#there’s a difference when I joke is actually offensive and never in this context will it ever be that serious

[valewritessss]

I’ve noticed the people in the pjo fandom are way too sensitive. Especially when people mention Percy. If you’re not praising him in every sentence you talk about him they’ll hate you. Not so much on this app but in other sites like TikTok and shit you can’t even imply that he depends on other characters for some things without being torn apart.

I love Percy too, but I can admit he can’t do EVERYTHING alone, and by saying that I’m not putting him down in any way.

I’ve seen videos of people joking about him looking to Annabeth for guidance or him not being able to do it without some character, and the comments are always filled with people saying “omg he’s not stupid”, “I didn’t see them(other character) leading a whole army”, or “Annabeth was bedridden the whole time she was useless”, and it’s like no one said he was dumb??? If they think someone’s dumb for needing any sort of assistance that’s a personal issue that they should probably speak to a therapist about.

And yes, Percy led an army but he obviously didn’t do it completely alone, and that doesn’t make him any less. And the Annabeth bashing is always there idk people can’t stand to see women get something.

But my point is, this fandom is way too sensitive when people mention something not AMAZING about their favorite character. And this can be seen mostly through Percy. Now I’m gonna go tag this as NOT Percy hate because the people I’m talking about will probably take this the wrong way lol

[magentagalaxies]

i really want to start making a table collecting statistics on the audience demographics i'll perform my aubrey material for (like what generation most of the audience is, whether i'm performing in a predominantly queer space, etc.) and how well the jokes land bc like. i need to collect more data points before i can properly present my findings but the results so far have been fascinating

[aguineapigcouldntdothis]

I do not find it reasonable that the term "ashkenormativity" is frequently used to mean "asheknazi jews, aka the white european ones, are racist, colorist, and even antisemitic against other jews". not only is that an improper definition with loads of information, it fails to recognize that the people who are most likely to perpetuate ashkenormativity are goyim.

for the purpose of this post, I will be going with the definition that ashkenormativity is the belief that ashkenazi people are the default jews, which leads to them getting more respect, opportunities, recognition, etc. goyim, especially in the western world, have likely only been exposed to ashkenazi jews, meaning that they are likely to view them as the blueprint. they are simply drawing conclusions from the available information, which in my eyes is not a huge issue. the true problem arises when they learn about other types of jews and immediately decide that we are "improper". because we don't fit their idea of what a jew looks like, acts like, etc., we are either bad jews or not jewish at all.

it is not the fault of ashkenazim that goyim think this way, and it is not their responsibility to fix it. it is also not their fault that most jews in the western world are ashkenazim. it is absolutely the responsibility of goyim to learn that there are many types of jew and we are still one people.

ashkenazim are less likely to spread ashkenormativity than goyim because they are exposed to other jews more often. they may have different norms than a sephardi, mizrahi, etc. jew would, but they're usually able to recognize that we are all jews with a shared culture. and by usually I mean I can count on 1 hand the number of times an ashki jew genuinely thought they were better than us. 2 hands if we're counting repeated offenses from the same person. I believe that has nothing to do with their heritage and everything to do with them being an asshole. point is, learning by observing other jews is an effective tool to combat prejudices. the more examples you see of a non-ashki jew, the more likely you are to correct yourself when you promote ashkenormativity.

i feel like a fun exercise would be to compare 2 separate interactions ive had with a goy and a ashkenazi jew. both contain examples of ashkenormativity. neither is significantly worse than the other so they are close enough to compare.

interaction with goy:

context is we were talking about jewish traditions and it got to the topic of food. I actually cooked a ton this year i didnt know what I was in for.

me: I won't cook that much this year, but usually id eat a lot of unleavened cakes and rice for passover

goy: i thought you guys ate matzah

me: I mean yeah but we eat other stuff too. im sephardi so I get more options which is fun (this was said as a joke, not judging anyone)

goy: oh so you're not really jewish then?

me: no im still jewish, Im just not ashkenazi and we have some cultural differences

goy: but like you're not jewish religiously, right??

me: I mean im not orthodox but yeah im still a religious jew. i just practice based on my culture its not hard to get

goy: wouldn't it be easier to just do what everyone else does though

me: yeah I just like doing this more it's fun for me

goy: yeah whatever I dont get this im done

interaction with ashki jew:

context is i was at shabbat dinner chilling on a couch and talking to a friend i made

ashki jew: so you know that shul down by (location)

me: the what?

ashki jew: ...the shul??

me: I've never heard that word in my life what is that

ashki jew: its just the synagogue. you've never heard that word before?

me: no i was so confused ive always just called it synagogue. sometimes the old people would call it kal never shul though

ashki jew: ok just like tell me if I confuse you with my yiddish again

I feel as if the differences between these interactions is quite clear. so, I wont go into heavy detail analyzing them. the basic idea is that during the conversation with the goy, I kept explaining myself and they refused to listen. they believed that ashki jews were better than me and that they themselves were also better than me. I was essentially told that I do not know anything about judaism because in their eyes I am not truly a jew. during the conversation with the ashkenazi jew, they explained themselves immediately because we are equals. they know we are both jews and we're more similar than we are different. it surprised them that I didn't know what shul meant, yet they did not use that as an excuse to tear me down.

I truly think people do ashkenazim a disservice by assuming that they are power hungry jews (*cough* antisemitic stereotype *cough*) who will stop at nothing to be better than the sad little sephardim and mizrahim. in reality, most of them, like my lovely friend, are more than willing to learn and share with other jews. the people who are truly hurting us are the goyische antisemites.

this is gonna sound hypocritical because I just made a long ass post about an intracommunity issue, however, can we please just focus the majority of our energy on the actual antisemites who are truly hurting us instead of other jews? this is an important topic that we need to discuss it's just not the most important thing us jews have going on. other jews are my friends and I refuse to be separated from them for the approval of goyim, and I know they will show me that same kindness.

note: I am just not feeling like myself today forgive any weird writing mistakes ill fix them later or maybe not

[glittering-snowfall]

At the time even the film's creators seemed nervous about what they had created. Like, when Diablo Cody in defending the film's same-sex kiss talked about her intense female friendships, how she "wanted to sleep at my friend's house every night, I wanted to wear her clothes, we would talk on the phone until our ears ached." Yeah Diablo, I had that with some of my guy friends as a teenager too, it was called being gay. The article that quote is from still finds the time to chide Cody for not doing good feminist representation, though, and I guess that makes me somewhat sympathetic to Cody here. Did she know that culture was in fact going to be too dumb to get the way Jennifer is both a predator and victim, the way her love for Needy is at turns beautiful and toxic, the way expressions of queer desire get warped into complicated, problematic forms by a diseased culture?

The film is full of uncomfortable joke/horror ambiguities, which were at least grasped by some critics (the film did have a number of favorable reviews, though they couldn't compete with the horrible marketing). As far as I can tell, the developing blogosphere, on the other hand, understood none of this from the moment they got their grubby cheeto dust covered fingers on the script before the film's release. Diablo Cody had amassed a considerable loud hatedom at that point, of both the aforementioned cheeto boys and their female counterparts,  going apoplectic over the "fantasy" that "Diablo Cody is a magical snowflake who can spray her unique pixie dust on an otherwise conventional script and give it indie cred". Perhaps the film's obsession with female relationships characterized by violence, jealousy, and crab bucket behavior cut too close to home for such critics?

Or maybe they just genuinely hate Diablo Cody's "twee dialogue". You hear about this? Yeah, Diablo Cody writes twee dialogue. This mantra seems completely unassailable now, basically accepted by even her defenders. What's so god damn twee about it though? To be sure, I remember mentally grouping Juno in with Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. Jennifer's Body reveals just how much "twee" is a function of the film in its totality, though. I mean, I feel like this should be obvious but the exaggerated quippy dialogue comes across a little differently in the context of a film featuring sexual assault, people being burned to death, ritual murder, demonic possession, and teenagers being sadistically eaten alive.

In that context her dialogue comes across more like a nightmare funhouse mirror version of Joss Whedon's now eye-rollingly ubiquitous quips. Whedon and his bazillion interchangeable hack studio vat clones never aspired for much actual wit beyond the "umm well THAT just happened". Cody's dialogue on the other hand is baroque, in love with weird wordplay and uncouth associations. Needy refers to Jennifer affectionately as "Vagisil". Jennifer, in a line that caught me totally off guard midway through taking a big sip of water, jeers that Needy needs to "Move-on dot org". Yeah, no man, you're right. This isn't how "real" teenagers talk. Also, Jennifer's not "really" possessed by a demon, it's a thing we call "Movie Magic".

Though, actually, it's not totally unreal. This baroque, warping dialogue feels now like how teens trash talk under ideal conditions: on the internet. This movie's dialogue is posting. Like Homestuck, the point is not to capture a literal representation but instead a vibe of the kind of unrestrained, often vulgar and offensive dialogue of teens shit talking each other over America Online Instant Messanger or replies to their friends' Xanga posts. It makes perfect sense that both Jennifer and the various Homestuck teens would call each other retards, for example. There's a real sense in the film of characters pushing boundaries, testing the limits of their ability to perform adulthood. It's not just an act in the sense that it's a movie you plodding dullards, but in the sense that these characters are performing their idea of maturity.

There's nothing of that performance when Jennifer, in the back of a van going who knows where, sobering up and getting a grip on her real situation, asks the members of the band Low Shoulder, "Are you guys rapists?"

The climactic flashback, late in the film, when we witness the band's brutal murder of Jennifer, still has plenty of quips, of course. It's just that now Jennifer's ability to perform any kind of mature confidence has been brutally ripped away by a bunch of third rate emo douchebags. All the quipping, over top of her desperate pleading for her life, issues from the douchebags, who treat the whole scene as a joke. The affect of this scene feels complex to me. It's still Diablo Cody's script so there's some pretty good one liners. Megan Fox, though, is playing the scene for pure horror, so the humor adds to the horror for me. For these guys, rape and murder is just, like, kind of a fun night out. They can sing pop songs while ramming a bowie knife ("Bowie! Nice!") into a teenage girl's body because their biggest concern is whether or not they can get their shit band on Letterman. 

I think it's notable that for a solid number of people--particularly though by no means exclusively women--this scene is not damaged in its horror by this dissonance. At least not now. And why should it be? Horror has never just been about what's "scary" or worse about startling people with jump scares. Horror has always partaken of a complex mix of affects: fear and visceral startlement, yes, but also grief, shock, disgust, rage, contempt... attraction... humor. The best horror might fuck with the viewer's head, prompting arousal or humor simultaneous with disgust or fear. Why play these things off each other? Maybe to destabilize us. If we feel a moment during Jennifer's brutal murder where we're just a little bit charmed by these self admittedly cute boys, maybe that prompts a question like: what other monsters might be hiding behind charming façades?

The post-9/11 years and incipient Obama cultural revolution were unfortunately for Jennifer's Body a time for dumb affects. We pretended Rudy Giuliani hadn't spent several years turning NYC into a characterless, facile police state before bungling the 9/11 disaster response. Clear Channel, now the insipidly named "iHeartRadio," banned numerous songs for fear of causing even a shred of offense. The FCC got more censorious, waving its own dick around to far more culturally degenerate effect than any superbowl nip slips. Even researching this period is tedious: the articles I access are full of euphemistic phrases ("Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable") so tortured they could have been dreamed up by the Bush admin's army of Eichmanns. I did discover that the maximum penalty for saying "fuck" went under Bush from a draconian $32,500 to a wild-eyed spittle-mouthed $325,000. People who objected to the dogshit state of culture and politics were drummed out of society, as The Dixie Chicks were. Or, more commonly, folks sorta slipped out of the public eye after getting played off at awards ceremonies, quietly shelved.

The primary objection to all this unfortunately did not come from anything really resembling a left but libertarians, constitutional bill of rights fetishists, and South Park. Democrats, never willing to lose an opportunity to supplicate themselves in spineless nematoad subservience to reactionary forces, attacked the Bush FCC for not fining stations MORE for Janet Jackson's sexual harassment by Justin Timberlake. Cool!

I wanted to talk about how this extended into the Obama years but here's the weird and ominous thing: a lot of the statistics and research material on the FCC's censorship actions just sorta stop in 2006. A lot of the relevant links from the FCC's own website are dead now. I doubt that means things improved under Obama. I mean, why should the FCC have stopped fining people for saying "dickhole"? It's not like any of the natsec state's border wars ceased, or the detaining of people without trial in the torture pits of Guantanamo, or the deportation of migrants, or the wiretapping of civilians. The prosecution of whistleblowers actually increased drastically under Obama, as did the lobbing of drones at wedding parties.

We bore this because Obama offered an alternative to divisiveness and the stale politics of the Bush era. We didn't have to tear down and dismantle what the Neoconservatives and Bible-brandishing Evangelical cultists had built through rancor and strife, we simply had to present a different way. A way that would unite the country. A way of hope. THROUGH THE TREEEES I WILL FIIIIIND YOU I WILL HEEEEAL THE RUINS LEFT INSIIIIIDE YOU

Now Needy's increasingly frantic sense that something is very wrong and all the memorial rallies and posters in the world can't fix it resonate pretty strongly with me. And, of course, after watching Low Shoulder brutally murder a teenage girl the whole grief and recovery (with a hit song!) thing feels like a cathartic confirmation of what I felt a lot during this period: that all sorts of cynical fucks were exploiting tragedy to their own ends. It never seemed to be quite the right time to bring up how cloying and often disturbingly fascistic a lot of the Strong In The Face Of Tragedy pop culture was. It was either offensive to the victims of terrorism, or offensive to Our Troops, or, extremely conveniently, before the critique even had a chance to be levied it was suddenly old hat: the Village Voice sneeringly dismisses this film's "routine “risky” digs at 9/11 kitsch". It was hard to tell Republicans to go lick a d*ckh*le when President Obama was wearing flag lapels and having grotesquely performative "beer summits" to bring together a completely innocent black college professor with the racist pig that arrested him. You wanna talk kitsch? Obama was so fucking kitsch, homeskillet. Kitsch and twee to a degree no Diablo Cody dialogue could ever sink.

Here's something that's not kitsch or twee: Needy finding the sacrificial knife that stole her friend/love interest, and using it and inherited succubus powers to murder the shit out of every member of Low Shoulder. That's cathartic as hell. I said earlier that no one in this film really deserves what happens to them. Low Shoulder are the exception, and it's so satisfying to see that knife buried to the hilt in the lead singer's shitty torso.

from We Were Too Stupid for Jennifer's Body

[miyamiwu]

Suddenly thinking about how accent is usually portrayed in translation. Example:

Why do they often translate it like That?

This isn’t applies to just Japanese manga. I’ve noticed it in other media as well. Hiori just happened to be the first example that came to mind.

How important is it to understanding the translated story that most dialogues of this Character with an Accent should have words that are contracted or purposefully misspelled? Is it important that the reader be constantly aware that this Character sounds differently? But everybody sounds differently when they speak. We all have our own quirks. (I don’t know how Hiori’s Kansai accent works, but this isn’t just about his accent specifically, okay.)

And I’m asking this as someone who, ironically, actually contracts/shortens words the whole time when speaking in my mother tongue because that’s just how conversational Cebuano works.

For example, the word know in Cebuano is kahibalo. But most people just say it as kahibaw, kaybaw, kibaw, or even just one-syllable—baw. Sometimes, we even mesh multiple words together: gamay og becomes gamay’g (gamay means small, while og is a connector word)

But if you ask me to translate a Cebuano story full of all such contractions in the dialogues, no way am I gonna contract their counterpart words in English as well. It would sound Odd, but this way of speaking is not at all Odd to us native speakers. I would not want our dialogues to be perceived as Odd. Depending on the context, I may just translate it as informal/casual versus formal/literary for dialogues that actually use the full words all throughout.

But this isn’t about the Cebuano language in itself, or any language for that matter. This is about accents. The sound and not the words themselves.

When I speak in Filipino, I have a Bisaya accent. This accent is characterized as being hard/rough when compared to the more smooth/flowy sound of the Filipino language. But note that despite speaking with such an accent, I do not contract my words in Filipino like how I would in Cebuano. I adapt to the language I’m speaking in instead. I’ll say the full word and only contract words I’ve noticed native speakers would contract.

Heck, I even try to adjust how I say Bisaya. I say it as bih-sa-yah, but when speaking in Filipino, I’d pronounce it as bee-saa-yaaa.

But there are just some words I can never sound smooth/flowy in. In this case, how should my rough accent be portrayed when translated to English?

Should my words be contracted and misspelled even when I speak the exact same words as a native Filipino speaker? Would you do the same for a native speaker fishmonger who has no accent but just speaks roughly in general? Am I cursed to always sound like a fishmonger in English even when I’m speaking gently? (No offense to the fishmonger. Us Bisaya just often lightheartedly joke about how we’re often perceived as fishmongers trying to sell their wares.)

I’m just trying to understand the implications here, and I’m coming to the conclusion that… translating accents in such a way is less about depicting the sound of it and more about depicting the Oddity of it. The foreign-ness.

...I will have to look into this some more...

[coraniaid]

I really do think that the least interesting way to approach any longform narrative written over the course of several years by different writers is to act as if it everything that happens in it must somehow be internally consistent. Especially when we're talking about television writers with an (at best) flexible approach to world building and logical consistency; writers with a clear willingness to abandon previously established facts about the setting if it allows for (what they think will be) a more interesting story in the moment. In such a context it is just not sensible to insist that any late season retcons definitively establish some singular Truth about how the show Really Worked in its original seasons.

Specifically (and I'm aware I wasn't being very vague before) the idea that the (often rather bad) writing of Buffy's later seasons establishes definitive Facts about the world of the first few seasons which, if they contradict earlier claims, mean the original world-building lore we were given must actually have been examples of the in-universe characters being wrong or telling deliberate lies is, I'm sorry, almost offensively stupid. We don't "find out more" about the rules of how the world works in later seasons of the show in a way that implies these rules always existed in some fixed and unchanging state. The world of the show has no such rules because it does not, in fact, exist. What happened is that the later writers of the show (who were mostly different people) had different ideas about what would make for an interesting story (and unfortunately these were mostly worse ideas).

There seems to be a bizarrely popular take online that says you can't really understand the first few seasons of Buffy until you've watched the later ones, as if the entirety of Buffy is a single coherent narrative meticulously planned out from the beginning in advance. But you do all get that that is absurd, right? Yes, sometimes the show frequently changes its position on how its worldbuilding is supposed to work, but that's not because the writers are slowly revealing something they had planned out years earlier and knowingly had characters lie to each other about. It's because they are making things up as they go (which, to be clear, is more difficult and significantly more impressive when done well).

The reason Giles claims in Season 1's Witch to have never cast a spell before is that the writers had no inkling of the backstory they were going to give him next season. You obviously can go back and interpret this as a lie Giles is telling Buffy for some reason, but it doesn't meaningfully improve your understanding of the episode to do this. Similarly, the reason that nobody in the show talks about a "Watcher's Council" until Season 3 is that before Season 3 the writers had no conception of such a thing. It's fun to come up with in-universe reasons for why Giles might not mention the Council, even when meetin a second Slayer, but I think we should admit than when we do this we're engaged in something closer to fanfiction than analysis.

We don't "find out" that the character of Anya introduced in The Wish was probably autistic even before becoming a vengeance demon: the writers just changed their mind about how her character worked and why she acted that way (and indeed in The Wish itself she doesn't act that way at all; Anya being "strangely literal" didn't really take hold as a character trait until the show's fourth season). It is not "revealed" that Buffy tried telling her parents about vampires before the show began and they had her locked up: this is just a particularly stupid retcon that doesn't make any sense if you actually remember the first two seasons (woud Buffy joke with her mom about being distracted by thoughts of "saving the world from vampires" in Bad Eggs if the last time she'd mentioned vampires to her mom she'd been institutionalized?). We don't "learn" that Giles and Buffy were always wrong about people not "turning into" vampires (meaning they were specifically wrong about people like Jesse and Ford, and that Buffy herself is some sort of unrepentant mass murderer): the later writers who imply that this is what happens after all just didn't care about continuity (or what this change would mean for the morality of the show's protagonist's entire reason for being).

You have to watch each season of the show as if it were telling you the truth about its world building as the writers understood it at the time, or none of them make any sense. That is, in fact, how you have to watch most television of this form: there was no long term master plan. There is no singular truth about what "really" happened. The rules of the setting are just subtly (or not so subtly) different from season to season. Nobody writing Season 1 of the show had the slightest idea what would happen in Season 7 and anyone who suggests otherwise is full of shit.

[aspd-culture]

@brandon666

First off, you have some *really* inaccurate ideas of what ASPD is. Do you think we can survive in the world acting like you expect me to act? Far more often, pwASPD appear detached and callous rather than actively hostile the way you're saying. We aren't 12 year old kids on Xbox Live voice chat, * s p o o k y voice* we are all around you. You wouldn't be able to pick most of us out of a crowd, even if you had direct interaction with us. In fact, a running joke here and in my real life is that people often tell pwASPD "don't worry, I can sniff out a s*ciop*th a mile away" or similar not realizing they're talking shit about us to our face.

There *are* pwASPD who are still entirely valid who act the way you're saying - and also plenty of prosocials who behave like that too. But it isn't all of us, all the time. Most of us are capable of and maybe even prefer to be cool, calm, and calculated about how we speak and act because of the trauma we have.

Unlike people on TV like Dr. House, there are real life consequences to the behavior you describe, and many of us strive not to be happy, but for life to be as convenient as possible. Kinda hard to get convenience while you're pissing everyone off. Ever heard the part of ASPD where they mention we are manipulative and charismatic? Yeah that isn't exactly compatible with being crass, careless, pranking, or offensive. Careless actually specifically bothers me because we are often said to "play a social chess game" with people we talk to. Many of us are extremely calculating and overly cautious. And many of us aren't, but it certainly isn't like you're saying all the time. Even pwASPD who *do* act like that usually are calm and "respectful" sometimes.

Also, I never claimed to be unmasked on this blog. Most of the time, I am absolutely masking to some degree - although much less than IRL. You can actually see that in the tags, I use "a rare unmasked aspd-culture" as a joke about this fact. Whilst this is a safe place for other pwASPD to unmask if they'd like, my posts on this blog are different. My side of this is helping educate people - prosocial, antisocial, whoever - if/when they have questions for me about ASPD which is fairly frequent. This isn't to say I am not ok with unmasking here, like I said it's happened before, but consider the context of what's happening.

I'm often asked genuine questions about ASPD, some of which are ableist (almost always on accident!) and many of which are based on extremely common misconceptions. If I were to unmask while answering those, I would end up being really shitty to people who are trying to learn - often people who want to do better for the pwASPD in their life, or for themselves. We talk about coping mechanisms and the development of ASPD a lot here; with those topics there is little room for my unmasked behavior *and* education. If I were to unmask while answering, no one would be getting anything out of asking those questions even if I was providing info because it's hard to take in new information from someone when they're being defensive or hostile.

I don't want to be hostile towards them, I want to help because if ASPD is ever going to be destigmatized, someone has got to answer their questions and help show them what it is and what it isn't! We can't expect prosocials to fend for themselves in the cesspool of stigma that the typical google results on ASPD show - someone has to help them. And since one of my special interests (something autistic ppl like myself have and love to infodump about) is mental health, especially my own disorders, I am happy to be one of the people they can ask these sometimes tough questions to.

I am also helping pwASPD! Many questions I get are people trying to understand their own disorder or the disorder they think they might have. It sucked for me, learning this all on my own (and I'm still learning too), so I can use the cognitive empathy I've taught myself over the years and remember the feelings I went through when I was trying to find unbiased info.

There's a transaction here - a major part of ASPD if you didn't know - I calmly and respectfully answer people's questions, and the world becomes slightly less ignorant and we get a slight amount of progress on destigmatizing this disorder. That makes my life easier too. In the process, I see many culture asks that remind me I'm not alone in this. Often, posting those gives me some catharsis, and you will sometimes see me going off in the tags about what I've dealt with. But for the most part, I'm giving other pwASPD an open space to unmask as well as to ask questions to someone who will, 95% of the time, give a masked and respectful answer. Friendly is a stretch tho lol unless you missed the original post about the syscourse that you commented this on.

So yeah, long and short, you're definitely missing something here and that's ok. Just learn and do better. I know you might see that as another thing that is flying in the face of ASPD or whatever, but it's no skin off my back if you think I have ASPD or not, and anyway I'd rather you just learn and maybe next time someone says something like that to/around you about ASPD, you'll have the knowledge to correct it. Spreading info is an exponential situation - once I tell you guys things, some of you will inevitably tell someone else that, and so on and so forth until a good handful of people now know things about ASPD they didn't before. If not, oh well. I got to infodump and see relatable posts that made me feel seen.

Either way, it's been, and hopefully will continue to be, a net positive. You are absolutely welcome to keep this dialogue going if you have questions, want clarification, are enraged that I gave you a calm response, whichever. Even if you don't get anything out of this, someone else seeing it might.

I'll really fuck with you now - I genuinely hope you have a good day.

[eisforeidolon]

In regards to that post [X]:

We could talk about the same old fallacies - OMG, Dean's siren is a guy! Yeah, a brother. OMG, Dean was supposed to say I love you in the Crypt scene! Yeah, it was removed and replaced with what the writer explicitly said was the less OOC version of what he meant anyway, "We're family". We could talk about the blatant absurdity of statements like "Dean liked men it happened on my screen" which bear no resemblance to the SPN that aired. But we've done that before and others have got this reiteration of it well covered.

So I wanna focus for the moment on this particular even more repulsive gem: "Like he literally doesn't need to verbally tell us he's bisexual we just know. He may not know but we do. This is an unmovable fact sorry."

It tells us a few things. One, this person is a fucking idiot. Two, this person, yet again, thinks that ~*interpreting*~ sexuality from the way someone looks/stands/makes eye contact/eats pastry/whatever numbnuts conspiracy bullshit you like? Is more valid than how a character identifies and is identified by those who created him. People can just look at you and know what your sexuality is better than you do, there's nothing repulsive about that idea at all! I've got a mountain of shiny pennies that says if Dean had literally never interacted with a man for the entire span of the series, they would have insisted it was because he was so afraid of how much he wanted to fuck them. There was no way the writers could have written Dean that someone like that would have accepted as actually heterosexual, because that's not what they personally wanted, so that's not what they were going to see.

I'm not saying there aren't things that might be said about how relatively questionable some of the gay jokes in SPN are, especially in the early years in terms of making queerness a punchline. But if we're going to talk about that? We need to do it not only in the cultural context of 2005 rather than 2023, but in the context of portrayals of real world men - and particularly those in fairly rural settings who aren't going to be particularly conscientious in the way they rib each other. Which becomes a whole other discussion about where to draw lines when you're writing fiction and dealing with things that might be realistic but also potentially offensive.

Furthermore, I'm not saying there aren't things that might be said about how SPN continually used romantic tropes for platonic relationships and how it's not entirely absurd for that to land different with the audience when the characters are not blood-related. Except that discussion needs to include not just how maybe the writers shouldn't have treated it as such a joke that a relationship between two male characters might have been possible, but also how fans should absolutely not have equated a relationship being theoretically possible with any specific relationship they wanted being owed to them. Especially in the context of those romantic tropes being used so so so much more between brothers all the fucking time setting the tone. As well as how it's not just problematic to treat the possibility of homosexual relationships as a joke, but problematic to insist literally any closeness between two male entities is gay, reinforcing all kinds of nasty toxic stereotypes about sexuality and masculinity which underlay a lot of modern adult men's issues with expressing their emotions and having genuinely close and open relationships outside of their romantic partners. I've seen fans wonder how heterosexual dudes can watch this show and love the brothers' relationship without seemingly noticing the weird undertones of how claustrophobically intertwined they are, and I think it's very much that when it comes to wanting a fantasy of platonic closeness, they're looking for realism as much as most women reading trashy romance novels are - but that's a whole other digression and this is already too long.

At the end of the day, not only was SPN not created in the cultural context of Very Online Tumbrites in 2023, convinced that nothing should ever be is heterosexual and every fictional story should be about them and what they want? The fact their ostensible original point misses is the real world and most other media of 2023 aren't like that either! Some of these shippers come across like they've literally never seen two adult male friends interact with each other or any actual love stories in media - and it's not just early 2000's television characters getting this treatment from entitled shippers who want to use representation as a weapon against creators as to why they're owed things they absolutely aren't.

[renaultphile]

Hi, Dear. I just have finished TC. Though so much underlying I cannot quite understand well for English is not my first language, I love this story！！！

But likely owing cultural differences, I don't get why Ralph so cares about Laurie's “sorry, dearie, some other time” from delirium, which I consider as only kind of banter. What's wrong with these words？Are they rude or implying someting？ Hope to get this answered🥰🥰🥰

Thank you so much for this ask @yitwosirui .  I think it is such a clever way of telling us so much about the characters.

I believe the short answer would be that this is definitely on the level of mild banter, not particularly offensive or rude.  But it is a rejection and a gentle put down.  So, in the context of Laurie being just a Corporal, and Ralph a Lieutenant and Captain of the ship it would be considered inappropriate because of their rank and also because of the context and the implications.  In general Laurie’s response would suggest that he thinks/or is pretending that Ralph is making sexual advances, so on that level and in those times it would be considered offensive given he is a man!  Well that’s my reading anyway!

So I think the various possibilities that really puzzle Ralph would be:

Laurie is delirious and confused and thinks Ralph is making sexual advances but doesn’t recognise him.  But he seems to be gay and sexually experienced.  Good news on one level, but then he is rejecting Ralph and doing it in an embarrassing way. 

Or, all of the above but he doesn’t recognise Ralph.

Or, he recognises Ralph, understands the situation and is making an affectionate little in-joke that only Ralph will understand.

Or Laurie knows perfectly well that Ralph is trying to help him but chooses to make a bitchy and embarrassing comment, whether or not he recognises him.

Or, Laurie it not actually gay but he knows that Ralph is and is suggesting that Ralph is gay and predatory.

Reg covers everything up by making it into a joke that Laurie thought Ralph was a woman and I’m sure Ralph joked about it to his ship-mates in the same way.

So on one level, there is no real harm to Ralph – he can cover it up by saying Laurie was delirious, thought he was a prostitute, or whatever, and it is obvious to all he was not trying to sexually assault him!!  In a way the only thing that would give him away would be his own reaction.

So why does he go on about it so much?

I think he must be so desperate to find out that he forgets how intensely embarrassing the whole thing must have been for Laurie (more embarrassing than for him!)     He brings it up within minutes of meeting again.  But embarrassment is the easiest emotion he can appeal to, otherwise he would have to admit that he had feelings or that he was hurt, or wondering about Laurie’s sexuality.  So in a way he is trying to find out information while not revealing too much himself.

The other thing is that when he talks about writing to Laurie he says he ‘couldn’t be sure’ and that he wanted to ‘settle it’ – the first things that seem to motivate him are that he wasn’t sure what Laurie meant, rather than any more general feeling of ‘Wow I just saw Laurie again I must reach out!’  That feels very like Ralph, always needing to know exactly where he stands.

I don’t know if that answers the question, or makes sense!

I’m struck by how much they talk about this, but never breathe a word about what happened in the study.   Pretty intriguing!!!!

I have a couple of personal theories relating to this too:

I recently thought about the way Ralph dismisses Laurie from the study, which is very abrupt, whether he intends it or not.  And I thought in a way ‘Sorry Dearie’ is the ultimate revenge seven years later!

I see the obsession with that incident as foreshadowing how Ralph will be at the end, because I think he will be obsessed with knowing whether Laurie read his letter or not…….

Thank you so much again – I have sent you a little ask of my own!

[ggebba]

I’m not the anon who originally asked in your latest post,however it’d be amazing if you did more content similar to the ask about Russian culture, specifically the dating and social normalities. I loved your advice! I’m going to spend my summer in St. Petersburgo next year with a sports program I applied to and I found your advice to be extremely helpful! It seems as though Russia has such distinct social aspects that if you are unaware can possibly give others a bad impression of you and it actually reminds me of the way things are in my culture 😁

Once again, a very interesting question. I have thought it over and decided that it is possible to highlight some "wishes" for foreigners coming to Russia. Russia is not such a harsh country that there is something very different from good manners in any other country, but there are certain "unspoken rules" and recommendations.

1. The most important and amusing item on this list is "don't smile for no reason". Russians "give" smiles to their friends and family members. Therefore, you should not accidentally smile at strangers when you are in public transportation or shopping. Russians have a saying, "smiling for no reason is a sign of stupidity." Just like we have no such thing as “small talk”. For a Russian person, it is not considered polite, rather you are invading personal space or taking up time. Be polite, but do not violate the personal boundaries of strangers.

(This is no time to smile 😁)

2. Russians themselves do not mind saying a few unflattering words about our country and the authorities in it. But this does not mean that such a thing will be forgiven to anyone else but the locals themselves.

In general, the topic of politics is very complicated and it is better not to bring it up.

3. In Russia, you should always carry an identity document. As a foreigner, you must carry a passport with a valid visa.

Random checks by the police are not uncommon, especially in Moscow. If you do not have your identification document with you when you are stopped by the police, you are in serious trouble.

4. In Russian apartments and houses it is customary to take off your shoes at the threshold and change into slippers or simply walk around in socks. In any case, do not walk inside the house in shoes.

5. This is closer to the advice. Do not buy food at train stations or nearby stalls. Because you do not know what you will get in the next station stall with pirozhki: whether the food of the gods for ridiculous money, or a severe test for the entire digestive system. Experienced travelers advise not to take risks and buy food only in chain establishments/cafes/restaurants.

6. Do not shake hands with gloves on unless you want to offend the person you are greeting. It is considered extremely impolite to leave your gloves on when greeting someone with a handshake. Also, never shake hands over the threshold, as Russians see this as bad luck.

7. You should never make jokes about mom (your own/other people's) in any context. It is considered highly offensive.

8. Do not go to a guest's house empty-handed. If you are invited to someone's home for dinner or a visit, it is considered very rude to show up empty-handed. Bring a small gift-a bottle of wine, flowers, a dessert, or a small toy for the children. Russians pride themselves on preparing exquisite meals for their guests, and showing up without a small token of appreciation is a sign that you don't care.

9. Flowers are given in odd numbers. Never give a dozen roses, for example. Even numbers are for funerals.

10. In cultural places (museums, exhibitions, galleries, theaters, etc.) try to choose more strict clothes. You simply may not be allowed into the museum if you are dressed too revealingly.

11. Do not disrespect the church/religion. Russia has a law protecting the feelings of believers. Religion is taken seriously here. Any religion.

12. In Russia, medicine is free (ambulance, doctor's appointments, etc.). But often, if you have a minor illness, such as flu, you can simply go to a pharmacy and ask for flu medicine. Many of our medicines are sold without a prescription.

When you walk around Russia, people may seem unfriendly to you. They tend to walk without a smile and look straight ahead, but if you get to know Russians, they are the friendliest and most hospitable people you will ever meet 😁 trust me)

Please, try to learn basic words in Russian "thank you", "please", hello, bye, etc. If you ask for something, always add the word "please". Without it, the sentence becomes orderly and people may not like it very much. Politeness is the key to everything! 🥰

And don't be afraid to ask passers-by for help. In big cities, a lot of people know English. If anything, they'll explain everything to you with gestures, and sometimes even walk you to your destination. In 2018, during the World Cup, I myself often helped foreigners with advice. With some of them I went as far as Luzhniki Stadium. We had fun chatting with guys from Germany. It was a fun time.

I hope I have answered your question 😊

Good luck with your studies and I hope you enjoy Russia in general and St. Petersburg in particular!

[luigra]

iirc joe had said he doesn’t have the time to put into editing vods, because if she were ever to publish vods she wouldnt want mistakes(such as accidentally saying a deadname) to be saved to the forever

And also the value of live performance too

Surely she has to understand that the viewers have context and can realize that things like these are a product of. Live streaming?? Like. If I& wanted edited videos I& would just watch xyr Hermitcraft episodes. No one is going to fault a livestream for not editing out a mistake, even if it's an offensive one, because that'd be detracting the value of the archival. In fact I&'d heavily frown upon any editorializing.

Also... even live performances are famous for people trying to record them as much as they can become people don't want anything lost to time. I& guess it's a conflict of two different artistic philosophies, which means it'll never be settled, but personally I& value accessibility over any benefits a live performance may have. Frankly this is a topic that could get a whole dedicated discussion.

This may not be the full truth, but I& feel like a whole lot made much more sense to me& when I& was watching a stream the other day and Joe mentioned being genuinely surprised to find out people actually went back and rewatched old VODs. And also one talk in which they mentioned that they wouldn't start a podcast because that would require a much higher production quality than streaming. Like, to me& that just strikes as them not understanding that their streams have value outside of the fact that they are done live??

Arts and Crafts streams specifically are a huge comfort media for me&. I& rewatch those all the time and they have so many fantastic bits and goofs and jokes that wouldn't ever make their way into a proper video because they wouldn't meet any quality standard ever. Hell, it could be a moment that only ever made me& alone and no one else laugh. They also have lots of moments that are straight up boring. I& still want to access and watch them later.

If Joe legit made a mistake like saying something offensive, I& don't think the stream being saved or deleted makes a difference in the impact of that mistake. And even then, if it's a case that DOES warrant the stream getting deleted, Joe is DEFINITELY not throwing deadnames or slurs around in every single stream, yet right now only a few mostly Moby Dick reading ones are getting saved. In fact, if there is so much value in saving those, what do they have above Arts and Crafts streams or regular Hermitcraft streams?

Sorry for the rant, this definitely doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things and Joe is extremely stubborn in how he wants to do things, which means this will probably not change at all. Still love him to bits. It just seems like such a simple fix. Youtube even separates the videos from VODs automatically on your channel, so I& don't get the point about the VODs cluttering up a channel, but even if that is the case and the algorithm doesn't like it or whatever, it's extremely common practice for youtubers to have a second channel for VOD archival. Surely this has a simple solution?

[toomuchsmoshbrainrot]

I don't mean this rudely, and I don't mean this addressed specifically at you, but it's genuinely such a weird thought to assume Smosh is keeping Noah around for the simple reason of "well, he'll sue! Firing him is discrimination!" when the counterargument is... Noah is a pro-genocide zionist, which in itself would mean HE'S the one discriminating. For most companies, publicly posting hate speech is a fireable offense. Having a conflict of company values is also a fireable offense. Smosh could absolutely have let Noah go IF he was the monster fandom has delighted in making him out to be. You talk about nuance but you completely disregard how that can apply to Noah himself. "But he gloated about his grandfather blah blah blah," this fandom likes to point out. Yeah, in retrospect, not great, but no one (no one!!!!) batted an eye at this when it first aired. No one cared. No one questioned his ethics, no one cared about the implications. No one called him out. No one was outraged.. But now we want to condemn him for it when the context of when he spoke it was so vastly different than if he said it now??? But ALSO. Literally all Noah has ever said on the actual genocide is that he's against it. That he wants a peaceful resolution for BOTH sides. He has literally only ever said he doesn't agree with violence inflicted upon innocent lives regardless of if they're from Israel or Palestine. And I will also add that EVERYTHING he's said, he said in the immediate aftermath of the Oct 7th attack, when it was still pretty globally framed as a terrorist attack. Even THEN he has just said "killing of innocent civilians is bad" and somehow secretly he means "I love genocide" by that. Huh??? Maybe, just maybe, Noah hasn't been fired because the people who work with him KNOW him and know he isn't this evil caricature fandom sure would love for him to be. Because it's sooo much easier to double down and continuously vilify the guy than take a step back and admit, hey, maybe we got this one wrong.

just putting this out there publicly, the op is clearly on anon for a reason because they know they're gonna get read to filth by some of the more intense people in the fandom

but the UNDERLYING part of this message is kind of exactly what I'm saying. that he's never said these things in videos, only on his personal accounts. that smosh clearly still associate with him. if y'all are SO scorched earth, why aren't y'all going after, say... shayne? for still considering him a friend? this is the same fandom that assumed courtney and damien were beefing because "she looked weird at him in videos sometimes". nuance is lost on a lot of people, and i've learned as i've gotten older to just ignore the drama.

no matter where you go, people you don't like are gonna exist. drama is gonna exist. and it's no longer worth my energy.

i don't wanna be seen by the fandom as someone who "supports noah/his opinions" just because i said i liked a joke he made in a video, or enjoy his puns in word games, or whatever. i can separate art from artists and i want to freely enjoy whatever the fuck i want. its the fact that i feel like i have to explain that that's wild to me.

(and when i say "other things that annoy me about him outside of the obvious" i mean like.... charty party video when he got SO HEATED insisting that he was right. or the eat it or yeet it 50's episode with the cold cut dress when chanse asked amanda to turkey slap him, and noah leaned in to do it. and chanse was like "wtf i said AMANDA" and noah backed off but then TOSSED it at chanse anyway like what. consent, my guy. ok that ones a little less serious but its still annoying)

[fuck-customers]

time to vent dump! <3 everyone at my job is so tired of one coworker of ours - he was "knighted" so he has a Sir suffix (something tells me that was something he got online and legit changed his name about it) and is an author of one book (we work at a gas station. he's very high and mighty about his book) i looked said book up and it's about a man and a woman who have almost the same name who date "so they can say their own names during sex" and the summary i read reeks of his personality, "i pretend to be so woke when really i'm a huge misogynist". such a big head on this guy's shoulders to start with.

he comes in to start his shift and immediately starts talking nonstop. mostly it is either complaints about customers, coworkers who aren't present, or music/media from his generation nobody cares about but insists are amazing and we should check them out. (really sticks out in my mind how he recommended that Lou Reed song about a boy being obsessed about his football coach. coworker seemed to think it was super progressive for the time bc it was talking about gay stuff when that's kinda overshadowed by the age difference element :/ )

he will talk over you, and it feels like if he's not talking about old media, he's talking about something negative (but of course he loves to complain about one of our female coworkers mentioning some tough things that are happening in her life right now. she's just SOOOO negative he says as he continues to shit talk everyone nonstop.)

at first i thought he'd be cool - when we first met he noticed my pronoun necklace and gendered me correctly like twice. (never did it again. we had a store meeting where my manager thought it'd be a great idea to single me out and tell everyone we need to work on getting my pronouns right. i don't think my manager meant ill will by it, he's trying to be supportive despite being ignorant of how everything trans works, but this douchey coworker tried to compare my gender neutral pronouns to his "sir" suffix and how "he didn't complain when people didn't call him sir" :/ that's.... that's really not comparable dude. everyone ignored him.)

today he was telling a story about a coworker and how badly she handled a situation with a deaf homeless person who sometimes comes to our store - when he finished, i tried to start telling a related story about how i passed notes back and forth with that deaf man a couple times and- that was as far as i got before he said "i don't give a flying fuck"

i've thought about it, and maybe he was saying, in context of the story, that he didn't give a fuck if the guy took some bananas while the coworker he was shit talking did care - but the way he delivered that line was so confusing, it really felt like he was telling me "i don't give a fuck about what you did or your story". in the moment i was stunned to silence, and tried later to rationalize it this way. i realized even if the former was the case, this coworker cared more about telling his story to shit talk our other coworker than he actually cared about the homeless person who was desperate for some food. it was more about opposing her than being generous or understanding with him. so when he tried to continue, i ignored him in favor of helping our other, newbie coworker, with his register.

i remember an old female coworker of mine told me he yelled at her to "never interrupt him when he's talking to a woman," which reeks of superiority and desperation lol

all in all he's just an unfriendly, disrespectful, self centered, unpleasant person who thinks his shit smells like roses. i feel bad whenever i clock out and leave one of my female coworkers with him for closing shift, although luckily i think he's bored by her and mostly leaves her alone unless he wants to bitch about something or talk about old media. he's always trying to crack jokes and they all are either bordering on the offensive or are just straight up not funny or both. i'm really sick of him and i can tell just about everyone else is too. i'm so so glad i only see him in passing, as he's a closer and i'm an opener, but the few minutes i have with him as i'm clocking out and gathering my things are just 8') a few minutes too many.

[salt-volk]

Saw the post about "other sites" and I'm feeling ~salty~, so lemme give some context for where the bar is with pet sites to y'all. Maybe you've seen ads, maybe you tried playing it and quit because the tutorial is its own circle of hell, maybe you're a blessed person who has never heard of it: Sylestia. It's run by one (1) man. He codes the entire site, has exactly 0 help - by choice. People have literally offered to help him with coding stuff *for free* and he refuses to let anyone touch his precious code.  His ex girlfriend (yes you read that right) is supposedly the other admin - she barely ever shows up, posts games/events that are full of errors, once vanished in the middle of running a game, and has personally insulted players before because they dared offer feedback on one of her ugly ass designs. There is exactly one artist for avatar items and one for pets - one other artist is listed in the credits but it's unclear what regular work, if any, they do for the site. Over 200 different avatar items are released per year, and new pet traits debut anywhere between 4-8 times per year, AND the site is in the (glacially slow) process of redoing all the art for various species. The site is at least 98% RNG by volume - including items you pay premium currency for. Retired items? RNG only. Getting pets? RNG. Getting items period? RNG. And the RNG is also awful - people are constantly having to literally beg for rates to be adjusted.  Plenty of features for events are also just. straight up gambling - you can pay solid chunks of premium currency and walk away with items that are literally worth nothing. You think DV is grindy? Sylestia not only practically requires you to spend a full workday glued to it - including events that basically require you to literally not sleep for several days - the site owner is actively making new content to further encourage ridiculous amounts of grinding. Why? Because he's worried that older players will be bored without new content - so instead of fixing any of the old content on the site, or the site itself which is a mess, he makes new content that ALSO doesn't work.  As of December, the site will be in its ELEVENTH YEAR IN BETA. So when I say "not fixing old content", I'm not talking like, a couple glitches or iffy art. I'm talking *half the site is completely incompatible with the other half*.  And all of that my friends, is still somehow not the source of my salt.  Someone pointed out to the site owner that one of his avatar items was, perhaps, a bit racist. It was (I should say is, it's still on the site :) ) a stereotypical native american dress, CLEARLY based off of the stupid Pocahontas movie, titled "Pow Wow Costume". It was released with a Pilgrim costume in the site's early years. Pretty not great, yeah? Multiple people complained, provided him sources explaining why "Maybe don't keep this on here, maybe this isn't great".  He, is white. He responded by saying he a) would not remove it, b) did not think it was offensive, c) what about the Christmas items or St. Patrick's day items the site has aren't those the same, and d) he actually visited a reservation once so he knows it's OK to have those items, and e) native players should actually be HAPPY to have those items because it was to iNcLuDE tHeM.  I am not joking.  The site has 0 acknowledgement of pride month, not a banner, not an announcement, no items, no anything - it DOES however have an entire festival for the American Fourth of July holiday. The owner claims he doesn't like to have political things on his site, make of that what you will.  The owner also issued a mass ban on a bunch of people because they said some rude shit (about the racist items, the rng, his refusal to get coding help, general issues taking feedback, etc.) in a private, off-site discord server. How did he know what they said? Why, he asked some players in the server to *spy on the others for him*.   He edited time stamps out and published a bunch of the screenshots from this private server, out of context and who knows if they were edited, and threw a public tantrum about how the players were harassing him and secretly planning to destroy the site… by bitching in a private discord.  So yeah. Not excusing Anji's behavior, but happy to show y'all exactly how much worse it could be LMAO. 

[asexual-means-no-attraction]

I'm like 95% sure my cousin is a chaser and in denial and like I'm kinda hoping he matures out of this but he's also 21 and he's chronically online

To give more context he's either gay or bisexual (and is also cis) but sees dating trans women as "gay", mentions quite often about wanting to dating one, believes that shows with crossdressers are "trans-baiting" and generally just talks about how attractive femboys/trans women (I put them together because I'm pretty sure he's sees them as one and the same) and apparently it's a joke in his friend group around how much he wants to date a trans woman. And I pointed out how much he sounds like a chaser but he completely denies it :p

Like on one hand I don't wanna make assumptions that he fetishes trans women but he also said his type was "women/feminine people with dicks" so I feel like I might not be wrong

(also sorry if this is incoherent I'm bad at having complete thoughts :/)

You're coherent don't worry. I wanna give him the benefit of the doubt but honestly, if he sees dating trans women as specifically "gay" then I think that shows pretty well that he doesn't see them as women at all. I understand people saying that it can be a bit of a gray area especially with pre-medically transitioned trans people, but there's a difference between calling it a gray area and flat out gay.

I think he just doesn't like being called a negative term because of his jokes. Seems he's trying to walk to line between offensive and tastefully funny when it comes to joking around/dark humor-ish jokes. Cuz you can make jokes like your describing and actually make them funny/not offensive. Most people just are bad at it while claiming "it's just a joke, you're too sensitive." Him not successfully making the joke.

If he can't see trans women as women then he's transphobic. And if he specifically wants to date a trans women solely because she's trans, and not because he actually finds her attractive, then he's definitely a chaser. You're not wrong in your assumption.

As for advice, I really don't have much. Beyond telling him he still sounds like a chaser or setting boundaries telling him not to make those jokes around you cuz they come off as transphobic there isn't much you can do. Maybe he'll come to you and you two can talk one on one. But unless he's actually willing to listen then he'll never understand what you're telling him.

Good luck. That sounds tough.

[beheadable]

Introduction to Corporal De.an Portman, my husband 💙💙

Portman is from the 2005 Do.om movie, which was a box office failure. You’ve likely heard of it in the context of ‘worst video game films ever’, but really, it’s not that bad, personally, I think it’s fun and absolutely deserves to become a cult film. I fully believe it will become a cult film .

He’s in the RRTS (Rapid Response Tactical Squad), basically he’s a privatized Marine. Other members of the squad include Sarge, Reaper, Goat, Destroyer, Mac, Kid, and Duke. All of those are Handle I.D.s, nicknames essentially, Portman’s is, well, Portman .

His character is a bit of an obnoxious asshole, saying offensive things and generally being a bit of a dick, but always with a shit eating grin that tells you he’s enjoying this way too much. He gives shit he gets shit, his jabs and jokes are usually followed with a chorus of “shut up, Portman” “I’m sick of your filth, Portman” “don’t give me an excuse, Portman”. He appears to have a sadistic sense of humor, and doesn’t seem particularly squeamish .

No one can stand him and no one likes him. My sad pathetic man. The only character in canon (novel canon) that is actually friends with him is Mac, who also appears to be an outcast in the squad. Portman is genuinely distraught when Mac dies and nobody seems to care about his death, sad he’s lost the only guy on the squad that was ever friendly to him, and fearful of his inevitable demise where no one will care about him and he’ll be forgotten *snaps* just like that .

Into drugs which is a very minor point in the movie, but more involved in the novel. He was written much more erratic and nervous than the movie which, I am not a huge fan of .

In fact, often feels like he’s written to be a bit of a pussy, which, I believe, is an exact descriptor used for him at one point. I don’t personally think he is, considering they are dealing with freaky creatures never before seen and an unknown number of them, entirely reasonable to be scared and or nervous .

In general the novel treats Portman as being just, inherently shitty and generally pathetic. Though, he is also unintentionally written as quite sad in combo, I feel for him outside of my obvious affections .

He knows they don’t like him, he’s tried to fit in .

Honestly it seems like no one even gave him a chance + There’s a high possibility Portman doesn’t even want to be in the military .

Anyway, enough screenshots for the moment. The way Portman thinks about the squad, I wouldn’t be surprised if he simply just stopped caring about getting along or trying to be nice because no one liked him anyway, so why try? A mutual of mine, gave me my eureka moment as to Why Portman Is Like That (shitty), and that’s because negative attention is better than no attention. And he certainly seems like the type of guy that would rather die than be ignored .

Seems like a party guy, definitely sleazy and cocky and shitty but that’s why he’s so hot lol. We don’t know how he dresses day to day and that saddens me. The only thing we see him wear besides his tactical gear is a hawaiian shirt, gray-ish white pants I think they’re jeans maybe, and white loafers, truly A Look. Is it a good look? Bad look? Idk man but it’s a look, I like it .

- non canon section -

My self insert (Minister) reciting poetry about Portman to Portman daily has both contributed to Portman’s minor ego and his way of speaking. Sometimes you’ll hear him talk and it flows just a little too flowery or pretty. Sayings and word choices are primarily what he picks up, vocabulary having grown quite a bit after dating Minister .

He has a passion for music which is partially supported by canon, constantly having his little headphones with him. He likes speedmetal + punk rock in canon but I like to imagine he also enjoys a lot of different alt music and things like She Wants Revenge, Love and Rockets, Smashing Pumpkins, and so on .

I also believe he prefers movies over TV. Likes those generic action movies for dudes but also into horror. Likes horror movies with torture and crazy gore .

Loves petnames, primarily giving but receiving is nice as well but he won’t actually admit it, goes hand in hand with his love of praise and being told positive things about himself. Favorite petnames to give are doll / dollface, sweetie, cutie, and babe .