

Uninterested” means to have no interest, whereas “disinterested” means to be removed or neutral to a situation.

Who's vs. whose

Who’s” is a contraction for ““who is,” whereas whose is used to show ownership of something. (The same goes for it’s vs. its.)

Than vs. then

Than is used when comparing two things, whereas then is used to express a sense of time, such as what comes next or what used to be.

Punctuation Skills

Punctuation refers to a whole host of symbols used in writing, but I’m going to review the few most popular in this section.

Periods (.), exclamation points (!), and question marks (?)

Periods should be your go-to way to end a sentence. Every sentence should end in a period (if you’re not using a question mark or exclamation point.

Exclamation points — which are used to express excitement, accentuate an important point, or get the reader’s attention — should be used sparingly! If you overuse them, they won’t be effective when you need them to be! These sentences are great examples of completely unnecessary exclamation points! Woot!

Question marks are appropriate for — you guessed it — questions. Using questions throughout your writing can help create a conversational, friendly tone (which we talk about in our language skills section below).

Commas (,), semicolons (;), and colons (:)

When I started at HubSpot, my editor told me that I was “comma happy.”

  I used commas a lot, so I understood why she was giving me that feedback. In my defense, commas are important in writing and apparently very financially valuable for businesses.

Commas pack a punch in your writing. They’re also easy to overuse and misuse. Because of that, it’s crucial to master the rules of the comma.

Next: semicolons. Where commas connect two phrases, semicolons connect two complete, related sentences. For example, the previous sentence could be re-written with a semicolon by saying: Commas connect two phrases; however, semicolons connect two complete, related sentences.

Always use “____; however, ____” when using a semicolon.

Colons are used to introduce a new point, just like in my sentence above, “Next: semicolons.”. They’re pretty easy to utilize in your writing.

Dashes (—) and hyphens (-)

Writers often confuse dashes and colons. Colons introduce something and are typically used near the end of a sentence, whereas hyphens are used to offset a phrase — not unlike commas — in the middle or end of a sentence.

Dashes just put a little more oomph on the phrase that’s set apart.

Hyphens are used to connect words to make them compound words. They’re used to connect two words that serve as an adjective for a noun (such as well-known, or caramel-covered) as well as clarify the meaning of a word (re-sign vs. resign). Hyphens also produce numbers (thirty-seven) and, with prefixes, set apart one word from another (boyfriend vs. ex-boyfriend).

Language Skills

Language refers to using certain words and writing techniques to create a great piece of writing. Consider language skills to be the proverbial “bow” on top of your grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Here are some of my favorites.

Employ transition words to help your reader glide from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph.

Use colorful and creative metaphors to help get difficult, complicated, or uncomfortable points across.

Don’t be afraid to incorporate a personal anecdote or two … like my comma story above. This helps connect to your reader and present something more interesting than a simple how-to or definition.

Look up colorful, flavorful synonyms to basic words. Painful = excruciating. Fast = rapid. Scary = chilling. Noisy = deafening. These words are more fun to read and present a more visceral, interesting piece of writing.

Pepper in questions in your writing to become more conversational. Try not to overdo it, though, or your reader might feel like he or she is being interrogated.

Study your audience to know which words to use (and not use) to have the greatest impact. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

Read your writing out loud to test for rhythm and awkward phrasing.

Developing Your Written Content

Different types of writing require different skills. What makes for a great business memo might not be needed when writing a blog or email. Note: The writing skills we discussed above are universal and apply to each of these types of content.

Writing a Letter

There are a lot of types of letters out there: formal letters, cover letters, letters of recommendation, letters to Grandma … but the letter format you choose should always depend on your audience. If you know your recipient, a casual letter is appropriate. If you don’t know your recipient or are writing a business letter, a formal letter is best.

Featured Resource:

5 Professional Cover Letter Templates

You should always address formal letters in a specific way, unlike informal letters to friends or family. When starting your letter, the greeting should align with your familiarity with the recipient. Informal letters can start with “Hello” or another common greeting. Formal letters should begin with “Dear _______” if you know the recipient’s name or “To whom it may concern” if you don’t. All greetings should be followed with a comma.

The body of your letter should be concise and accurate, whether informal or formal. Avoid contractions, slang, and inappropriate language in formal letters.

Always include a complimentary closing at the end of your letter. Informal letters can be closed with “With love,” “Sincerely,” or any other customary closing. Formal letters should be signed off with “Sincerely” (typically the safest bet), “Cordially,” or “Warmly.” All closings should be followed with a comma as well.

Writing a Business Memo

A business memo (short for “memorandum,” or reminder) is a type of internal business communication sent to a large team or entire organization. Business memos typically follow a simple template to ensure consistency.

When writing a business memo, you should always prioritize accuracy and brevity. Consider your audience when choosing what words and language to use. Double-check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that could confuse or distract the reader. Be sure your memo is concise and to the point so that recipients clearly understand its purpose. Lastly, don’t forget to attach any necessary data and documents.

Writing an Email

Like letters, emails come in all shapes and sizes. There are marketing emails, sales emails, emails to pitch media relations, and emails that communicate with international teams.

Regardless of what kind of email you’re writing, here are a few tips that can help you write a great one:

Write an outstanding subject line … literally. Make it stand out so people open your email.

Keep your email focused. Consider dropping any extraneous greetings or unnecessary information. Break up your message so it’s not just one long block of text.

Watch out for robotic writing. Read your message out loud to help combat this.

Avoid hedging language, which can make you sound less confident and weaken your writing.

Featured Resources:

25 Proven Sales Email Templates

The Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing

How to Create Email Newsletters That Don't Suck

Writing a Blog Post

At HubSpot, we love writing blog posts. They’re fun, straightforward, and often informal ways to connect with our customers and readers.

Everyone should know how to write a blog post. While maintaining a blog takes some extra work, writing up the blog posts isn’t hard at all. In fact, we’ve made it easier — simply download our five free blog post templates and dive right in.

In the meantime, here’s our super-simple blog writing formula:

Identify your blog post topic

Brainstorm a working title

Draft a captivating intro

Outline your content

Write the blog post

Edit, proofread and format the post

Add a CTA and optimize for SEO

Finalize your title, and publish!

Learn more about this process in our step-by-step guide on writing a blog post. Want to learn how to write other types of content? Check out our guides on writing video scripts, compelling copy, business proposals, and press releases.

Featured Resources:

How to Start a Successful Blog

5 Free Blog Post Templates

Nurturing Your Writing Habits

Writing skills are both technical and habitual. You could become a grammar guru, punctuation pro, or master of business memos … but if you never actually sat down to write, it wouldn’t matter. While the technical skills make you a better writer, building up your habitual skills actually makes you write.

Here are some writing skills and habits to build for both professional and personal purposes. Every writer (me included!) implements at least a few of these habits in order to improve their writing.

Book time on your calendar to write

Set a meeting with yourself that you can’t break, and let your co-workers and friends know that you’re unavailable for that block of time.

Assign yourself a task for each weekday

For example, I try to outline my pieces on Mondays, write on Tuesdays, submit my first draft by end-of-day Wednesday, make edits on Thursday, and submit by final draft by Friday. You could also set a word count goal for each day, such as 500 or 1,000 words. This can help break up your piece into digestible bits so it doesn't’ seem overwhelming. Each day, you can say to yourself: “I only have to get X done today.”

Go somewhere that doesn’t have Wi-Fi

Maybe you need a change of scenery. This removes the temptation to respond to emails, check social media, and generally procrastinate. Save these trips for days on which you don’t have to do research.

Give yourself time away from your writing

This is especially important if you have to do a final sweep-through or round of edits. After spending hours and hours on a piece, it can be hard to see minor errors or gaps in the writing. Sometimes stepping away and coming back can give you a fresh set of eyes.

Read. Read. Read.

Read the writers and writing styles that you admire and aspire to be/recreate. Subscribe to your favorite blogs. Bookmark those websites and publications that you love reading. Download any e-books or digital guides that catch your eye. Buy your favorite books — which supports your favorite authors, too! You’ve heard the saying, “You’re a byproduct of your environment,” right? The same goes for your writing.

If you’re interested in writing — whether professionally or personally — and not sure how to get started, becoming a writer is actually a pretty straightforward process.

Using Writing Resources to Become a Better Writer

Even the best writers are continuously learning. Below, we’ve collected a handful of writing resources for you to bookmark and use as you improve your writing skills.

Courses

HubSpot Academy, notably our Business Writing Course: Master High-Impact Writing With Bestselling Author Daniel Pink.

MasterClass, which offers access to online courses taught by the “world’s greatest minds”. Their writing courses feature teachers like James Patterson, Judy Blume, Malcolm Gladwell, Shonda Rhimes, Aaron Sorkin, and Margaret Atwood.

Tools

Grammarly, a free digital copyeditor. Available as a web or desktop app and for a fee, you can access many premium features.

Hemingway Editor, a free digital copyeditor for more editorial, creative writing. Also available as a web or desktop app.

Definr, a super quick digital dictionary.

Jargon Grader, a simple tool to check your writing for jargon and fluff.

Tone Analyzer, a pretty cool tool that assesses the different tones (anger, confidence, tentativeness, etc.) in your writing.

Blogs and Guides

Grammar Girl, both a blog and podcast that provide quick tips to improve your writing.

Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL), a very trustworthy site for any questions about writing or grammar.

Over to You

Building and improving your writing skills is a continuous process. From technical skills for grammar, punctuation, and spelling to skills that help you hone a disciplined writing process, there are many tips and techniques to master and remember.

Whether you’re learning how to write better emails to your team at work or are chipping away at that dream of writing a book, we’re here to help. Bookmark this guide for future reference, and start writing!

[geekpellets]

Basking in Terror

It was going to be a night of slasher movies, that didn’t happen. The Final Terror The Final Terror is about a group of “rangers” who got the go ahead to clear trees in a forest, assumingly so the land can be built on, but one of their own goes missing, and something dangerous lies in the woods. I will start by stating that The Final Terror had to be put together again with what remaining scraps of film they can find. Considering that, the film works way better than one might imagine, but the progression is noticeably choppy at parts. I also want to talk about the nature of this film, because it puts it in an odd place. Individuals that like slasher films in particular expect certain things. Characters usually aren’t that important, give ‘em a good or fun atmosphere, a string of excellent kills or effects, and a good villain and they’re set. The Final Terror is not like this. There aren’t a lot of kills, you don’t see the killer that often, and there’s no mystery as to who it is that is killing people. It’s really very easy to figure out. The Final Terror is about the fear the murders afflict on our protagonists, and how it affects them. These protagonists and the antagonist are playing a game of chess with each other. It’s more of a battle of tactics, and I think that’s unique for what is at its core a slasher film. Now, a little about these protagonists. Yes, most are one note, but none of them do anything explicitly stupid throughout this film, and I like that. In fact, I would say that they do a lot of intelligent things. There are three characters that stand out here. The first two are Dennis and Nathaniel. Dennis is the more interesting of the two. He’s kind of an angry guy, he’s kind of a bully, kind of an asshole, potentially a legitimate sociopath, BUT he’s a real natural leader, and he does want to lead his people out of this situation. He’s the one with military experience, so he’s trying to “defend” his “troops.” His best friend is Nathaniel, who is kind of flat on his own, but works as a counterbalance to Dennis. Dennis pushes Nathaniel to go further, Nathaniel is the only one that can hold Dennis back or make him feel like he should be accountable for his actions. There’s a nice comfortable dynamic to their friendship, and Nathaniel is also a natural leader. Within their friendship, who is leading the other is passed back in forth depending on the situation, which I believe is natural but not always well depicted, but they also share leadership of the group when the going gets tough, and they have different styles and different believes, but they never but heads. I believe this relationship and the actions of these two characters specifically really benefited this film. There is also Eggar, the bus driver/whipping boy. The outlet for Dennis’s aggression. Eggar is great whenever he’s on screen, because the actor is very good at grinding scenery. The other characters? Forgettable, but as a group of people being hunted by a killer, they work.  The film does drag a little towards the end, but only just before the big climax. Most of the time, I had no problems with the pacing of the film. The effects in the film isn’t strong. The blood might as well just be water, and one time, it dried up instantly in a weird way. Like, someone got cut, and then during the next immediate moment looked like he or she was covered in red powder. Visually the film doesn’t do anything fancy, and there’s not much to speak of. It’s not really a film that I found particularly suspenseful. Instead I found it genuinely interesting. I don’t know who this film is for. Clearly it is for me, I watched it. I like it. I’d be proud to own it, but it’s not a must own, and it’s not a must see. I think you would have to be a certain connoisseur in order to appreciate this film, to appreciate what makes it different, especially in its era, as a generic slasher fan would just be bored by the lack of actual slashing. One mooooore thing! I personally feel like this is an excellent pairing with the original Friday the 13th. I just believe that would be such a good double feature. Mulberry Drive Tenants of an apartment complex not unlike the boarding house in Hey, Arnold, have to defend themselves against a plague that turns people into mutant rats. Isn’t that a fun concept? Too bad this movie sucks. Here’s the thing. This movie is DRIPPING with potential. The premise is good. The actors are good. They’re charismatic and likeable in a real way. If this really WAS just these people trying to fight of the plague, that would be excellent. Unfortunately, there’s a B plot of the protagonist’s daughter roaming around basically doing nothing. What’s worse is, when her plot line finally merges with her father’s, it adds NOTHING. They barely talk to each other, and that’s not an exaggeration in ANY way. The charming relationship her father has with everyone else? He doesn’t have with her. So, when they try to do an emotional ending, yeah....doesn’t work. This movie tries too hard to force....everything it wants to accomplish. If this movie just genuinely believed in its actors and premise, and made this a character focused film, it might have been really good. Unfortunately, TOO much of this movie is emotional short hand. Everything they want you to think is eerie or mysterious is green tinted. Everything they want you to feel is sad or melancholy is tinted blue, and this is extremely overused, the film is basically flashing green and blue. The camera work is mostly bad, because they want to be so extra about it. Lots of quick cuts, unnecessary spinning around a characters, unnecessary zoom ins. It’s like part of this movie was filmed by a guy who knew what he was doing, and part of this movie was filmed by a restless dog with ADHD. Then there’s the musical cues. The rock music that plays when they want you to feel excited or tension, and the sad music they play when they want to hit those emotional beats that they really sucked at building up to. Again, they had the actors to do this right. They had the talent. It just feels like they didn’t believe in the talent. Here’s some good things. The film is short. The make-up/practical effects aren’t bad. It is amateurish, but not bad, and it helps the effects that the lighting and shadow work in this film is genuinely good. Unfortunately, this is a film you ought to avoid, but, somewhere in here is love for the material and the genre. It just wasn’t expressed well. As opposed to Blood Slaughter Massacre Which also suffers from being amateurish but lacks the acting talent that Mulberry Drive had, looks like it was a home movie filmed by your dad in the 90′s, is almost two hours long, and is completely worthless. Baskin Baskin is about...well...um...huh? Well, here’s the official synopsis. “While taking a break, a unit of cops receive a distress call over the radio. Directed to an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere, they soon find themselves trapped in a surreal and nightmarish world. “ Baskin is a Turkish horror film. AND IT IS AWESOME! It’s exactly what I needed to end this string of movies. Now. This movie is a question movie. It is not an answer movie. If you need answers to everything that happens in a film, don’t watch this movie. It’s not for you. If you don’t mind that, and you want to see a bunch of Turkish police officers go to Silent Hill, you’re in for a treat, frens! This movie starts with horror and immediately transitions into these police officers talking over a table at a diner. Not only is the dialogue good, genuinely interesting to the point that you don’t mind spending time with them, and they use that as a means to get you interested in these characters, and while they aren’t particularly complex, you feel like you know most of them more than you would ordinary horror protagonists. Then the spoop kicks off. The film does dabble in surrealism, and more often than that means strong blue tints and loud contrasting colors, in this case red. One of the things this movie does so well is visual mystery. Here’s an example. There’s a lot of naked people in this film. There is a LOT of naked people in this movie, but almost no nudity. There is one titty slip, and that’s it. That’s what this film does so well. It isn’t this thing where they focus above the chest, they just shoot this shit SO well. They will show you things plain as day, and you will still not know what the fuck it is you are looking at. Part of it is camera work, part it is imagery. The imagery is fantastic, both conceptually and in its implementation. It all amounts to something that is not just suspenseful, but genuinely creepy. The pacing is good. The blood isn’t realistic, it’s very watery, but sometimes that works towards the films more surreal nature. The practical effects are very good, but the most extreme use of them is saved for key moments. A lot of the disturbing things in this movie doesn’t really require effects at all. The actors are good all around. One of the actors...his very existence amazes me. This is a must see must own movie for me, but it is, again, not for everyone. This is a film with its own mythology, its own logic, and you have to respect that to enjoy it.