#they all have the same exact flavor of misogyny what can I say

[imruination]

Sometimes I think about the

Spike

to-

Logan Echolls

to-

Bellamy Blake

pipeline and the fact they they were all hated by (later outted to be extremely problematic) showrunners for having stereotypically feminine character traits, and for daring to give their “tough badass” FMC counterparts the option of a happy ending …. But that’s none of my business

[timeisacephalopod]

The type of Christian who asks atheists how they don't like, murder people on the reg are so funny to me because they seem to think their religion makes them the Peak of Morality when statements like "if you don't believe in God how comes you don't do X thing" all but outright state they have no idea why shit like murder and rape is bad except that God doesn't like it lmao. Like way to admit you have no intrinsic sense of morality and need to be afraid of a higher power to be a decent person, but I promise if you're not a piece of shit it's actually very natural not to want to do heinous evil shit all the time potential punishment from a higher power or not 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

[whoree321]

the bad batch + unhinged episodes of law and order svu

Hunter: Granting Immunity (season 16 ep 19)

episode begins with rich prep school teens having a blowjob party while Good Girls Go Bad plays, leads to the squad uncovering an anti-vaxxer conspiracy among the mothers at the prep school. benson and barba prosecute the ring leader mom (trudy) for reckless endangerment after benson’s son noah gets the measles bc of trudy’s dirty child

this one gives hunter bc it’s very “perhaps i only care about this crime bc of my child, perhaps not” which really is one of his main personality traits

he def has the same aggressive maternal energy as miss olivia benson and that’s really showcased here

also i think hunter would enjoy the song Good Girls Go Bad like he would respect the flavor of tasteful misogyny

Crosshair: The Undiscovered Country (season 19 ep 13)

in this one barba succumbs to his deep rooted daddy issues and unplugs a baby on life support (i don’t remember the baby’s exact diagnosis but it was basically like dead as a doornail and only in excruciating pain and one parent wanted it alive and the other wanted to pull the plug). he gets tried for murder and is acquitted but still resigns as an ADA to take some time to unpack his trauma

crosshair would definitely kill a baby and somehow convince us it was the morally correct thing to do

barba and crosshair are also very sexy in a very similar way (arrogant bastard who masks his early life trauma and deep insecurities with cockiness and snark)

seriously tho i really think crosshair would kill a baby and not a brain dead one

like i’m sure the baby would deserve it but crosshair would take its life without hesitation

Tech: Zebras (season 10 ep 22)

basically this really irritating loud mouth lab tech named stucky makes a super boneheaded clerical error that gets an entire case against a murderer thrown out. he absolutely loses his fucking mind and stages several other murders to frame on the dude bc he can’t cope with his failure and then he kills the other lab tech and tries to kill stabler when they discover evidence linking him to the murders

i feel tech in this episode bc i think one day he will go off the rails like this

like chatty geek who everyone is annoyed by gets pushed over the edge by his mean coworkers and commits several heinous murders that are almost perfectly framed on someone else?

mary that’s what filoni is actually gearing up to for season 2. the devolution of tech after years of psychological warfare.

the only difference is that when tech finally becomes a serial killer he will never be caught

Wrecker: Wildlife (season 10 ep 7)

a woman is mauled by a tiger, the detectives discover an animal smuggling ring run by the Russian mob. stabler goes undercover and the mob guns him down in the street when they figure out he’s a big fat faker. at one point a rapper is eaten by hyenas and they eventually catch the mob in the act when they smuggle a monkey inside of a basketball

i think that wrecker really likes animals and he would enjoy both seeing exotic animals and also brutalizing people that hurt them

just like elliot stabler, wrecker would be a dreadful undercover agent and would likely get whacked instantly by any sort of organized crime syndicate

the absurdity of a whole entire gibbon monkey inside of a basketball is something he would be greatly amused by

i also think that wrecker could beat 1 (one) wild cat in hand to hand combat and i would love to bear witness (edit: i forgot about that one time when wrecker WWE smackdowned muchi the rancor so i will amend this statement and say he could beat 2 (two) wild cats in hand to hand combat)

Echo: Bang (season 12 ep 22)

baby is found in a dumpster, they figure out it’s the adopted baby of a girlboss named dede. she is dating john stamos, who we know is not playing a good character bc he has untrustworthy sideburns. she gets pregnant and he’s super gross about it like way too happy, they come to find out that he’s a sicko who loves to impregnate women and he’s fathered like literally 47 kids. at the end the domestic violence counselor the squad worked with murders john with a scuba diving knife that has a ton of pressurized CO2 in it and makes him explode

i feel that echo has a long-standing feud with john stamos and this episode would validate him

he would appreciate the theatricality of a pressurized exploding knife as well as the scene when like 20 of the mothers confront him at the precinct and are like “you’re a fucking terrible deadbeat father please choke”

there’s a lot of strong female energy in this episode and i can tell echo respects women who murder

overall he would really enjoy the unionization of single mothers to defeat his one true nemesis (johnathan stamos)

Omega: Gone Baby Gone (season 19 ep 9)

basically brooke shields kidnaps benson’s adopted son noah bc he’s her biological grandson and there’s like a whole manhunt for them. liv goes through some of the most crippling anxiety and despair of her life and then they find noah and he’s literally just like “that was a great trip we saw a deer and ate mcdonald’s i can’t wait to do it again sometime!”

omega gets kidnapped literally all the time bc just like noah porter-benson, she’s a little cutie

she also sometimes exhibits a very similar “teehee oops” energy in the face of extreme peril

i think if brooke shields could get her grubby paws on her she would snatch omega right up and sell her to the highest bidder

[monkberries]

So here goes: Personally I find Paul to be hot with a beard. But it annoys me because there’s always some Paul stan who’s like “he was super depressed during that time you know” anytime someone says how hot he looks with a beard. Like first of all, I don’t think we should go around diagnosing people and assuming how he felt 24/7 just based on a couple of quotes when we don’t know him, and second of all I was just saying he looks good. Also idk why Paul stans want to pretend like Paul is STILL a victim when he’s definitely not. He’s a super successful billionaire musician. He’s fine.

I'm going to assume all four of these were from the same anon; I received another along these same lines that seems to be from someone else:

OKAY. There's a lot here.

As I've said before, I think the concept you are both talking about - that Paul is the favourite, that people will attack you if you criticize him, that people are vilifying John more now - is true, but is also a matter of perspective. I think sometimes we perceive the whole fandom as just the people we're surrounded by; that can be true in smaller fandoms, like for obscure shows or whatever, but for the Beatles, the fandom is so much bigger and more spread out across generations, social media platforms, and works of literature than almost any other fandom. There are literally thousands upon thousands of books either about or tangentially about the Beatles; there are pockets on every platform from tumblr to twitter to podcasts to instagram to facebook etc., and it branches off even more niche within those to like, facebook groups specifically for podcasts about the Beatles, or discord servers, or livejournal threads, or music forums, or fics on ao3. There are fansites with thoughtful speculative articles like heydullblog and blogs specifically reviewing Beatle books like beatlebioreview and sites cataloging every bit of minutiae like the Beatles Bible, all with their own flavor of comment sections. And not only that, the Beatles fandom spans generations and cultures in a way that almost nothing else ever has or ever will.

And this is not even going into the shifting narratives that have been in play over the years surrounding Paul specifically, and the huge, huge difference between the perceptions of him by the authors and the Counterculture People, the perceptions of him by regular ass Wings fans who have only idly flipped through Rolling Stone while waiting in line at the local bodega, and the perceptions of him by everyone in between, who may or may not have been unconsciously influenced by the wider narratives about him.

All that is to make the case that the fandom that you are experiencing on tumblr/twitter is an extremely small fraction of The Fandom at large. For every Paul stan on twitter that yells at people for not believing that Paul literally invented music, there is a John stan in a facebook group going on about John's supposedly tireless peace efforts. For every nuanced, well sourced post on amoralto's blog, there is someone in the Beatles Bible comment section saying that John and Paul hated each other. For every fan who's read the major Beatles bios with a critical eye towards bias, there are plenty more fans who just absorbed them as straight fact. This is not to say that your experiences are not real or valid! They absolutely are! What I am saying is that there are infinite permutations of infinite Beatles fandoms out there, and the people you see who insist that Paul is still treated worse than John, I would imagine, are occupying various permutations of the fandom where that is more true, alongside the one they share with you. It's not for me to say whether the Paul or John people have the upper hand on the whole - truly, I don't think anyone has enough perspective on the whole fandom to make any judgment on that, no matter what general Grand Pronouncements anyone may make about The Fandom.

As I've said before, any overly defensive "stan" behavior, whether it's for John or Paul or George or anyone, is exhausting to me, so I definitely understand where you're coming from re: him being supposedly underrated. He is literally one of the most successful musicians of all time; as of the beginning of this year, he is worth 1.2 billion dollars; and, thanks to his own efforts and the efforts of quite a few fans and writers out there over the decades, he now enjoys an incredibly positive "granddude" reputation. There are ways in which it can be exasperating to read yet another indignant refutation of music reviews for RAM that came out fifty years ago, when his last three albums have hit the top 3 in the charts in both the US and the UK and have gotten great reviews. I have seen people wonder, honestly wonder, how much more money Paul could have made, how much more respected he could have been, if the rock press had been inclined to give RAM good reviews. When I see that, it does start to feel like fans of Paul, at least the defensive ones in the fandom permutations I occupy, are arguing with the author photo of Philip Norman in the book jacket for Shout!. It's not that I think those arguments and discussions are not worth having; I do think they're worth having because I believe that the only way we can continue to grow is if we grapple with the mistakes made in the past. But there is a strange kind of disconnect that happens when you read about someone indignantly defending Wild Life as though the members of Wings are currently, actively having eggs and rotten fruit thrown at them, and then you remember that Paul is currently, and has been for many years now, one of the richest men in the entire world.

As for the misogyny thing, I'll copy and paste a quote from Erin Weber which may explain a little better than I can:

"Where it starts entering into serious discussion for me is when you have professional grown men (Schaffner would be the most glaring example of this, but not the only one) repeatedly using the term “pretty” or “pretty-faced” to refer to another grown man. (Norman does the same). Schaffner doesn’t only do that once or twice, he uses one of those exact words at least fifteen times in his references to McCartney. “Pretty-boy” is also a term that at least one journalist has used to describe Paul, and that’s not a stealth insult: that’s an overt one. (My husband, who hates the Yankees, routinely used the term “pretty-boy” to insult Alex Rodriguez. And it wasn’t meant as a compliment).

My reaction to this is based both on studies that I’m aware of (I’d have to hunt them up, but I’ve seen them referenced before) which argue that the use of feminized language can be a method of stealth insult/diminishment when used by men to describe other men, and my own personal experience. It is difficult to see a situation where a grown man using the term “pretty” or any variation of the word “pretty” to describe another grown man means it as a compliment. Even if its purely meant as a descriptive term, it is a descriptive term that is weighted with significant meaning and is feminizing. And given the rock press’s obsession with masculinity and its insistence, as noted in other studies, of using masculine terms to portray a song as good and feminizing terms to describe them as weak or inferior, I don’t think its a coincidence that a rock press that knew well the power of masculine and feminine language commonly used feminized language, particularly in the 1970s and 80s, to describe McCartney."

I personally see this more as pseudo-homophobic than pseudo-misogynistic (like, when I see a man called "pretty" by another man in an insulting way, I immediately think "oh, that author wanted to say a gay slur but he's too Professional"), but the two things can get muddled together, I suppose.

Anyway, actionable items:

Diversify Your Fan Experience. More perspectives can really help gain a fuller understanding of not just the fandom but the Beatles themselves. Don't be afraid to be wrong, and don't be afraid to be right; always be open to learning new things and hearing new insights.

If All Else Fails, Block 'Em.

[ganymedesclock]

I just wanted to say I hate Lotor, but you are helping me dislike him less and less! I know it's not VLD Lotor's fault I hate him, it's like, you met four Kevins who were terrible jerks in the past and first Kevin was also the worst for child you, so you can't help go "yuck" when you think of him. When you meet a fifth Kevin, your impulse is to go "yuck" without taking the time to know him. But I'm working on seperating the Lotors and I do like your meta on him most of the time!

If I’m reading you correctly, past incarnations of Lotor kinda soured you on Lotor as a concept, but VLD is sorta slowly winning you over?

Because I don’t really blame you. The more I see of past versions of Lotor- well, I’m the opposite, in that VLD Lotor has primed me to see a sympathetic antihero. And because of that, looking at GoLion, DoTU, Force, and Third Dimension... it’s like pulling teeth.

My impression of past versions of Lotor is he’s always had this sympathetic core in that he’s in an awful situation and he’s someone who’s... the feeling is he’s kind of desperate to be loved. Force in particular gets some heartbreaking lines because he’s basically a broken person trying to drag himself back together again after he was summarily murdered and left to rot, and he grinds out something about how “I have not suffered everything I have to let animals rob me of my victory” when it seems like an experimental robeast might actually win against Voltron.

That’s sad. Seeing what Zarkon, in basically every continuity has done to him (Third Dimension sees Lotor begin the series in critical condition and Zarkon throwing him under the bus to smooth things over with the Galaxy Alliance), is sad.

That all said? It is really damn hard to really meaningfully feel sorry for any other version of Lotor because he’s determined to fill the hole in his life by being about the worst flavor of violent misogynist. He latches onto Allura as his prize who he’s decided is going to fix his life for him, and depending on the continuity he waxes from absolute slimeball (GoLion, Third Dimension) to sorta standard villainous sexist creep (DotU, Force).

The Devil’s Due Comics run in particular is a version of Lotor I really wish I could root for because it’s another continuity that tries to go into his depths, tries to explore him sympathetically, but like... they’ve set him up so that even when he’s not interacting with Allura his surroundings tend to involve a great deal of undressed harem girls who the narrative as much as Lotor himself treat like so much furniture.

And that basically destroys any of the other redeeming qualities Lotor’s shown to have, because, end of the day he’s a violent bully that keeps women as literal sex slaves and is very eager to collect the main heroine as one of them. You can’t root for that. You just can’t. I don’t have it in me to feel bad for a guy that’s like that.

Which is why, I think, VLD is the most successful in actually exploring Lotor as a gray antihero- because they cut that shit out. Decisively. From the start of s3 they were very clear Lotor has no designs on Allura, and consistently, VLD Lotor is showcased to not have his prior continuities’ problems:

In s3e2 and s3e3 Lotor noticeably avoids using pronouns for any of the paladins that he’s facing, as he’s unable to ascertain their identities. He doesn’t assume they’re guys. While he and Allura do end up in a duel, and Lotor pursues Allura with a sinister smirk, it’s also worth noting that Lotor before then picked on Keith as a target in the exact same way, for the same underlying reason- he was going after those uncertain with their Lions. (Lance, who got a pretty good handle on Red right away, is mostly ignored but Lotor does provoke him with the Nitrate Gas trap)

Allura and Blue are also able to turn the tables on Lotor, and because of this, Allura emerges as so far, the only paladin Lotor has commended- again, with her identity anonymous, not as anything born of attraction, but as someone who has bested him in combat. “Well played, Paladin.” and he retreats, having changed his plans to utilize the paladins rather than defeat them. Implicitly, Allura changed Lotor’s whole attitude about the paladins.

VLD Lotor, like many of his predecessors, spends a lot of time around women. However, unlike his predecessors, the women Lotor surrounds himself with were stated in s3 to be people he was drawn to because they were likeminded. The generals are armed, trained, combat-ready and highly competent individuals and Lotor does not belittle them or take them for granted. When conflicts emerge between them, Lotor loses and it’s clear that after killing Narti, remorse and guilt start eating at him hard. Once Narti’s dead, Lotor completely loses his edge- he makes reckless decisions, snaps at the other three generals, and utterly fails to defend himself from that decisive second betrayal.

Which is arguably a “cleaner” version of what his prior incarnations were always trying to do- because the underlying problem with any version of Lotor is he feels unloved and lonely. VLD Lotor, with a clearer sense of what he actually wants, doesn’t force himself onto potential romantic partners, but, instead, went looking for friends. Family figures. People who could fill the absence created by his neglectful and abusive parents.

Other versions of Lotor feel often like the violent misogyny is stuffed in there as... cheap heat. Because again, the narratives don’t treat many of these women better than Lotor does- there’s no plot point of rescuing or sympathizing with the plight of the women who are trapped by Lotor (with the exception of Allura and Romelle). They’re used as plot devices to show us that Lotor’s a nasty person, and then, in the case of some of the continuities, DDP in particular, we’re asked to empathize with him anyway, over the women he’s using and throwing away.

The feeling I get, I guess, is that the various continuities were always trying to write at least a vaguely sympathetic Lotor, but... pretty much none of them before VLD actually, in personal opinion, succeeded. There were those that came close- DotU had its moments, DDP got a whole arc in- but ultimately, you’re faced with the impasse of if you want to really connect emotionally with Lotor as a character, you have to basically hold your nose and wade through the miasma of his disgusting attitude towards women.

Which VLD Lotor is... infinitely more accessible as a character you can empathize with and root for. What makes him a shade of gray and not a hero is what he’s willing to do to survive, and the cutthroat tactics that creates in a very desperate, scheming person. Instead, we have things like his genuine admiration of his mother’s scientific prowess, and again, confirmed writing intent that Lotor valued the generals for their minds and skills, people he could go to for “anything”- his handpicked trusted allies. 

You can feel bad for Lotor without having to overlook the way he treats people, because of the people he’s really attacked, you have Narti, who nobody, even Lotor himself, would defend that as a good action and he sets hard and fast into “this is a complete disaster” in response- and Throk who is a proud violent racist that was plotting to overthrow Lotor and probably kill him, who is, in short, not somebody we should feel all that bad about because if Lotor hadn’t gotten to him our heroes would have picked up the slack in a heartbeat.

In contrast to DotU Lotor’s poor harem girls who again, with the exception of Romelle are not given names, stories or personalities, we know Ezor, Zethrid, Narti, and Acxa by name, by design, they’re people with power more comparable to characters like Cossack, Mogor, Maahox or Kala- and their autonomy in the plot is strong enough that three of them have actually cut ties with Lotor and are flying solo at the moment.

So yeah... as someone who loves Lotor, I do not blame you at all if prior versions of the character have kinda ruined him for you.

[argentconflagration]

wondergirrl said:

what is this about. anti what?? am confused please aid me VonBond

This is pretty long and I apologize, but I feel like I need to go all the way back and talk about TERFs, for reasons that will hopefully soon be clear.

As I'm sure you know, TERF stands for 'Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist'. There are still TERF communities within feminism, but generally speaking, TERFs are far less numerous and their ideology has far less sway than it used to have. Part of the reason for this was people going out of their way to proactively explain why TERF arguments are wrong before their fellow feminists encountered TERFs, which made it a lot harder for TERFs to spread their ideology.

Which is great! But I think that for the most part, feminists have argued against the transmisogynistic aspects of radical feminism, and to a lesser extent the sex-worker-exclusionary aspects of radical feminism (SWERFs), but kind of failed to see the coherent whole that TERF-flavored feminism belongs to, what sort of thinking causes it, and why it's wrong. "Being anti-TERF" nowadays has largely been reduced to stuff like putting "no TERFs!" in blog descriptions and popular posts, and it rarely takes the form of scrutinizing TERF logic to understand how they went wrong and how we can avoid making similar mistakes against other people. Which is why I'm writing this now.

(I've tried very hard to articulate what I think are two distinct flaws in thinking that seem to me to give rise to just about every TERF position, but I do feel like I'm not quite right on the money, so if anyone has better ways to say these two things, I'm all ears.) In general, TERF positions are the result of 1) rigid, black-and-white, binary thinking and 2) ignoring people's consent, especially their 'yes'es. Take transmisogyny: they believe that trans women are men and therefore oppressors. Now, this belief is readily debunked by observing the world, but TERFs have divided the world strongly into oppressors and oppressed, and have a lot of rhetorical tools to dismiss and ignore anything said by "oppressors" or that seems to favor "oppressors". And because trans women are "oppressors", they justify violence and harassment that ordinarily common sense would never condone.

A lot of other central TERF positions have to do with ignoring people's 'yes'es. Sex workers say, "No, this line of work isn't without its problems, but I want to be empowered to address those problems, not kicked out of my livelihood." AFAB trans people say, "I'm not a woman, I'm another gender, and I want to transition." Subs (in BDSM) say, "I enjoy being submissive." Heterosexual and bisexual women say, "I want to date and/or sleep with men." And TERFs' response to all these people is, "That's just your internalized misogyny talking." (And when these people fail to stop wanting the thing they want, TERFs decide that they've taken the side of misogyny and are now valid targets for harassment.) TERFs don't pay attention to people's stated wishes and what they actually are or aren't consenting to. Instead, they decide what women must want, or what wishes would best further the cause of feminism, according to their views of feminism and patriarchy.

Which brings me, finally, to antis. Antis come from two main sources, and one is the anti-kink/anti-BDSM/anti-porn aspect of TERF-style feminism. The other is, as ridiculous as it sounds, ship wars. Ship wars have existed since the beginning of fiction, of course, and what's going on right now is that some people in fandom harass others using the intellectual framework laid out by anti-kink/anti-BDSM/anti-porn radfems. The targets are usually people who ship things (or create/consume other content) that's dark or unrealistic. (E.g. if you ship an abuser with his victim, that content is either going to be dark, if they have an unhealthy relationship, or unrealistic, if they have a healthy relationship. This also often includes non-ship-related dark content like characters getting killed.) The harassers believe themselves to be morally superior to their targets, based on the justification that "no one could really enjoy this content unless they were either enacting oppression or internalizing oppression".

This is particularly obvious when they talk about survivors of abuse and trauma. As you might know from debunkings of the "violent video games" moral panic, dark themes in media tend to be a way for people to emotionally process horrible things that happen in real life. There are lots of ways this plays out, according to the specific needs of the individual, but to speak from my own experience, taking things that were inflicted on me nonconsensually and fictionalizing them -- bringing them into a context where I have complete control -- is really important to healing and growing past that experience. Now, everyone, no matter their specific experiences, has fears that they might choose to process through fiction, but survivors of abuse and trauma are necessarily people who have experienced some of the worse things the world has to offer. Antis' response to this is the same as TERFs' response to people who want or need things that are politically inconvenient for them: "That's just internalized oppression." "That's an unhealthy coping mechanism." "You're taking the side of oppression, so it's okay to harass you."

Antis tend to have other beliefs that are inherited from radical feminism. For example, like TERFs, they tend to conceptualize heterosexism as "homophobia, which also hurts bisexual people because they're attracted to the same gender" rather than "heterosexism hurts people of non-heterosexual orientations in a variety of different ways". As such, they tend towards aphobia, biphobia, and nbphobia. Many of them are aphobes/exclusionists, and they tend to support a short list of acceptable non-straight identities (e.g. "LGBT") rather than accepting categories that are loose or flexible like "queer", "LGBT+", "QUILTBAG", etc. I've also found that, even when acknowledging NBs, they tend toward rhetoric that puts people into two categories based on their gender, like "men vs women/NBs" or "women/transfeminine people vs men/transmasculine people". Again, they have very binary thinking, and disregard people's stated wishes not to be put on one side of a gender binary.

They also have a particular way of talking that leans toward bullying and ideological abuse. They tend to interact with anti-antis even when they're not in a place to do so in a non-harmful way, and tell people who disagree with them to go kill themselves ("drink bleach", "jump in a fire", etc.). They tend to overuse words like "gross", "nasty", "scum", "garbage", etc. that provoke a disgust response, and generally exaggerate wildly ("literally advocating for child abuse", that kind of thing). There's a distinct lack of emphasis on anything that could potentially break the grip of black-and-white thinking, such as recognizing gradations of harm, or weighing the harm of something against the benefit it has.

I don’t want to go overboard and replicate the exact same patterns by implying that “calling something you don’t like ‘garbage’ is supporting ideological abuse” or anything like that. At the same time, I'm pretty sensitive to all this stuff, and pick up on it easily, even when I would rather ignore it. I can't stand to see people harassed for something as trivial as their taste in fanfic, and I also tend to be particularly vulnerable to ideologically abusive rhetoric because of some of the stuff I've gone through. An easy way to avoid interacting with people who harass others for their dark fic (or who support that framework of moral inferiority) would be to hang out with people who create and consume dark fic. But I actually find most of that content stomach-turning, so I wouldn't want to hang out around people who are posting it and talking about it all the time.

tl;dr: To avoid “TERFs minus (most of the) transphobia”, I might try hanging out with people who like fucked up fic, but I don’t want to do that because it would be unpleasant.