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inchidentally · 8 months ago

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I've got a few asks that are all actually roughly under the same umbrella in terms of my replies - and be aware I've had to get way more serious then usual so pls skip if you're not here for that <3

mmmmm yea you can feel as you want anon but I personally am not going to want to parallel that relationship with Oscar and Lily's. my main cause when it comes to wives and girlfriends is that they all deserve to be protected against rampant, casual misogyny in fandom spaces. but also to not to project any reflected good will onto her boyfriend or husband simply because he's the boyfriend or husband. and there's so much about the 2000s drivers that makes me hope that at least some of their behavior isn't being carried on with the current younger guys on the grid :///

also just as a reminder: I was raised by intersectional feminists and I've witnessed what even supposedly "loving" het relationships can do to people who identify as women* - so I'm never going to be rooting for heterosexual relationships as far as women are concerned. I'm not overly prejudiced and I fully support any woman's choices for herself - and I don't have the smallest delusion that I have a right to an opinion on those choices <3 but equally I'm not going to lie to myself that women don't statistically always lose or sacrifice something of themselves when they become a partner to a man and that the man loses and sacrifices nothing - and if he makes the most basic effort he's praised as a god among men. especially not a man who's career has and will always take priority over his relationship and especially if the woman has to navigate or alter her life to deal with the man's profession, public image or his fanbase. I will always want women to pursue life on their own terms without men in any way dragging them down or altering their lives - that's just my opinion and it's fine if others disagree or hopefully project onto those relationships for any reason. so far, to me, the only driver's relationships that seem at all truly balanced and not negatively affecting or requiring compromises of the women that the man doesn't have to repay, are Lily and Alex and Melissa and Nando - and while I don't know much about them probably Tiffany and Valtteri. those women were already fully adults when they met these guys and would be able to leave the relationships whenever they want without having their own individual lives and incomes affected or altered in any way. I do not see any excuse for a woman to be in a relationship in any other way or with any further sacrifice and especially not because of a man, who will always enjoy economic and social power above hers.

*I know this is a whole unique point but as far as I'm concerned identifying as a woman is how I'm referring to women at any time. TERFs DNI.

ok so I've heavily edited these next two bc my blog is not the place to get into All That and I don't want to bring stress and negativity to moots

I think the funniest part of this rumor is how everyone's been asking for a screen recording of this and absolutely no one can produce anything other than one screencap of Rebecca at one brief time offering subscription content with no explanation for what - and that was something all models and influencers did for a while to make some money when a bunch of platforms screwed over their engagement. everyone's just running with this as if it's anyting and wtfff you're saying all she was offering were 'pictures of Carlos from the back' LIKE BFFR what are y'all even saying here ??? who was being robbed what crime was committed how is this even worth remembering ??? the reach being rought!!

but on the serious side, I'm gonna need all of you to sit yourselves in a quiet place and start taking this spontaneous and erratic morality that magically shows up when women are involved and start actually applying it to your pookie bears in F1. because not only does Carlos and the rest of the grid exploit the media, fans and sponsorships for cash, gifts, engagement and popularity - they also endorse and personally directly fund and engage with entire companies and individuals who actively perpetuate and uphold the absolute gutter of amorality and social iniquity that is the foundation of this whole sport !!

like here you guys are hunting for any tiny scrap of something to further the prejudice that these wives and girlfiends are not your ideas of Perfect Pure Sainted Angels - meanwhile you're looking at hugely problematic words and actions from your favorite driver and literally assuming that they've suddenly "had a change of heart" or are "better people now" based on ???? nothing ???? and THEN you start hoping that the girlfriend or wife is "good for him" or that she won't "be bad for him" I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind since when does a girl or woman over the age of 15 think that rich, powerful white men in hugely problematic fields of work are the ones being cruelly corrupted by the women they personally choose to date ??? if these men are shitheads then they did it all on their own babes !!

and I have to assume that even die hard Carlos fans on here are aware of how he's very much not perfect and that anyone sensible has to admit that unless he made the decision to publicly and loudly make a statement to the contrary then all of his opinions and affiliations are the same. you can absolutely compartmentalize these guys - we all do! - in order to like certain things about them or engage in content about them, but nobody should be out here so woman-hating as to take nothing of substance and use it to award these men virtues that have no foundation in reality. all while vilifying their wives and girlfriends over literally the smallest thing or making the most tenuous of connections to try and prove why they shouldn't be with your fave guy. or because while the men can fuck and cheat all they want, you've decided the women they date or marry have to conform to regressive ideas of female purity.

(just to clarify, the stuff I'm referring to "men" or "drivers" as doing is not specifically referring to Carlos or one man in particular but about the wider issue of double standards between drivers and their girlfriends and wives)

so a wife or gf of a man with an all-consuming career that involves her altering her life and plans to go all over the world just to be with him, decides to do exactly what he does and utilize a fanbase and popularity for gain? suddenly she's an evil conniving witch capable of manipulating and controlling poor widdle rich, white, powerful, influential man !! even though he dumps women and cheats on women whenever he wants and doesn't face a single bit of criticism for fans' perceptions of problems in his relationships but oh he's just a helpless hard-working victim who is nobly doing his dream job that his one percenter family and/or social status and/or race and gender made completely effortless for him and how DARE his wife or girlfriend get any of the financial benefit from a field of sports where women are so hated that even the most powerful woman is publicly accused by the highest authority in the sport of collusion based on nothing more than one gossip columnists lie !!

I could go so fucking far about how the women these men date and marry have been socially groomed from birth to be beautiful and silently supportive of their man and told they're not good enough or smart enough to succeed in a "serious" business environment - and that the drivers conveniently always end up with beautiful women who suffer at the hands of his fans who blame women for how men treat them all while he says nothing so as not to upset his base of support - then fuck it, let them all sell you people subscriptions for pictures of the drivers! let them scrape even a tiny fraction off the top of this imbalanced and unfair socioeconomic dynamic compared to the huge, unearned kickbacks and handshakes that make these men so effortlessly successful and rich. you can see those subscriptions as payment on your part for spreading rumors and hate about women and using double standards.

the rich famous man will NOT change his life to either fit your rpf ship - or to stay single so that you can continue your parasocial relationship with him uninterrupted - or choose a woman based on who you deem to be an appropriate self-insert. no matter how many rumors you believe or spread or how often you post content hating on his partner, his choice will not be affected by you. so keep those delusions and misogyny to yourself - or at least away from my blog and inbox !

honestly anon, I've already known the content of all of your messages over the past few months and I'm choosing the least offensive one for a reason to post (edited ofc so no one can accuse me of slander or whatever)

listen: if I was at all saying that Carlos is unproblematic or publicly promoting him in any way then I'd absolutely deserve what you're saying. but for myself personally, Carlos is part of am f1blr specific hyperfixation where I stay on my blog and write stupid narratives using drivers for fun. I'm not contributing anything to his overall fanbase or giving him any of my financial or personal support. I stick to fandom spaces only and not any platform that the drivers or anyone in wider F1 circles use.

and the thing is that not only would it be putting the burden of his problematicness on me if I were to post your asks bc I alone would have to answer for them, it would also probably just be informing people of what's fully and easily available to find elsewhere. everyone I mutually follow and most people I see are fully aware that we're taking these men and for the most part using them for our own fanon rather than their actual reality. so for me to pick one driver and say look at these awful realities then I'd have to do that with all of them, including the drivers who are at all friendly with known problematic drivers and people. so while I totally understand if someone wants to kick all of F1 out of their fandom experience bc Men then jfc absolutely go for it. I'm not at all pretending that what I'm doing on my blog is worth the smallest shit! but me deciding to pick one driver out of all of them to put on blast would do nothing but make me a hypocrite and rightfully have people asking me why I don't talk about this or that driver too.

and quite frankly unless someone never supports with any male-majority content and solely focuses all of their time to intersectional feminist content then there ain't a leg to stand on to blast any other fanbase or focus on one particular person. it's fully fair to be critical! but not to get on a high horse if there's even one cishet man in your list of fandom things. honestly that could even be broadened in some cases to one cis man.

absolutely, take the truth to people who are out there on public platforms trying to claim that any of these drivers are saints and perfect humans where they could potentially be recruiting to a fanbase using false narratives and covering up problematic behavior. but ask yourself if you're time is best spent mostly attacking women and girls in fanbases over this or going right to the comments and tags that squarely target the men themselves.

but on here I've got to kind of assume we all know what the score is and nobody's in denial that these are mere Rich Powerful Men and none of them deserves our actual serious allegiance yk ??? I feel like we're all aware this is us having fun and we're all accepting that while we can block and blacklist tags based on personal preferences, none of us in f1blr who likes a male driver can pretend to be superior to liking a different one. at best they're better at keeping their mouths shut but they also permit and overlook a LOT. and yes, that includes Lewis even though my god he has a gigantic lead on the rest in terms of progressive actions and deeds compared to any other man in F1. and that while he still has unaddressed problematic associations and behavior, all of us white fans need to be fucking vigilant of going after him if we're not fully going ten times harder on the white drivers.

#inchreplies #I am exhausted lol #I'm mostly a stupid so this is my brain done for the day !!#I hope everything makes sense I rly spent time on these since the topics actually matter #wank adjacent #f1partnerstalk

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ruthlesslistener · 1 year ago

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We sure do live in a society, don't we.

The anons sending you hate are doing my head in. Like, I can completely understand why they bristled at your initial response, because as someone who writes Ghost as an adult in a child's body (hi, Gently, my beloved fic that is drowning from my dead muse), I had a kind of similar "hey wait" response at first.

But then you CLARIFIED. You took the time to ask, listen and let others educate you on another POV. It may not have changed your own personal HCs (and that's OK!!!), but you clarified your meaning was not people like me - it was not the average person who spurred it - and that's all anyone can really ask for. You don't have to agree with or ask people.

The best part of fandom is taking bits and pieces of each other's ideas and using them to decorate our sand castles and make them our own. That means "I wouldn't spin it that way but I liked reading how you did it." It also sometimes means "Oh I cannot get behind that but I respect your right to."

I think it says a lot that people are on anon, rather than actually talking to you and giving you a chance to engage with them one-on-one. I'm not sure I would label them trolls. I think their feelings got hurt and they are lashing out because of it, in an impolite way, rather than stopping to listen to explanations. I am going to give the benefit of doubt and assume that ill-intent wasn't meant, and that the reason they're on anon is that anxiety has them going "if I say it on my main, I'm going to get flamed because I offended popular tumblr user." To that I say: If you weren't on anon, Aren could've replied privately to you, and likely would have. A one-on-one conversation can go a large way for trying to clear up misunderstandings.

TBH, I probably could've just sent all of this on Discord but I just am frustrated. Asks like the ones you received are why I am terrified of sharing my own headcanons, why I assume anyone asking me ANY opinions has bad faith, and why everything I say has a giant ass disclaimer on it with "THIS IS LIKE, JUST MY OPINION GUYS" and we shouldn't have to do that. We shouldn't have to sit and police everything that we say because Someone Might Twist It.

Anyway, sorry. I just needed to put this out here because I was about to blow up on my own blog. lmao

Thank you tumblr user grollow I appreciate it immensely and I agree with everything you said about fandom being a sandbox made more fun by people having different ideas that make things fun to play with. It's just that I've been off in my corner playing relatively on my own for a bit, which kinda fucks over the amount of context you get on things a bit. And also the miscommunication had the misfortune of landing squarely in the intersection between 'things I really don't like' and 'things that have a canon basis but lack canonical descriptive details', turning it into a shitshow. Which I really really fucking wish didn't happen, even if I did enjoy discussing the pros and cons of different mental interpretations of Ghost and was able to come to the conclusion that it's about as appealing to me as a slice of apple pie. Which is to say, I like certain bits of it and will gladly nibble at said bits, but if there's any other option out there I'd take it over pie anyday. It's not bad and I certainly do enjoy it in extremely specific context, but it also doesn't appeal to me in the slightest and there's certain parts that I refuse to touch altogether (the texture of cooked fruit makes me cringe and nauseates me, much like the idea of Ghost being an adult trapped in a child's body from a horror perspective incites panic). But that's fine, bc then I can just plop the filling onto a friend's plate for their enjoyment, and nibble away at the bits I like in piece. My dislike of pie doesn't extend to the people who enjoy it, nor do I get upset when my brother refuses to eat what I cook for him. He's picky, I'm picky, I've got no right to judge. He's just as valid for saying my cream cheese frosting is gross as I am for thinking him refusing to eat anything but mac n cheese and scrambled eggs is gross. Same concept with fandom here

(And honestly, my judgement on the whole minor/adult thing is seperate from Ghost as a character altogether. I'm of similar mind with Miquella of Elden Ring, who is canonically an adult trapped in a child's body. Having a relationship with him in his child form would be fucked up- hell, even Mohg goes for breaking the curse first, and Mohg is canonically fucking insane! This isn't something limited to just one fandom, it's a hard line I draw in fiction in general)

Also yeah, I totally would have just worked it out in private, but I get the feeling the anon thinks I'm running some sort of clique or something over here where I would have twisted it into clout somehow. Which needless to say, I would not fucking do. Can't say this enough, but I'm autistic as all getout and had to deal with that enough in high school so I have nothing but contempt for that sort of behavior.

#ashe im not tagging ur blog i dont want it coming up in the ship tag #but tysm i hope i was coherent #reply #(also to clarify: mohg is still terrible but i think the goal was to age miquella up first so that the formless mother hsd a host)#(so still for very nefarious purposes)

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joshuaalbert · 1 year ago

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going to go straight for the jugular. 10

10. worst part of fanon ok the serious answer to me is that the worst part is the subsets of characters that get focused on/don’t get focused on and the intersections with racism and sexism. it’s harder for me to speak to mischaracterization because I’ve curated my circle pretty well and I don’t reeeaaally tend to read a lot of fic, but just in going into tags and whatever the difference in levels of content is stark. like as one example if kiradax wasn’t f/f I think they’d have garashir’s level of popularity given how popular dynamics like that tend to be, and yet even with the advantage of them both being white there’s often not that much content. but then even for characters with easy convenient m/m ships like…do you know how hard it is to find just geordi content separate from geordi/data? I like the ship but sometimes I just want to see my best friend geordi la forge yknow. I will say though shoutout to the primarily-voy fandom or at least what I tend to see of it because I feel like I do see a lot of tuvok and b’elanna and harry which is nice.

and like. I’m not saying I’m personally immune to any of that! ik there are ways in which I personally can/should do better bc I was also raised in a society tm!! but it’s still definitely also an overall trend and I think we shouldn’t just fall in line with what the writers’ biases often are yknow.

anyway the petty answer is that anyone who still calls characters himbos is almost definitely completely wrong about the character please look at the character’s canon actions because like 99% of the time they’re actually really not stupid.

#ask game #ty!!

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joe-moi · 1 year ago

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I think the gator discourse is just like the JQ discourse the other day. People got bent because of an objective look at JQs work as if blanket support is the only way to show adoration or some shit. some of his work isn't great nor are they all great roles. Fans aren't required to like every character or performance that person does and it's perfectly fine to admit it. Blindly supporting roles regardless of movie, script or acting quality is a thin line before you do that for them as a person too.. and luckily our Joe's seem pretty genuine and unproblematic but still.

I for one like that we can typically talk like that here and be objective. That makes this a safe and healthy place for fans/fandom. And I hope that continues.

Like okay JK girlies.. do you REALLY think he was *good* in Henry Gambles Birthday Party or do you just 👀 that you got him in his swim trunks all movie, jerking off and getting fucked for a few seconds? Great for your imagination. But buddy was not breaking the sound barrier with his acting there. Nor was that movie ANY good, and it had some really fucked up storylines intersecting. Loads of heavy topics people find triggering...and It's OKAY. People are gonna definitely choose to gloss over that one because they're not interested or they're triggered by religion, self harm or any of the undercurrents there. Every actor has huge stinkers. Even the best have absolutely terrible roles and movies.

Tell me you like every single song your favorite band or artist ever made? Their entire discography is top teir? No. You skip songs and you know it. It's OKAY to pass on a piece of media that isn't for you guys! I promise!

You won't get disowned by the fan circle if you bow out of Gator because Fargo isn't your cup!

oh, you make an amazing point about that movie. Because I haven’t seen it… But I have seen those scenes and I have no idea what the fuck that movie is about. Literally not a clue. But I’ve seen those scenes all over Twitter.

And the same thing goes for that JQ movie where he’s dating the girl that falls in love with another girl. Do you really like that movie or do you like that he has like four sex scenes and a blowjob scene? because that movie was shit. I don’t even remember the name of it. That’s how much I didn’t like it. And I think that’s what happens in hoard… I don’t know because I haven’t seen it… But I’ve seen enough talk about it to get the gist that he has a great sex scene in it because he’s naked and you see his ass, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a good movie.

as fans we do watch that stuff because it feeds our imagination. It doesn’t mean that it’s good. It doesn’t mean that they were good in those scenes. We just are horny. And I see how that can correlate to when you watch gator or any other character that you don’t enjoy. you’re only watching it to feed your imagination of this actors characters, and what we’ve already built them up to be. And when they’re not great people, sometimes it can be a little tough to see. Especially if you have no idea what else is going on.

and like you said, that’s OK! You don’t have to like everything. But you don’t need to unstan or leave fandom because you don’t like one specific character.

#🛼answers #jk #jq #anonymous asks

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dittolicous · 5 months ago

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Hello, different anon; I come from the perspective of always seeing the kinky and fetish fic as the canary in the coal mine. I’ve seen the rise and fall of many online platforms, and usually onces the canary dies, it becomes open season on whoever else doesn’t reach the agreed stranded. Which usually results is sweeping bans that hurt allot of folks who aren’t even involved.

I completely understand folks not wanting to engage and interact with that kind of fic or that side of fandom, which is why having tags/filters/blacklist to help manage one’s internet experience is so important.

Content warnings are clearly stated at the start is the most important thing.

Yeah, I can definitely see that perspective too. It's kinda similar to the whole dividing the LGBTQA+ idea, in a way, where a they try to divide us and use in-fighting to weaken us. And then the leopards eat our faces too.

Course thats a huge over-simplication (and again works on good faith that no ones trying to groom or genuinely support IRL taboos). And in defense, proper tagging can be a real issue, with like Tumblr/Twitter being HORRID about showing you things you don't wanna see, and certain topics can intersect in very troubling ways (ex. how do you avoid creating fan content for sibling characters without incest fans projecting on to it, and handling feeling gross that someone saw incest in a thing you made? what if you based it off your own sibling interaction, how would that make you feel? this can leave one not wanting to create for that anymore from squick. but if you make a point of them not interacting with it/creating a dni, you may get mocked or hated on as well, with people doing so anyhow, making a *point* to do so, or what if you interact with incest piece without knowing, and if you find out... how do you feel? art is subjective but you made personal art and the interpretation directly contradicts your point. how do you interact going forward? of course, this can happen anyways for many topics, with varying levels of general ok-ness). There's Dead Dove and sometimes theres just improperly tagged squick/triggers flooding a tag because it's almost considered the 'norm' (I see so much untagged incest in the Batfam tag and I've raged on that in the past). AO3 is getting better, but filtering out things you don't wanna see can still be tricky (I have never found a way to fully filter out highschool aus - its not a squick, I just find them boring XD but things can get tagged so differently! I have the same struggle with ABO, it seems to sneak by all the time).

(I don't use many other sites so I'm not sure how tagging systems work on like... pintrist or tiktok. Is DeviantArt still a thing? And YouTube tagging is useless, you search something and the third video down and on are all like completely irrelevant)

Hence why it's a complicated thing for me. Cuz I can see points from both sides and I don't want my general disgust with certain issues to lead me to make a rash or uniformed decision.

(this is a problem I have in everyday life, sometimes, where I become indecisive because I keep trying to see other points of view, and end up losing MY pov... I spent so much of my childhood be a little brat, I may of overcorrected)

#ditto rambles #i am full of hate for things but goddamn i dont want to like be the silencer #how do we find a way for these things to coexist????? how do we handle these inbetweens and shades of grays #i think it would help if people were better about tagging and more respectful about dni #because there are good reasons for them!#and if these were respected could we better and more healthily moniter these spaces?????#if some asks you not to interact with them because of an ethical thing that doesnt mesh with your ethical thing #the respectabls thing would be to understand and go with it #but trolls love trolling #and it just creates this cycle where people want to create and another group is triggered/squicked by it #and they keep bumping into each other because of .... 1000 different things #like improper tagging or terrible algorithms showing you stuff you dont wanna see #and drop by drop it just wears you down #see my thoughts keep going!#(i just wanna create submad stuff without worrying about if people are projecting incest)#sometimes man... you just get so tired of seeing things and desperately trying to block thngs #yet it keeps squeaking throygh!!!!#so #yeah #suffering is me #im making my own head hurt

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bitchkiss · 5 months ago

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Hello, I hope I am not disturbing you. I wanted to ask something that's been on my mind for a while if that's ok. I've sent this to a few other blogs also, and I was hoping you'd be able to provide a more appropriate answer

At what point do we draw the line between "I do not think this fits the character/I do not like how the character has been constructed" vs "I hate this character because they're black, or a poc, or a minority"?

Because I've SEEN people in the screenshot post comment that if you do not include gaz, then there's racism in there. But if I do not see the text blurb, or prompt or whatever fit any given character, then is that racism? And if I have to include the character if the opposite is racism, then wouldn't that be more inappropriate? Since I'd be including them out of obligation than a genuine interest/adoration/appropriateness of the character?

Because this has constantly been on my mind. So far I've believed that as long as I remain fair with what I like or dislike in a character, WITHOUT basing it on colour, then that's alright, like that's been my logic, and it made sense for me? But from what a few people have commented, it seems like whenever I do not include gaz (leave apart excluding him from t141 stuff, that's clear cut racism for me, because why include everyone else except a core member of the team when it says tf141) then it becomes racist?

Help me understand this, or atleast let me know who I can send an ask to that explains this.

it's all based on patterns. as a black woman, and i know other black women get this too, there's like...a gut feeling you get when something seems off. our first instinct is to dismiss it. i think that's a really important thing for white people to know. when someone starts pointing out a pattern of racism, especially if that person is a poc, usually all other explanations have been ruled out. when i experience it in real life, i think long and hard about how i've seen that person interact with others. how do they interact with men? how do they interact with other women and genderqueer people? how often are they around black people? the reason for all of this is because it's really hard to believe that people can be so openly prejudiced without awareness. but people are. and if people are bringing it up to you, well then im glad you're sending these asks, because it's far past time for you to start looking at your actions beloved. to bring those questions to the fandom space, you look at a persons posts. are they never including this character? do they post about this character an equal amount, just in different situations? then yeah, it's totally likely that this character doesn't fit for whatever that post was. or like a lot of cod bloggers have a favorite character or a favorite pairing, and most of their posts are geared towards those one or two characters. i also think that's normal. but also, there's always going to be bias involved in who or what you like. i have my own bias. i am at the intersection of many forms of oppression and i definitely still have my own biases based on the systemic prejudice we are all raised in. when i don't like a character, or i like one character moreso than others, i always try to examine that. i think the most helpful thing is to be comfortable saying that your life or dislike of something is based in prejudice. this isn't something you post about or air out to the world, just be aware of it in yourself...examine it privately...you will often find that what you like starts to change as you break that bias away...but this is only possible if you're willing to say you are being biased without judgement. no one can read your mind. examine yourself honestly without fear of backlash, because it's only you and maybe a friend you really trust to talk about it with. and sometimes after that examination, you'll find that you don't like that character because...you just don't! and you can feel comfortable in that. but i think it's more likely, in this case, you will find new avenues of looking at gaz/other characters in a way that seemed unfit before. but i could be wrong. only you know you. when someone says that it's ONLY because this character doesn't fit, or that they're definitely not racist, then that just tells me they don't know if their motivations are racist or not. it tells me they've done no examination. doing something racist is not the end of the world because we have all done something racist (including poc), we will all do something racist, because we live in a world that is entrenched in racism and it's something we have to ACTIVELY address in ourselves every day. its a full time fuckin job baby! here's a list of questions i ask myself. - why don't i like this character/why don't i feel like this character fits? - what is the evidence for these traits? - if these traits are ones i feel about the character intuitively, then where do those beliefs come from? (we always have our intuitive beliefs about a character that come from our life experience. sometimes it will be projection, sometimes it will be from previous media analysis, sometimes it will be from biases we haven't examined in ourselves yet) - do these traits align with widespread beliefs about the group of people this character comes from? - is it possible i feel this way about this character because of these societal beliefs i was raised with?

what you've asked is a big question. i gave a big answer. i hope it's comprehensive and it made sense. i'm open to explaining anything that seems confusing.

#cod #cod drama #also SO funny that im talking about this on my smut blog #asks #anon

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blackstarising · 4 years ago

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ok i promised myself up and down i wouldn’t make posts like this anymore for my own mental health but i’ve been seeing a lot of, uh, takes in regards to the potential of sarah and bucky dating and a lot of confusion to why these takes are racist, insulting and hurtful, especially to black people. and for me? well, i won't lie, it's personal.

what non-black people need to understand is that positive portrayals of interracial romantic relationships between dark-skinned black women (yes, dark skinned) and non-black men are extremely uncommon in media. for example, can you think about any recent fictional portrayals of relationships of this kind? maybe rick and michonne from the walking dead? or abbie and ichabod from sleepy hollow? great, because those are the only two that i can think of off the top of my head.

okay, now how many of those relationships ended happily?

right.

as a next point, why do i highlight ‘dark-skinned’? because of colorism. you’ve probably seen that word thrown around a lot more in the past year. colorism is the discrimination within ethnic groups between those with lighter colored skin (and more eurocentric features and hair texture, i’m folding in featurism and texturism for ease) and those with darker skin.

the way this plays out in visual media is that it’s much more common to see lighter skinned black women in roles than darker skinned black women. when i was growing up, this was evident in both white-produced AND black-produced media. that’s so raven. sister sister. my wife and kids. the proud family, even. and to make it worse, it wasn’t uncommon for dark skinned black women in shows like these to be portrayed as unattractive, uncultured, or straight up bullies.

this isn’t me saying that we shouldn’t see light skinned or biracial black women in media. i want to emphasize that their life experiences and the pressures they have are different from mine. but i know that, because of colorism, i grew up thinking that the absence of Eurocentric features and a non Eurocentric body meant i was not beautiful and not worthy to be seen. and these truths can coexist. this is not an uncommon wound of colorism.

i say all this to say that for bucky barnes, a white man, to flirt with sarah wilson, a dark skinned black woman, is not the same as ‘just another het ship’. it is positive representation in its own right.

now, i’ve been in fandom for years. i’ve encountered this before. and i’ve encountered this enough to know that truthfully, these kind of ships make people truly uncomfortable and sometimes these people do a bad job of hiding it. what reason, i can’t say. if you ask me, i suspect part of the discomfort comes non-black people realizing they can’t project onto the black person in the ship in the same way they’re used to. i could be wrong. but i’ve been around enough to see a lot of pretzeling and back bending to discredit these sorts of relationships that don’t seem to come up for similar pairings if that same black woman was now white. and i’m seeing it again here, so i wanted to break down the most common takes i’ve either seen or i suspect i’ll see soon and break them down to explain why exactly you’ve been getting irritated replies and why they’re hurtful.

“bucky’s flirting with sarah to make sam jealous.” without thinking about it, this is actually a funny trope. sibling rivalry and all that. and you’re right, bucky doesn’t have to be attracted to sarah, and maybe you ship sambucky instead. but what if he can still find her attractive? this take subtly discredits the idea that bucky could find sarah attractive in her own right - there has to be some ulterior motive in order to explain it, yeah?

“bucky repeated sarah’s name like that because sarah was steve’s mom’s name.” we do know bucky knows steve’s mom’s name! but again, this feels like a lot of reaching to again, rework bucky’s potential attraction to sarah in a different context so it’s not actually genuine. in this case, he doesn’t like her, she just makes him think of his dead best friend’s mom, right?

“sarah’s so strong and badass, she doesn’t need a man! she deserves better.” okay. what does ‘deserving better’ actually mean? why can’t a potentially fulfilling relationship for sarah, a hardworking widow with two children, be deserving better? this also plays into the Strong Black Woman myth, in which black women are just So Strong and Self Sufficient and Powerful they don’t need anything! not even social aid! or protection! or love! or mental health support! let me be clear, this trope is not fun for us, it’s not a positive, it’s a burden that allows society to justify not protecting black women.

“this seems kind of forced/crowbarred in to me.” maybe, but also, in the episode, they really just said 'hi' to one another. now if sam had caught them making out on the boat two seconds after they met, that would have raised my eyebrows, but they just said 'hi'. some people are interpreting that as flirtatious - i'm one of them. but again, using words like 'crowbar' and 'force' or 'shove' make it seem like bucky's attraction to sarah is irrational.

now, here’s what i’m not saying. i’m not threatening you to ship bucky and sarah Or Else. you don't have to. i do. i think it’s fun! but that’s my choice. you don’t have to make that choice. you could be shipping someone else with either sarah or bucky and you don't want something to get in the way of that, i get it. i'm also not saying that sarah needs bucky's validation to be considered beautiful, far from it. what i’m saying is it’s worth it to evaluate the ways that implicit racism is affecting and influencing your responses to interracial relationships with black people, and especially black women in the media. because even if you might not see it, there are those of us who can. why can't the prospect of a white man flirting with a dark skinned black women be taken at face value? maybe sit with that.

sources for further reading the roots of colorism, or skin tone discrimination the walking dead's new power couple: 'richonne' and fandom racism fanlore breakdown of 'what shipping richonne taught me about racism' black women and the thin line between strong and angry post on black womanhood and feminism what is featurism? black hair and mental health: a tale of texturism fandom and the intersection of feminism and race "weak black women" by robin thede (for giggles) the take's 'the strong black woman, explained' (yet to watch but the take hasn't failed me yet)

#sarah wilson #bucky barnes #bucky x sarah #sarah x bucky #buckysarah #sarahbucky #tfatws #tfatws spoilers #fandom racism #ok to rb #otp: buckysarah

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pinkdogplushie · 3 years ago

Text

Ok, um.

I've seen a lot of discourse regarding neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ headcanons in Encanto.

On one hand, it is true that a lot of fans (usually white, abled people) are reducing the characters to only their sexualities and genders, assigning foreign meaning to traditional objects, behaviors and color patterns. This comes from ignorance and white-centrism, and should be unlearmed if they want to engage in a fandom made for latinxs, by latinxs. I'm especially bothered by a trend I've seen of infantilizing Bruno. He's nd-coded, particularly autistic and OCD, so some fans have been trying to turn him into an uwu boy who can't stand up for himself and needs constant protection because he's fragile. Come on, folks, the man is 50 years old and has mad parkour skills, he needs family support and validation, not babying.

On the other hand, just because we should give significance to the cultural aspects of the characters doesn't mean we can't also headcanon them as neurodivergent and queer. We can do this without detracting from their main conflicts. Because latinx people can also be queer and nd. Bruno can have compulsions born out of superstition, things he did initially to bring good luck but now does because he's urged to. Isabela feeling obligated to marry Mariano can be both because of familial pressure and comphet. Camilo can have issues with his identity both related and unrelated to his gender. People are nuanced, motivations can be complex, and just because a character is working through generational trauma doesn't mean they can't have issues related to their personal identities. In fact, they can and will intersect, because personal identities oftentimes clash with cultural and familial expectations born out of trauma.

And before you start decrying me as white, let me tell you: I'm Argentinian. I'm brown-skinned, of Italian, Spanish, Arab and Indigenous descent. I'm autistic. I'm OCD. I'm trans. I'm bisexual. I can't claim to know how Colombian folks feel about this movie, but I do know that I want to see characters like myself, even if it is in fanon.

TL;DR Don't reduce the Encanto characters to just nd and queer hcs disregarding their cultural baggage, but also don't dismiss the significance that neurodivergent queer latinx characters can have to neurodivergent queer latinx fans. Both angles of their identities can be explored thoroughly and respectfully, including how they intersect

(This post can be reblogged by white folks, but I made it mainly for POC and Latinx fans. Please refrain from adding your opinion if you're not POC or Latinx).

#encanto #bruno madrigal #isabela madrigal #camilo madrigal

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fandomshatepeopleofcolor · 2 years ago

Note

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRTBvtXR/

So there is an indigenous tiktoker @kulanui_ who tracked down the obituaries of sydney agudong's paternal grandparents and both of them stated that they were born in the Philippines and that they are not connected with the indigenous community in Hawai'i, pretty much every native Hawaiian I've seen on social media has said that agudong is not part of their community...

BUT I definitely think that whats happening right now with the casting of this movie is a great time to have a convo here for other bipoc fans about how this controversy is something that actually extends beyond this singular live action movie. I think when you have shows/movies/books that can uplift one community should that moment come at the expense/derision/dismissal of another community? In this case agudong is Filipino, and a small time actor of color, we want to support these new actors but should that support come at the expense of native representation? And how much are we willing to not engage with or unpack when it has to deal with these hard questions of major studios essentially pitting community against community or with high profile bipoc creators who create works that can cause damage to/have material consequences for other bipoc communities?

anyways im not really sending this as like personally directed at this blog or anyone but more as like a hey this is should we should be talking about this intersectional issue as it applies to this particular situation (while very much respecting the lead that indigenous voices have on this issue) but also how it affects bipoc interactions on future works as well as our fandom experiences

idk if that makes sense

so ok I've watched the video and like I can't say much I'm not native hawaiian or filipino. however!!! I can pin this as evidence that agudong is not native hawaiian. with my reach hopefully that helps? but I'm not sure it seems like everyone that follows for the last year or so is a spambot.

like this is exactly why intersectionality matters so much. agudong has lightskin privilege and unfortunately she lied about being native hawaiian.

anyways I'm so sorry it took me days to reply I keep starting to reply to things and get interrupted and stick them in the drafts and then forget they're there.

mod ali

#sydney agudong #nani pelekai #lilo and stitch #lightwashing #native hawaiian #colorism

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pumpkinpaix · 4 years ago

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Pleeeeeeease get into the class one at some point because I very much want to understand the class dynamics happening in the story but I have yet to find a meta that dives into it

god anon you want me dead don’t you alsjdfljks

referring to this post

okay, so -- my specific salt about class interpretations in mdzs are very targeted. I can’t pretend to have a deep understanding of how class works in mdzs generally because uhhhhh yeah i don’t think i have that. i’m just not familiar enough with the genre and/or the particulars of chinese class systems. but! i can talk in general terms as to why I feel a certain way about the class dynamics that I do think I understand and how I think they relate to the themes of the novel! i’m gonna talk about wei wuxian, the daozhangs, xue yang, and 3zun with, I’m sure, a bunch of digressions along the way.

the usual disclaimers: i do not think you are a bad person if you hold opinions contrary to my own. i may disagree with you very strongly, but like. this isn’t a moral judgment, fandom is transformative and interpretive etc. etc. and i may change my mind. who knows what the future will bring!

OKAY so let’s begin!

here’s the thing about wei wuxian: he’s not poor. I think because characters use “son of a servant” kind of often when they’re trying to insult him, a lot of people latch onto that and think that it’s a much stronger indication of his societal status than it actually is. iirc, most of the insults that fall along the “son of a servant” line come after wei wuxian starts breaking severely from tradition. it’s a convenient thing to attack him for, but doesn’t actually indicate anything about his wealth. (exception: yu ziyuan, but that’s a personal familial issue) this is in direct contrast to jin guangyao who is constantly mocked for his family line, publicly and privately, no matter what he does.

so this, coupled with all the jokes about wwx never having any money (wei wuqian, sizhui’s “i’ve long since known you had no money” etc.), plus his like, rough years on the street as a child ends up producing this interpretation of wei wuxian, especially in modern aus, as someone who is very class conscious and “eat the rich”. but the fact of the matter is, wei wuxian IS rich. aside from the years in his childhood and the last two years of his life in yiling, like -- wei wuxian had money and status. he is gentry. he is respected as gentry. he is treated as a son by the sect leader of yunmeng jiang -- he does not have the jiang name, but it is so very clear that jiang fengmian favors him. wei wuxian is ranked fourth of all the eligible young masters in the cultivation world -- that is not a ranking he could have attained without being accepted into the upper class.

wei wuxian’s poverty does not affect him in the way that it affects jin guangyao or xue yang. he is of low-ish birth (still the son of jiang fengmian’s right hand man though! ok sure, “son of a servant” but like. >_> whatever anyways), but for most of his life he had money. he, jiang cheng, and their sect brothers go into town and steal lotus pods with the understanding that “jiang-shushu will pay for it”. this is a regular thing! that’s fucking rich kid behavior!!! wei wuxian is careless with money because he doesn’t have to worry about it. he still has almost all the benefits of being upper class: education, food security, respect, recognition etc. I think there may also be a misconception that wei wuxian was always on the verge of being kicked out by yu ziyuan, or that he was constantly walking on eggshells around her for fear of being disowned, but that is just textually untrue. i could provide receipts, but I admittedly don’t really feel like digging them up just now ;;

even in his last years in yiling, he was not the one who was dealing with the acute knowledge of poverty: wen qing is the one managing the money, and as far as we know, wei wuxian did little to no management of daily life during the burial mounds days -- mostly, he’s described as hiding in his cave for days on end, working on his inventions, running around like a force of chaos, frivolously making a mess of things -- it’s very very cute that he buries a’yuan in the dirt, but in classic wei wuxian fashion, he did Not think about the practical consequences of it -- that A’Yuan has no other clean clothes, and now he’s gotten this set dirty and has no intention of washing them. is this a personality thing? yeah, but I think it’s also indicative of his lack of concern over the logistics of everyday survival, re: wealth.

furthermore, i think it is important to remember that wei wuxian, when he is protecting the wen remnants, is not protecting common folk: he is still protecting gentry. fallen gentry, yes! but gentry nonetheless. wen qing was favored by wen ruohan, and wen ning himself says that he has a retinue of people under his command (the remnants, essentially). their branch of the family do not have the experience of living and growing in poverty -- they are impoverished and persecuted in their last years, but that’s a very different thing from being impoverished your whole life. (sidenote: I do not believe wei wuxian’s primary motivation for defending the wen remnants was justice -- i believe he did it because he felt he owed wen ning and wen qing a life debt, and once he was there, he wasn’t going to stand around and let the work camps go on. yes, he is concerned about justice and doing the right thing, but that’s not why he went in the first place. anyways, that’s another meta)

after wei wuxian returns, he then marries back into gentry, and very wealthy gentry at that. lwj provides him all the money he could ever want, he is never worried about going homeless, starving, being denied opportunities based on his class and accompanying disadvantages. who would dare? and neither wei wuxian nor lan wangji seem to have much interest in shaking up the order of things, except in little things like the way they teach the juniors. they live in gusu, under the auspices of the lan, and they live a happy, domestic life.

were his years on the street traumatizing? yes, of course they were, there’s so much delicious character exploration to be done re: wei wuxian’s relationship to food, his relationship to his own needs, and his relationship to the people he loves. it’s all important and good! but I feel very strongly that that experience, while it was formative for him, did not impart any true understanding of poverty and the common person’s everyday struggles, nor do I think he ever really gains that understanding. he is observant and canny and aware of class and blood, certainly, but not in a way that makes it his primary hill to die on (badum-tss).

this is in very stark contrast to characters like jin guangyao and xue yang, and to some extent, xiao xingchen and song lan. I’ll start with the daozhangs, because I think they’re the simplest (??).

I think both xiao xingchen and song lan have class consciousness, but in a very simplified, broad-strokes kind of way (at least, given the information we know about them). we know that the two of them share similar values and want to one day form their own sect that gives no weight to the nobility of your lineage and has no concern with your wealth. we also know that they both disdain intersect politics and are more concerned with ideals and principles rather than status. but, I think because of that, this actually somewhat limits their perception and understanding of how status is used to oppress. as far as we know, neither of them participated on any side in sunshot and they demonstrate much more interest in relating to the commoners. honestly, i hc that they were flitting around trying to help decimated towns, protecting defenseless villages etc. I ALSO think this has a lot of interesting potential in terms of xiao xingchen and wei wuxian’s relationship, if xiao xingchen is ever revived. regardless of whether you’re in CQL or novel verse, xiao xingchen really doesn’t know wei wuxian at all, other than knowing that he’s his shijie’s son. he knows that cangse-sanren met with a tragic end, like yanling-daoren before her, and that he wants to be different. but here is cangse-sanren’s son, laying waste to entire cities, desecrating the dead. I would very much like to get into xiao xingchen’s head during that period of time (and i think, if i do it right, i can write some of it into the songxiao fixit), but that’s neither here nor there, because i’ve wandered off from my point again.

i would posit that song lan is used to an ascetic lifestyle, and xiao xingchen probably is too -- but that’s different from poverty because there’s an element of choice to it. I also think that neither of them is particularly worldly, xiao xingchen especially. he lived on an isolated mountain until he was like, seventeen, and he came down full of ideals and naivete about how the world worked. I think that both of them see inequality, that they are angered by it, and that they want to do something about it -- but their solution is neither to topple the sects, nor is it to reform the system. rather, it seems to be more about withdrawing and creating their own removed world. I think that the daozhangs embody a kind of utopianism that isn’t present in the minds of any of the other characters, not even wangxian. honestly, baoshan-sanren’s mountain is a utopian ideal, but one that is not described. it exists outside of and beyond the world. i have a lot of jumbled, vague thoughts about utopianism generally, mostly informed by china miéville and ursula k. le guin, and I don’t think i have the ability to articulate them here, but i wanted to. hm. say something? there is something about the inherent dystopianism contained within every utopia, that utopias are necessary, but also reflections of the existence of terrible things in their conception. idk. there’s something in there, I know it!! but i suppose what I want to say is -- i do not think the daozhangs understand class and social hierarchy very deeply because they don’t see a need to examine it deeply. for their goals, the details aren’t the point. they’re not looking to reform within the system, they’re looking to build something outside of it. I think they spend a lot of time concerned with alleviating the symptoms of social oppression, and their values reflect the injustices they witness there.

regardless, even if their story ends in tragedy and there is a certain amount of critique re: the utopian approach, i think the text still emphasizes that xiao xingchen left a utopia and that he thought that people mattered enough for him to try, and that was an incredibly honorable, kind, and human thing to do.

YEAH SURE THE DAOZHANGS ARE THE SIMPLEST ok ok RETURNING to class and moving forward: xue yang.

i also don’t think xue yang has class consciousness lol, or not in any way that really matters, but I do think poverty impacted him in a much stronger way than it impacted wei wuxian. wei wuxian spent some years on the street as a child. xue yang grew up on the streets. chang ci’an’s horrific treatment of him was directly due to his class and social standing: chang ci’an is a nobleman and xue yang is not even worth the dirt beneath the wheels of his cart. what I think is the seminal point though, is that this does not make xue yang think particularly deeply about systemic injustice, because xue yang is so self-centered, self-driven, and individualistic. he is not even slightly concerned about how poverty and class might affect other people -- they’re other people. what he takes away from his experience is not an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a system, but an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a specific man.

xue yang is not particularly concerned with the politics of the aristocracy -- he has no obvious ambitions other than, “i want to eat sweets whenever i please”, “i want to hurt anyone who wrongs me”, and “i want to be so strong that no one can hurt me”. like, he just doesn’t care -- it’s not the kind of power he wants. he sneers at people for like, personal reasons, not class reasons -- “you think you’re better than me” re: xiao xingchen and song lan. to him, all people -- poor, wealthy, noble, common -- are essentially equal, and they are all beneath him. after all, what does he care what family someone comes from, how much money they have? everyone bleeds when you cut them. some of them might be harder to get to than others, but xue yang does not fear that sort of thing. it’s just another obstacle he needs to vault on his way to getting revenge and/or a pastry.

ANYWAYS onto jin guangyao (wow this is hm. getting rather long ahaha oh dear): I would argue that the two characters with the most acute understanding of class/societal politics and the injustice of them are jin guangyao and lan xichen. i’ll start with jin guangyao for obvious reasons.

where xue yang took the damaging effects of poverty as personal slights, I think jin guangyao is painfully aware that there is nothing personal about them, which is, in some ways, much worse. why are two sons, born on the same day to the same father, treated so differently? just because.

he watched his mother struggle and starve and work herself to the bone in a profession where she was constantly disrespected and abused for almost nothing in return, while his father could have lifted her out of poverty with the wave of a finger. why didn’t he? because he didn’t like her? no -- because he didn’t care, and the structures of the society they live in protect that kind of blase treatment of the lower class.

“so my mother couldn’t choose her own fate, is that her fault?” jin guangyao demands. he knows that he is unbelievably talented, that he has ambition, that he has potential, and that all of it is beyond his grasp just because his father didn’t want to bother with it. his mother’s life was destroyed, and his own opportunities were crippled with that negligence. it isn’t personal. that’s just the way things are. your individual identity is meaningless, your humanity does not exist. when he’s kicked down the steps of jinlin tai, it’s just more confirmation that no matter how talented or hardworking he is, no one will give him the time of day unless he finds a way to take it himself and become someone who “matters”.

jin guangyao’s cultivation is weak because he had a poor foundation, and he had a poor foundation because he was denied access to a good one. he copies others because that’s all he can do at this point, and he copies so well that he can hold his own against some of the strongest cultivators of his generation. he’s disparaged for copying and “stealing” techniques, but -- he never would have had to if only he had been born/accepted into the upper class. the fact is that i really do think jin guangyao was the most promising cultivator of his generation that we meet, including the twin jades and wei wuxian: he had natural talent, ambition, creativity, determination and cunning in spades. in some ways, I think that’s one of the overlooked tragedies of jin guangyao: the loss of not just the good man he could have been, but the powerful one too. imagine what he could have done.

jin guangyao spends his entire time in the world of the aristocracy feeling unsteady and terrified because he knows exactly how precarious his position is. he knows how easy it is to lose power, especially for someone like him. he’s working against so many disadvantages, and every scrap of honor he gets is a vicious battle. jin guangyao fears, and I think that’s something that’s lacking in xue yang, wei wuxian and the daozhangs’ experiences/understandings of poverty. i think it’s precisely that fear that emphasizes jin guangyao’s understanding of class and blood. jin guangyao exhibits an anxiety that neither wei wuxian nor xue yang do, and it’s because he truly knows how little he is worth in the eyes of society and how little there is he can do to change that. to me, it very much feels related to the anxiety of not knowing if tomorrow you’ll have something to eat, if tomorrow you’ll still have a home, if tomorrow someone will destroy you and never have to answer for it. it’s the anxiety of knowing helplessness intimately.

moreover, jin guangyao is the only person shown to use the wealth and power at his disposal to take concrete steps to actually help the common people typically ignored by the powerful -- the watchtowers. they’re described in chapter 42. it’s a system that is designed to cover remote areas that most cultivators are reluctant to go due to their inconvenience and the lack of means of the people who live there. the watchtowers assign cultivators to different posts, give aid to those previously forgotten, and if the people are too poor to pay what the cultivators demand, the lanling jin sect pays for it. jin guangyao worked on this for five years and burned a lot of bridges over it. people were strongly opposed to it, thinking that it was some kind of ploy for lanling jin’s personal benefit. but the thing is -- it worked. they were effective. people were helped.

i believe CQL frames the watchtowers as an allegory for a surveillance state/centralized control (i think?? it’s been a minute -- that’s the hazy impression i remember, something like a parallel to the wen supervisory offices?), but I personally don’t think that was the intent in the novel. the watchtowers are a public good. lanling jin doesn’t staff them with their own sect members -- they get nearby sects to staff them. it’s a warning network that they fund that’s supposed to benefit everyone, even those that everyone had considered expendable.

(did jin guangyao do terrible things to achieve this goal? yeah lol. it’s not confirmed, but his son sure did die... suspiciously...... at the hands of an outspoken critic of the watchtowers........ whom he then executed....... so like, maybe just a convenient coincidence for jin guangyao, two birds one stone, but. it seems. Unlikely.)

lan xichen is the only member of the gentry that ever shows serious compassion for and nuanced understanding of jin guangyao’s circumstances. lan xichen treats him as his equal regardless of jin guangyao’s current status -- even when he was meng yao, lan xichen treated him as a human being worthy of respect, as someone with great merits, as someone he would choose as a friend, but he did so knowing full well the delicate position meng yao occupied. this is in direct contrast to nie mingjue, who also believed that meng yao was worthy of respect as a human being, but was completely unable to comprehend the complexities of his circumstances and unwilling to grant him any grace. you know, the difference between “i acknowledge that your birth and status have had effects upon you, but I don’t think less of you for it” and “i don��t consider your birth and status at all when i interact with you because i think it is irrelevant” (“i don’t see color” anyone?)

to illustrate, from chapter 48:

大抵是觉得娼妓之子身上说不定也带着什么不干净的东西，这几名修士接过他双手奉上来的茶盏后，并不饮下，而是放到一边，还取出雪白的手巾，很难受似的，有意无意反复擦拭刚才碰过茶盏的手指。聂明玦并非细致之人，未曾注意到这种细节，魏无羡却用眼角余光扫到了这些。孟瑶视若未见，笑容不坠半分，继续奉茶。蓝曦臣接过茶盏之时，抬眸看他一眼，微笑道：“多谢。”

旋即低头饮了一口，这才继续与聂明玦交谈。旁的修士见了，有些不自在起来。

rough tl:

Probably because they believed that the son of a prostitute might also carry some unclean things upon his person, after these few cultivators took the teacups offered from [Meng Yao’s] two hands, they did not drink, but instead put them to one side, and furthermore brought out snow white handkerchiefs. Quite uncomfortably, and whether they were aware of it or not, they repeatedly wiped the fingers they had just used to touch the teacups. Nie Mingjue was not a detail-oriented person and never took note of such particulars, but Wei Wuxian caught these in the corner of his eye. Meng Yao appeared as if he had not seen, his smile unwavering in the slightest, and continued to serve tea. When Lan Xichen took the teacup, he glanced up at him and, smiling, said, “Thank you.”

He immediately dipped his head to take a sip, and only then continued to converse with Nie Mingjue. Seeing this, the nearby cultivators began to feel somewhat uneasy.

all right, since we’re in full cyan-rampaging-through-the-weeds mode at this point, i’m going to talk about how this is one of my favorite 3zun moments in the entire novel for characterization purposes because it really highlights how they all relate to one another, and to what degree each of them is aware of their own position in relation to the others and society as a whole.

1. nie mingjue, who is a forthright and blunt person, sets meng yao to serving tea and is done with it. he notices nothing wrong or inappropriate about the reactions of the people in the room because it’s not the sort of thing he considers important.

2. meng yao, knowing that his only avenue is to take it lying down with a smile, masks perfectly.

3. lan xichen, noticing all this, uses his own reputation to achieve two things at once: pointedly shame the other cultivators in attendance, and show meng yao that regardless of others’ opinions, he considers him an equal and does not endorse such behavior--and he does it while taking care that no fallout will come down on meng yao’s head.

is this yet another installment of cyan’s endless lxc defense thesis? why yes it is! no one is surprised! but this is my whole point: both meng yao and lan xichen understand the respective hierarchy and power dynamics within the room, while nie mingjue very much does not. this is not because nie mingjue is a bad person or because nie mingjue is stupid--it’s a combination of personality and upbringing. nie mingjue is straightforward and has no patience for such games. but then again, he can afford not to play because he was born into such a high position: that’s a privilege.

to break it down: meng yao knows that he is the lowest-ranked person in the room, sees the way people are subtly disrespecting him in full view of his general who is doing nothing about it. in some ways, this is good -- nie mingjue’s style of dealing with conflict is very direct and not at all suited to delicate political maneuvering. after all, the way he promoted meng yao was actually quite dangerous to meng yao: he essentially guaranteed that his men would bear meng yao a grudge and that their disrespect for him would only be compounded by their bitterness at being punished on his behalf. (it’s like, why often getting parents or teachers to intervene ineffectively in bullying can just be an incitement to more bullying -- same concept) meng yao’s reaction during that scene shows that he’s pretty painfully aware of this and is trying to defuse the situation to no avail. nie mingjue gives him a bootstrap speech (rip nie mingjue i love u so much but. sir) and then promotes him, which is pretty much the only saving grace of that entire exchange, for meng yao at least.

lan xichen, on the other hand, understands both that meng yao is the lowest-ranked person in the room and that any direct attempt to chastise the other cultivators in the room will only serve to hurt meng yao in the long run. he knows that if this were brought to nie mingjue’s attention, he would be outraged and not shy about it -- also bad for meng yao. so he uses what he has: his immaculate reputation. by acting contrary to the other cultivators’ behavior, he demonstrates that he finds their actions unacceptable but with the plausible deniability that it wasn’t directed at them, that this is just zewu-jun being his usual generous self. this means that the other cultivators have no one to blame but themselves, nothing to do but question their own actions. there is nowhere to cast off their discomfort. meng yao didn’t do anything. lan xichen didn’t do anything -- he just thanked meng yao and drank his tea, isn’t that what it’s there for? he doesn’t disrupt the peace, he doesn’t attack anyone and put them on the defensive, but he does make his position very clear.

i know this is a really small thing and i’m probably beating it to death, but I really think this shows just how cognizant lan xichen is of politics and emotional cause and effect in such situations. certainly, out of context I think the scene reads kind of cliche, but within the greater narrative of the story and within the arc of these characters specifically, I think it was a really smart scene to include. it also showcases lan xichen’s style of action: that he moves around and with a problematic situation as opposed to moving straight through.

not to be salty on main again, but this is why it’s very frustrating to me when I see people call lan xichen passive when he is anything but. his actions just don’t look like traditional “actions”, especially to an american audience. it’s easy to understand lan wangji and wei wuxian’s style of problem-solving: taking a stand, moving through, staying strong. lan xichen is juggling an inconceivable number of factors in any given situation, weighing his responsibilities in one role against those in another, and then trying to find the path through the thicket that will cause the least harm, both to himself and the thicket. lan wangji and wei wuxian are not particularly good at considering the far-reaching consequences of their actions -- again, not because they are bad people, but because of a combination of personality and upbringing. they’d just hack through the thicket, not thinking about the creatures that live in it. that is not a terrible thing! it isn’t. it’s a different way of approaching a problem, and it has different priorities. that’s okay. there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and where you come down is going to depend on your personal values.

okay we’ve spiraled far and away from my original point, but let’s circle back: i was talking about class.

I think it’s undeniable that class, birthright, fate etc. are some of the driving forces of thematic conflict in mdzs, and the way each character interacts with those forces reveals a lot about themselves and also about the larger themes of fate, chance, and what it means to be righteous and good and how that is and isn’t rewarded. a lot of the tragedy of mdzs (the tragedy that isn’t caused by direct aggression on the part of one group or another) stems from the injustices and slights that people suffered due to their lot in life. it isn’t fair. none of it is fair! we sympathize with jin guangyao because we recognize that what he suffered was unconscionable, even if we don’t excuse him. i sympathize A Lot with xue yang as well for similar reasons, though I understand that’s a harder sell. this is a story focused on the mistakes of an entrenched, aging gentry and the effects that those mistakes had on their children, and a lot of it has to do with prejudice based in class and birth status. whether the prejudice was the true reason or whether it was just a convenient excuse, the fact remains that the systems in place rewarded and protected the people in power who used it to cling to that power. mdzs is also a story of how the circumstances of one’s life can offer you impossible choices that you cannot abstain from, and it asks us to be compassionate to the people who made terrible choices in terrible times. it’s about the inherent complexity in all things! that sometimes, there are no good choices, and i don’t know, i’d like to think that people would show me compassion if I had to make the choices some of these characters did. not just wei wuxian, mind you, every single one of them. except jin guangshan because I Do Hate Him sorry. and i guess wen ruohan. i think that’s it.

good. GOD this is clocking in at //checks notes -- just over 5k. 8′D *stuffs some weeds into my mouth like the clown i am*

(ko-fi? :’D *lies down*)

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army-of-mai-lovers · 4 years ago

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in which I get progressively angrier at the various tropes of atla fandom misogyny

tbh I think it would serve all of us to have a larger conversation about the specific ways misogyny manifests in this fandom, because I’ve seen a lot of people who characterize themselves as feminists, many of whom are women themselves, discuss the female characters of atla/lok in misogynistic ways, and people don’t talk about it enough.

disclaimer before I start: I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person who is semi-closeted and thus often read as a woman. I’m speaking to things that I’ve seen that have made me uncomfy, but if any women (esp women existing along other axes of oppression, e.g. trans women, women of color, disabled women, etc) want to add onto this post, please do!

“This female character is a total badass but I’m not even a little bit interested in exploring her as a human being.”

I’ve seen a lot of people say of various female characters in atla/lok, “I love her! She’s such a badass!” now, this statement on its own isn’t misogynistic, but it represents a pretty pervasive form of misogyny that I’ve seen leveled in large part toward the canon female love interests of one or both of the members of a popular gay ship (*cough* zukka *cough*) I’m going to use Suki as an example of this because I see it with her most often, but it can honestly be applied to nearly every female character in atla/lok. Basically, people will say that they stan Suki, but when it comes time to engage with her as an actual character, they refuse to do it. I’ve seen meta after meta about Zuko’s redemption arc, but I so rarely see people engage with Suki on any level beyond “look at this cool fight scene!” and yeah, I love a cool Suki fight scene as much as anybody else, but I’m also interested in meta and headcanons and fics about who she is as a person, when she isn’t an accessory to Sokka’s development or doing something cool. of course, the material for this kind of engagement with Suki is scant considering she doesn’t have a canon backstory (yet) (don’t let me down Faith Erin Hicks counting on you girl) but with the way I’ve seen people in this fandom expand upon canon to flesh out male characters, I know y’all have it in you to do more with Suki, and with all the female characters, than you currently do. frankly, the most engagement I’ve seen with Suki in mainstream fandom is justifying either zukki (which again, is characterizing her in relation to male characters, one of whom she barely interacts with in canon) or one of the Suki wlw pairings. which brings me to--

“I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”

now, I will admit, two of my favorite atla ships are yueki and mailee, and so I totally understand being interested in these characters’ dynamics, even if, as is the case with yueki, they’ve never interacted canonically. however, it becomes a problem for me when these ships are always in the background of a zukka fic. at some point, it becomes obvious that you like this ship because it gets either Zuko or Sokka’s female love interests out of the way, not because you actually think the characters would mesh well together. It’s bad form to dislike a female character because she gets in the way of your gay ship, so instead, you find another girl to pair her off with and call it a day. to be clear, I’m not saying that everybody who ships either mailee or yueki (or tysuki or maisuki or yumai or whatever other wlw rarepair involving Zuko or Sokka’s canon love interests) is nefariously trying to sideline a female character while acting publicly as if she’s is one of their faves--far from it--but it is noteworthy to me how difficult it is to find content that centers wlw ships, while it’s incredibly easy to find content that centers zukka in which mailee and/or yueki plays a background role.

also, notice how little traction wlw Katara ships gain in this fandom. when’s the last time you saw yuetara on your dash? there’s no reason for wlw Katara ships to gain traction in a fandom that is so focused on Zuko and Sokka getting together, bc she doesn’t present an immediate obstacle to that goal (at least, not an obstacle that can be overcome by pairing her up with a woman). if you are primarily interested in Zuko and Sokka’s relationship, and your queer readings of other female characters are motivated by a desire to get them out of the way for zukka, then Katara’s canon m/f relationship isn’t a threat to you, and thus, there’s no reason to read her as potentially queer. Or even, really, to think about her at all.

“Katara’s here but she’s not actually going to do anything, because deep down, I’m not interested in her as a person.”

the show has an enormous amount of textual evidence to support the claim that Sokka and Katara are integral parts of each other’s lives. so, she typically makes some kind of appearance in zukka content. sometimes, her presence in the story is as an actual character with layers and nuance, someone whom Sokka cares about and who cares about Sokka in return, but also has her own life and goals outside of her brother (or other male characters, for that matter.) sometimes, however, she’s just there because halfway through writing the author remembered that Sokka actually has a sister who’s a huge part of the show they’re writing fanfiction for, and then they proceed to show her having a meetcute with Aang or helping Sokka through an emotional problem, without expressing wants or desires outside of those characters. I’m honestly really surprised that I haven’t seen more people calling out the fact that so much of Katara’s personality in fanon revolves around her connections to men? she’s Aang’s girlfriend, she’s Sokka’s sister, she’s Zuko’s bestie. never mind that in canon she spends an enormous amount of time fighting against (anachronistic, Westernized) sexism to establish herself as a person in her own right, outside of these connections. and that in canon she has such interesting complex relationships with other female characters (e.g. Toph, Kanna, Hama, Korra if you want to write lok content) or that there are a plethora of characters with whom she could have interesting relationships with in fanon (Mai, Suki, Ty Lee, Yue, Smellerbee, and if you want to write lok content, Kya II, Lin, Asami, Senna, etc). to me, the lack of fandom material exploring Katara’s relationships with other women or with herself speak to a profound indifference to Katara as a character. I’m not saying you have to like Katara or include her in everything you write, but I am asking you to consider why you don’t find her interesting outside of her relationships with men.

“I hate Katara because she talks about her mother dying too often.”

this is something I’ve seen addressed by people far more qualified than I to address it, but I want to mention it here in part because when I asked people which fandom tropes they wanted me to talk about, this came up often, but also because I find it really disgusting that this is a thing that needs to be addressed at all. Y’all see a little girl who watched her mother be killed by the forces of an imperialist nation and say that she talks about it too much??? That is a formational, foundational event in a child’s life. Of course she’s going to talk about it. I’ve seen people say that she doesn’t talk about it that often, or that she only talks about it to connect with other victims of fn imperialism e.g. Jet and Haru, but frankly, she could speak about it every episode for no plot-significant reason whatsoever and I would still be angry to see people say she talks about it too much. And before you even bring up the Sokka comparison, people deal with grief in different ways. Sokka repressed a lot of his grief/channeled it into being the “man” of his village because he knew that they would come for Katara next if he gave them the opportunity. he probably would talk about his mother more if a) he didn’t feel massive guilt at not being able to remember what she looked like, and b) he was allowed to be a child processing the loss of his mother instead of having to become a tiny adult when Hakoda had to leave to help fight the fn. And this gets into an intersection with fandom racism, in that white fans (esp white American fans) are incapable of relating to the structural trauma that both Sokka and Katara experience and thus can’t see the ways in which structural trauma colors every single aspect of both of their characters, leading them to flatten nuance and to have some really bad takes. And you know what, speaking of bad fandom takes--

“Shitting on Mai because she gets in the way of my favorite Zuko ship is actually totally okay because she’s ~abusive~”

y’all WHAT.

ok listen, I get not liking maiko. I didn’t like it when I first got into fandom, and later I realized that while bryke cannot write romance to save their lives, fans who like maiko sure can, so I changed my tune. but if you still don’t like it, that’s fine. no skin off my back.

what IS skin off my back is taking instances in which Mai had justified anger toward Zuko, and turning it into “Mai abused Zuko.” do you not realize how ridiculous you sound? this is another thing where I get so angry about it that I don’t know how useful my analysis is actually going to be, but I’ll do my best. numerous people have noted how analysis of Mai and Zuko’s breakup in “The Beach” or Mai being justifiably angry with him at Boiling Rock or her asking for FUCKING FRUIT in “Nightmares and Daydreams” that says that all of these events were her trying to gain control over him is....ahhh...lacking in reading comprehension, but I’d like to go a step further and talk about why y’all are so intent on taking down a girl who doesn’t show emotion in normative ways. obviously, there’s a “Zuko can do no wrong” aspect to Mai criticism (which is super weird considering how his whole arc is about how he can do lots of wrong and he has to atone for the wrong that he’s done--but that’s a separate post.) But I also see slandering Mai for not expressing her emotions normatively and not putting up with Zuko’s shit and slandering Katara for “talking about her mother too often” as two sides of the same coin. In both cases, a female character expresses emotions that make you, the viewer, uncomfortable, and so instead of attempting to understand where those emotions may have come from and why they might be manifesting the way they are, y’all just throw the whole character away. this is another instance of people in the fandom being fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the female characters of atla in a real way, except instead of shallowly “stanning” Mai, y’all hate her. so we get to this point where female characters are flattened into one of two things: perfect queens who can do no wrong, or bitches. and that’s not who they are. that’s not who anyone is. but while we as a fandom are pretty good at understanding b1 Zuko’s actions as layered and multifaceted even though he’s essentially an asshole then, few are willing to lend the same grace to any female character, least of all Mai.

and what’s funny is sometimes this trope will intersect with “I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”, so you’ll have someone actively calling Mai toxic/problematic/abusive, and at the same time ship her with Ty Lee? make it make sense! but then again, maybe that’s happening because y’all are fundamentally disinterested in Ty Lee as a character too.

“I love Ty Lee so much that I’m going to treat her like an infantilized hypersexual airhead!”

there are so many things happening in y’alls characterization of Ty Lee that I struggled to synthesize it into one quippy section header. on one hand, you have the hypersexualization, and on the other hand, you have the infantilization, which just makes the hypersexualization that much worse.

(of course, sexualizing or hypersexualizing ANY atla character is really not the move, considering that these are child characters in a children’s show, but then again, that’s a separate post.)

now, I understand how, from a very, very surface reading of the text, you could come to the conclusion that Ty Lee is an uncomplicated bimbo. if you grew up on Western media the way I did, you’ll know that Ty Lee has a lot of the character traits we associate with bimbos: the form-fitting pink crop top, the general conventional attractiveness, the ditzy dialogue. but if you think about it for more than three seconds, you’ll understand that Ty Lee has spent her whole life walking a tightrope, trying to please Azula and the rest of the royal family while also staying true to herself. Ty Lee and Azula’s relationship is a really complex and interesting topic that I don’t really have time to explore at the moment given how long this post is, but I’d argue that Ty Lee’s constant, vocal adulation is at least partially a product of learning to survive at court at an early age. Like Mai, she has been forced to regulate her emotions as a member of fn nobility, but unlike Mai, she also has six sisters who look exactly like her, so she has a motivation to be more peppy and more affectionate to stand out.

fandom does not do the work to understand Ty Lee. as is a theme with this post, fandom is actively disinterested in investigating female characters beyond a very surface level reading of them. Thus, fandom takes Ty Lee’s surface level qualities--her love of the color pink, her revealing standard outfit, and the fact that once she found a boy attractive and also once a lot of boys found her attractive--and they stretch this into “Ty Lee is basically Karen Smith from Mean Girls.” thus, Ty Lee is painted as a bimbo, or more specifically, as not smart, uncritically adoring of Azula (did y’all forget all the non-zukka bits of Boiling Rock?), and attractive to the point of hypersexualization. I saw somebody make a post that was like “I wish mailee was more popular but I’m also glad it isn’t because otherwise people would write it as Mai having to put up with her dumb gf” and honestly I have to agree!! this is one instance in which I’m glad that fandom doesn’t discuss one of my favorite characters that often because I hate the fanon interpretation of Ty Lee, I think it’s rooted in misogyny (particularly misogyny against East Asian women, which often takes the form of fetishizing them and viewing them only through a Western white male gaze)

(side note: here at army-of-mai-lovers, we stan bimbos. bimbos are fucking awesome. I personally don’t read Ty Lee as a bimbo, but if that’s you, that’s fucking awesome. keep doing what you’re doing, queen <3 or king or monarch, it’s 2021, anyone can be a bimbo, bitches <3)

“Toph can and will destroy everyone here with her bare hands because she’s a meathead who likes to murder people and that’s it!”

Toph is, and always has been, one of my favorite ATLA characters. My very first fic in fandom was about her, and she appears prominently in a lot of my other work as well. One thing that I am always struck by with Toph is how big a heart she has. She’s independent, yes, snarky, yes, but she cares about people--even the family that forced her to make herself smaller because they didn’t believe that their blind daughter could be powerful and strong. Her storyline is powerful and emotionally resonant, her bending is cool precisely because it’s based in a “wait and listen” approach instead of just smashing things indiscriminately, she’s great disabled rep, and overall one of the best characters in the show.

And in fandom, she gets flattened into “snarky murder child.”

So where does this come from? Well, as we all know, Toph was originally conceived of as a male character, and retained a lot of androgyny (or as the kids call it, Gender) when she was rewritten as a female character. There are a lot of cultural ideas about androgynous/butch women being violent, and people in fandom seem to connect that larger cultural narrative with some of Toph’s more violent moments in the show to create the meathead murder child trope, erasing her canon emotionality, softness, heart, and femininity in the process.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t write or characterize Toph as being violent or snarky at all ever, because yeah, Toph definitely did do Earth Rumbles a lot before joining the gaang, and yeah, Toph is definitely a sarcastic person who makes fun of her friends a lot. What I am saying is that people take these traits, sans the emotional logic, marry them to their conception of androgynous/butch women as violent/unemotional/uncaring, and thus create a caricature of Toph that is not at all up to snuff. When I see Toph as a side character in a fic (because yeah, Toph never gets to be a main character, because why would a fandom obsessed with one male character in particular ever make Toph a protagonist in her own right?) she’s making fun of people, killing people, pranking people, etc, etc. She’s never talking to people about her emotions, or palling around with her found family, or showing that she cares about her friends. Everything about her relationship with her parents, her disability, her relationship to Gender, and her love of her friends is shoved aside to focus on a version of Toph that is mean and uncaring because people have gotten it into their heads that androgynous/butch women are mean and uncaring.

again, we see a female character who does not emote normatively or in a way that makes you, the viewer, comfortable, and so you warp her character until she’s completely unrecognizable and flat. and for what?

Azula

no, I didn’t come up with a snappy name for this section, mainly because fanon interpretations of Azula and my own feelings toward the character are...complicated. I know there were some people who wanted me to write about Azula and the intersection of misogyny and ableism in fanon interpretations of her character, but I don’t think I can deliver on that because I personally am in a period of transition with how I see Azula. that is to say, while I still like her and believe that she can be redeemed, there is a lot of merit to disliking her. the whole point of this post is that the female characters of ATLA are complex people whom the fandom flattens into stereotypes that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or dislike for reasons that don’t make sense. Azula, however, is a different case. the rise of Azula defenders and Azula stans has led to this sentiment that Azula is a 14 y/o abuse victim who shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions. it seems to me that people are reacting to a long, horrible legacy of male ATLA fans armchair diagnosing Azula with various personality disorders (and suggesting that people with those personality disorders are inherently monstrous and unlovable which ahhhh....yikes) and then saying that those personality disorders make her unlovable, which is quite obviously bad. and hey, I get loving a character that everyone else hates and maybe getting so swept up in that love that you forget that your fave is complicated and has made some unsavory choices. it sucks that fanon takes these well-written, complex villains/antiheroes and turns them into monsters with no critical thought whatsoever. but the attitude among Azula stans that her redemption shouldn’t be hard, that her being a child excuses all of the bad things that she’s done, that she is owed redemption....all of that rubs me the wrong way. I might make another post about this in the future that discusses this in more depth, but as it stands now: while I understand that there is a legacy of misogynistic, ableist, unnuanced takes on Azula, the backlash to that does not take into account the people she hurt or the fact that in ATLA she does not make the choice to pursue redemption. and yes, Zuko had help in making that choice that Azula didn’t, and yes, Azula is a victim of abuse, but in a show about children who have gone through untold horrors and still work to better the lives of the people around them, that is not enough for me to uncritically stan her.

Conclusion

misogyny in this fandom runs rampant. while there are some tropes of fandom misogyny that are well-documented and have been debunked numerous times, there are other, subtler forms of misogyny that as far as I know have gone completely unchecked.

what I find so interesting about misogyny in atla fandom is that it’s clear that it’s perpetrated by people who are aware of fandom misogyny who are actively trying not to be misogynistic. when I first joined atla fandom last summer, memes about how zukka fandom was better than every other fandom because they didn’t hate the female characters who got in the way of their gay ship were extremely prevalent, and there was this sense that *this* fandom was going to model respectful, fun, feminist online fandom. not all of the topes I’ve outlined are exclusive to or even largely utilized in zukka fandom, but a lot of them are. I’ve been in and out of fandom since I was eleven years old, and most of the fandom spaces I’ve been in have been majority-female, and all of them have been incredibly misogynistic. and I always want to know why. why, in these communities created in large part by women, in large part for women, does misogyny run wild? what I realize now is that there’s never going to be a one-size fits all answer to that question. what’s true for 1D fandom on Wattpad in 2012 is absolutely not true for atla fandom on tumblr in 2021. the answers that I’ve cobbled together for previous fandoms don’t work here.

so, why is atla fandom like this? why did the dream of a feminist fandom almost entirely focused on the romantic relationship between two male characters fall apart? honestly, I think the notion that zukka fandom ever was this way was horrifically ignorant to begin with. from my very first moment in the fandom, I was seeing racism, widespread sexualization of minors, and yes, misogyny. these aspects of the fandom weren’t talked about as much as the crocverse or other, much more fun aspects. further, atla (specifically zukka) fandom misogyny often doesn’t look like the fandom misogyny we’ve become familiar with from like, Sherlock fandom or what have you. for the most part, people don’t actively hate Suki, they just “stan” without actually caring about her. they hate Mai because they believe in treating male victims of abuse equally. they’re not characterizing Toph poorly, they’re writing her as a “strong woman.” in short, people are misogynistic, and then invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of feminist theory to shield themselves from accusations of misogyny. it’s not unlike the way some people will invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of critical race theory to shield themselves from accusations of racism, or how they’ll talk about “freedom of speech” and “the suppression of women’s sexuality” to justify sexualizing minors. the performance of feminism and antiracism is what’s important, not the actual practice.

if you’ve made it this far, first off, hi, thanks so much for reading, I know this was a lot. second, I would seriously encourage you to be aware of these fandom tropes and to call them out when you see them. elevate the voices of fans who do the work of bringing the female characters of atla to life. invest in the wlw ships in this fandom. drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic (please, drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic). read some yuetara. let’s all be honest about where we are now, and try to do better in the future. I believe in us.

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