#to a group of people that supposedly care about oppression

[pastadoughie]

i am literally begging people to stop putting sexism and transphobia on my dashboard please fucking think critically abt ur internal biases for 5 secconds and please accept even an ounce of critisism without assuming that someone is attacking you unfairly

alot of you have extremely sexist beliefs that you dont recognize because within social media as a whole these are incredibly normalized, covering blatent homophobia and misandry in tumblr buzzwords doesnt make you not sexist it just lets you be sexist and homophobic and transphobic in a way that is socially acceptable and incouraged within a queer centric space

i keep seeing posts talking abt how people actively like artwork (writing, photography, drawings) more when they find out its of a butch lesbian and not just a dude, and like, if your opinion on a peice of media can change solely based on the gender of the person being depicted by it, with zero change to the character, then that implies an inharent bias against men like, just because its men doesnt mean it isnt sexism

same thing where people think that media depicting gay men is better when it explicitly isnt written by a gay man, like that implies a fundimental disrespect of the work based on the sexuality and gender of the author. if you like an artwork but then you find out its written by a trans women, and all of a sudden you think its garbage, you are transphobic, but when people try to point this same bias out for the works of queer men this is largely written off.

i know ppl will argue abt punching up and whatnot, and while i do in some ways agree with that overall sentiment, i think that we should be striving to uh, not be sexist at all, rather then just being misandrists instead of mysogenists, like, if you only care about sexism when it hurts women/women ajacent people then you dont actually hate sexism you just want it to harm a different group of people, you dont hate the system you just want to be ontop of it and benifit from it

misandry and mysogeny present in different ways, they arent a directly comparable thing, different people have things worse in different ways so its rlly hard to take a group and say "this group has it worse", like yes generalizations like that can help in an extremely broad sense, but the world is not black and white and this kind of shit is mindnumbingly complex, trying to act like there is some kind of objective scoreing system for who is more oppressed then who is just unproductive and harmful

and moreover, someone having it worse then you doesnt make you less deserving of trying to make your situation better, i dont experience racism and in many many many ways i have it easier then poc people, that does not make me undeserving of support and that doesnt make me complaining or trying to better my situation unreasonable

we can care abt the lives and want to better the situation of different groups simoltaniously, we dont have to stop caring about racism because we want to better transphobia

i get that transwomen have it rlly bad and i do not experience the exact same struggles as them, and therefore cant comment on alot of them, but so often i see erasure of queer men in order to give more focus to transwomen, and just because trans girls go through alot of shit doesnt make that ok

one thing that people have to recognize about misandry and specifically transmisandry that you dont really have to see as much with its mysogeny counterparts is that they have far more attention and people care far more about activism for queer women/women in general, queer mens experience and specifically the transmasc experience is very very very often erased and written off even by supposedly trans friendly and queer sorces, people care more about butch lesbians then they do trans men dispite the insane ammount of overlap between the two groups, when researching about historical butch lesbians alot of them are just, trans guys that people are misgendering and mislabeling as butch lesbians because ooooo woemennnnn

being transmasc myself i can say that like, the erasure of trans men is an extremely large issue, for large swaths of history the experiences of trans people arent paid attention to at all, and even looking at media coverage today, if people are going to talk abt transgenderism they are talking about it specifically under the lens of trans women

this is largely because misandry (specifically, people thinking that having cock and ball makese u somehow predatory) makes trans women an easier punching bag, trans women get more attention because they are easier for radfems (misandrists) to be bigoted against in a more violent way, if you assume all men and amab people are violent and predatory by nature then this makes justifying violence against trans women easier

and yea being a punching bag for the media is fucking hard but it does mean that activism for that group is much much much louder, more people are complaining about trans women so more people know abt the specific issues they face

but dispite trans men yaknow, also existing and recieving a shit ton of transphobia and erasure over history they dont get talked about as much, people hate us and are violent twards us but we dont nessasarily get the same outrage for our treatment

trans men are just as often get the dismissal for being women, and the outrage for being men as trans women do we just dont get as much support and thats really difficult! often people seek to treat transmasculinism as some kind of new thing like, i get the comment often that "usually its boys that wanna be girls" and its like, no. its not. its simply that people care less about us

i think that its really easy to misenterpret me here so im gonna just get this out of the way, i dont think that women have it easier then men in a broad socital sense, but also, i dont nessasarily believe that means that my complaints are invalid, being a queer woman is not a walk in the park, and neither is being a queer man, and both groups experience homophobia transphobia and sexism in different ways, so acting as if saying one is objectively worse then the other is unfair and reductive

i think that if we want to get anywhere in regards to making it easier to be trans then we need to talk about all queer experiences, you cant just, only care about trans women you have to care about all trans people, and moreover queer people in general, this means you HAVE to be vigilant about people wrapping up sexism in a tumblr buzzword packadge, you need to consume things critically and you are not immune to pipelines, people dont just wake up and become radfems you get continually fed more and more extreme idologies, being fed things that you 90% agree with untill you eventually become completely removed from the groups you were supposed to stand with

you can care about the oppression of multiple groups at once, and if you think activism in any way involves the erasure of a certain group then you have fundimentally misunderstood what youre supposed to be doing, queer men exist and they deserve support and respect and you need to be able to support and respect them without being like "ohh she is soooooo trransfemme coded" like. men can be queer and still be men, they can be queer and still deserve your love and support, i am begging.

also yes i am aware that outside of my specific experience of tumblr people fuckin hate trans girls and women in general and they dont feel the need to do this shit. but that doesnt mean what im talking about is not an issue and is not something that people need to change and address. if you find urself doing this shit you have got to reflect on yourself, you arent immune to transphobia or homophobia or sexism ESPECIALLY if you think that you somehow are magically immune. nobody is. no identity is. everybody is suseptible to this shit and it takes active critical thinking in order to combat it

[alyrch99]

I think it's fundamentally this:

If you're not a trans women (or transfeminine) I don't care about literally anything you think about eggs, or transmisogyny, or what a TERF is, or what "radical feminism" in the context of transness means and whether or not you think it can be recouped with a trans-inclusive mode of thought or identity, or literally any of this other shit. This means you, he/they obsessively browsing the transmisogyny tag to disagree with people, I block yall wherever I find you but there's always more. Actually it's not even a tag, because this website restricts #transmisogyny, though for some reason not transandrophobia or transmisandry gee I wonder why that is with your opposition supposedly being so similar to ours in scope.

Anyway you're not part of a fucking community with me. You simply aren't. Learn what actual solidarity is (hint: it isn't screaming "where's your solidarity, we should work together!!" Whenever anyone mentions how you're in fact also part of an oppressive group to her) or never try to talk for or with me again. Actually preferably don't do that anyway. Also your gender isn't special or somehow better than trans womanhood, it's not more transgressive, think for a moment about why trans women don't tend to have (don't tend to *get* to have) these "more complex" gender identities - it's because we aren't allowed to, we aren't given the leeway.

This probably won't get any traction, no one gives a fuck what I say on here, but if it does? If you're TME keep your fucking mouth shut in my notes.

[gandalfsbignaturals]

do you also hate terms like gentile on the same grounds or what

this is a bad faith comparison.

gentile is a word with a very clear definition: someone who isnt jewish. there is some blurriness in the lines of "jewish" vs "not jewish," for instance: is someone who has married a jewish person and attends services with them jewish, even if they havent finished their conversion process? if they havent even started? no, but they may still be lumped in with jewish people in the eyes of an antisemite. still, it is a word with a clear definition. there is a process to become jewish if you are not jewish, and otherwise, being jewish is something one is born into.

transmisogyny exempt, as a term, is not well-defined. i have seen it defined most often as anyone who isnt a trans woman or trans fem. but this definitely designates a large group of people who do face transmisogyny as supposedly exempt from it. transmisogynists, as i have said many times, dont care about the specifics of our labels. if someones gender is too difficult for them to parse, they will default to assuming that person is a trans woman and treat them accordingly.

thus, there is no clear group that can be designated as affected by trans misogyny or exempt from trans misogyny. it is a label founded on oppression, but the oppression of queer people is fundamentally a hatred of that which doesnt fit into a binary. the incredibly wide and varied range of trans and queer experiences means that trying to draw clear lines between our experiences of oppression is an endeavor destined to failure.

[fatphobiabusters]

Please help me. My militant, bootlicking sister did a report on Ob*sity in this country and she is showing obvious fatphobia, and I told her about the origins of the BMI system, and she said "I don't support Eugenics, I just want people to have healthier bodies and improved lifestyles!!!"

That is LITERALLY the definition of eugenics.

How can I convince her that she did a school project on why she hates fat people?

The very first post I saw on your blog is in support of a trans person who was harassed by trolls, and yet here you are sending troll messages to another oppressed group.

Despite your troll message being both fatphobic and ableist, despite fatphobia having an immense amount of intersectionality with transphobia (you know, the group you supposedly care about), you'd rather spend your miserable life doing exactly what transphobic trolls do to trans people. It's just okay when you do it because your definition of "equality" comes with asterisks.

Get a life that actually has any sort of value or meaning. Because being a pathetic, bigoted hypocrite ain't it.

-Mod Worthy

[arlathvhenan]

Sera Makes No Sense

Sera as a character baffles and frustrates me, because there was so much potential there and none of it was ever realized. I honestly don’t know what they were going for with her character but what we got feels so unpolished and incomplete.

For one thing, her backstory makes zero sense. It assumes that Sera, a City Elf, has either never encounter racism from a human nor does she know about the Alienages, the genocides, or the other incredibly out in the open atrocities being committed against the Elves to this day. That, or she is SO mean spirited and so lacking in empathy that she sees these people suffering and deems them worthy of being mocked for it, which kind of flies in the face of her whole ‘uplifting the little guy’ thing.

Sera supposedly cares for the downtrodden, and yet is constantly punching down. She openly mocks Solas at any opportunity over the death and downfall of their people. Just imagine for a second if this were set in the real world and we were dealing with a real life marginalized group? Substitute the Elves for any famously abused and oppressed group and consider if you’d still find Sera’s attitude all that charming.

Her hatred of the Elves in general makes very little sense within the context of her own narrative. Her story about the cookies is utterly baffling to me because it illustrates exactly why she should be distrustful of humans and yet she still projects her scorn onto the Elves, who are constantly being abused by the world around them. Why? How does that logic follow?

It honestly feels like writer didn’t know what to do with her. Her character has no arc. She never changes. She never really demonstrates any sense of empathy or compassion, yet we’re meant to believe she’s cares deeply about the plight of the powerless, yet her character never demonstrates this with her actions. She likes to cause trouble, sure. She calls it ‘payback.’ But that comes from a place of malice, not compassion.

I won’t say I don’t understand wanting to menace the rich, but at the end of the day what is she doing to actually help people? By her own admission she only wants to help the Inquisition so she can ‘go and play’ which…yeah. And again, she never really grows from this point. There is no arc to her.

I think the problem with Sera and why she’s yet another character it’s impossible to have nuanced discussions on is because people project a lot of qualities into her that simply aren’t there in the text, that warps their perception of her, and then they get attacked to the image if her they want rather than what’s there in the text. They like her, so they want to assume the best at all times. Her writer left her in an unpolished state, so people do the legwork of fixing her character in their interpretation and then crediting it to the original work. For example, the idea that Sera’s hatred of Elves is somehow internalized racism. A symptom of being raised by the oppressors of her people and wanting desperately to suit their image of personhood, therefore rejecting that which would set her apart from them. Except Sera clearly doesn’t care what the humans think of her. Certainly not the wealthy ones. Moreover, this internalized racism is never reckoned with by the narrative.

The objective tragedy of a social minority coming to despise their own due to the circumstances of their upbringing is never acknowledged. She never changes, which implies that the writers think she has nothing that needs changing. Ergo, they clearly didn’t think through the implications of her character or what it would actually look like for someone in her situation. Sera could have been a deeply interesting look into the damage colonialism and oppression do to a person’s sense of identity. Instead her racism is simply treated as a quirk.

TLDR; She deserved better writing than she got and it sucks that more effort wasn’t put into her story.

[kitkatopinions]

When people talk about how "rwde is mad that RWBY subverts expectations" I wonder how much of what's considered subverting expectations is actually ignoring set up, doing things out of nowhere, and actually doing a popular and very much so expected thing.

Like don't get me wrong, I do think sometimes people have ideas for what RWBY should've been and then think that it was more set up then it actually was. Like, people who took Blake saying she grew up outside the kingdoms and had to learn to fight to mean "I am an orphan and spent my whole life on the streets" that then got mad when Blake had pretty big house and parents. I might agree that RWBY perhaps shouldn't have given Blake the privileges they gave her specifically because of how they decided to use her to tell the other Faunus to stop being mean to their oppressors (though I'd sooner throw that part out than get rid of Blake being the daughter of a leader with a big house,) but I don't think it was pulling the rug out from under people the way some people do.

However, then you have things like Adam, where some people in RWDE are saying "he was set up as this interesting character who would be an ideological foil for Blake that cared about the cause and his people, and it felt like he'd be used as a way to talk about the injustice in the world of Remnant and then was reduced to nothing but a girl-obsessed hate sink two dimensional incel" and some anti-rwde people are hitting back with "you're just upset that the edgy bad-boy isn't getting redeemed, you just wanted Adam to be Zuko, but RWBY subverted your expectations by not redeeming him and instead giving Ilia the redemption arc, and giving Blake and Yang the sympathy."

And there's a lot to unpack, there. Including the fact that redemption arcs and sympathy aren't a zero-sum game in fiction and as someone who loves both redemption arcs and when characters get justified sympathy, it's frustrating when people act like there isn't enough redemption to go around as if it's a pie and Adam getting a piece of it means Ilia doesn't get any.

But more to the point, A. I at least have zero interest in Adam being a Zuko, because so much of Zuko's redemption arc hinged on Zuko confronting his and his people's role in oppression. Adam is oppressed. Zuko was scarred by an abusive father and banished from home, Adam was branded like cattle by a supremacist who he was working for as a child laborer. Although both are incredibly sympathetic, they're incredibly different. Whether or not the writers were trying to harken back to Zuko (which I believe they were,) they seemed to completely miss the differences between the two characters, and also deciding to 'subvert expectations' when the circumstances they themselves wrote were so different is a bad look at best. As if they couldn't have 'subverted expectations' with a different character like Cardin or Jacques or even Roman Torchwick, that wasn't a member of their in-universe oppressed minority group.

B. A member of an oppressed people group that's been hurt by the oppressors of the world and yet spends their time committing horrible cruel acts that force the heroes to stand against them is not some never before heard of thing. In fact, it's very common. A revolutionary supposedly fighting for equality that's actually hurting the people he's supposedly fighting for is a pretty regular every day thing. People have literally been criticizing how it's misused and usually racist propaganda (usually written by white people) since long before RWBY was even concepted. Adam isn't a proper subversion of anything, in my opinion, because you can't do the common thing and then say you subverted expectations by not doing the less common thing. Which in this case, the less common thing would actually be to make the oppressed person who had been branded and was shown fighting for the rights of his people to actually be a nuanced and complicated character who does deserve sympathy and could be redeemed.

C. It might just be me, but if you're going to 'subvert expectations' then the thing you write instead of the expectation had better be pretty freaking good. Because sometimes the expectation is there because it just works well. Like in a group of heroes, you expect them to develop a friendship. If people want to subvert expectations by instead having them hate each other, the story better be golden because the reason people tend to expect friendship is that it's usually much easier to connect to character dynamics when they actually like each other. If you're going to write a story where hope is a central theme, but you want to subvert expectations by making a sympathetic and cool character with a personal connection to the mains look like they're gonna get redeemed but then instead make them just the worst person imaginable, then you better do it super well and make him instead a great well-rounded nuanced and fun to hate villain. So not only do we have to pay attention to why the writers shouldn't have gone that route for Adam, we gotta look at the quality of what they did with it, and... Nope. It sucked. Adam was paper thin and horribly voice acted and honestly if he'd never attacked in V6 nothing would've really changed because it had no real consequences that couldn't have been better achieved in a different way, and introducing his branding scar in the same scene he got stabbed was purely for shock value, and nothing came of his character, and idk if Ruby ever even learned his name on screen or Weiss knew anything about him, and it was so badly done. If you're going to 'subvert expectations,' you gotta do it well, or people are always going to want the thing they expected in the beginning instead. Unfortunately, the RWBY writers didn't write Adam well at all. So I for one can't blame anyone for saying 'honestly, I wish they'd gone with the other thing.'

D. Back to 'sometimes when people say subverting expectations, they really mean ignored set up.' With Adam in particular, I do believe that he was always meant to be a bad guy who did bad cruel things from the very first trailer he appeared in, but that doesn't at all mean that set up wasn't ignored. From Blake talking about him as a mentor, to her crediting him with the Grimm masks, to the ideological differences, to Cinder literally having to threaten and coerce him into working with her on screen, the set up indicated that at the very least, this would be a complicated and nuanced 'villain with a point' and that point was going to matter and be addressed. The set up was that Cinder's coercion was going to be addressed and would matter. The set up was that Blake's complicated feelings about Adam and her desire to help her people and her later established care and compassion for Ilia (who may I remind people is at least just as bad as seasons 1-3 Adam in at least attempt if not execution,) would lead somewhere when it came to Adam. The set up was that seeing a child laborer literally branded on the face with the logo of WEISS'S COMPANY would lead to big discussions and some sort of recognition of just how bad the current system is and how bad the SDC itself as always been. And instead Weiss as far as we know never even heard about it and continued on being angry that she wasn't set to be CEO and calling her grandfather a hero and Blake was completely disinterested in attending a rally against Jacques Schnee and teased Weiss about her family owning half of Atlas. Like ???

E. Doing things out of nowhere is also not subverting expectations. In regards to Adam, this looks like randomly making him totally obsessed with Blake enough that he stalks her for weeks when he literally let her go repeatedly before that. Doing things out of nowhere is making Adam not care an ounce about his people in order to do whatever Salem says when we saw him reject Cinder outright and need to be coerced with threats to his people. Those aren't subverting expectations, that's just doing one thing and then retconning the character to do something out of character.

This post turned out to be mostly about Adam, but there's tons of examples of this, like people saying RWDE are mad that the writers 'subverted expectations' by making Ironwood turn evil when we were sitting there like 'the fact that he wasn't evil was subverting expectations in the first place! And they had to throw V3 out the window to get where they were in V8! And it was super badly done!' People just throw around 'subverting expectations' when it comes to RWBY because it sounds a lot better than 'flying by the seats of their pants doing whatever pops into their heads with no care or consideration towards set-up or emotional pay off' but that's it, that's what the RWBY writers seem to do. When I expect something to happen in RWBY, it's because it's the natural thing that makes sense to happen, and in their supposed effort to 'subvert expectations,' the writers instead made a show with no consequences where you can't expect the writers to make anything that happens matter and you can't trust what's in the show because the writers might say sike and retcon it. It's endlessly frustrating to be like 'hey was any of what was in the show going to matter' and then have people say 'you're just mad because RWBY subverted your expectations.' RWBY subverted my expectation that the show would be good, how about that?

You know, if the show actually was interested in subverting expectations, Jaune wouldn't be in the show nearly as much and he'd be more gender-non-conforming and be a support healer role instead of the man now with like twenty years of experience on the mains who always has his trauma get plenty of focus and gets away with screaming in Ruby's face that she's responsible for all bad things while he mourns the three different women that were shoved in the fridge for the sake of his character development. They could've started with making the white straight cis able-bodied not-faunus man actually not be a basic underdog-protagonist turned Michael-Scarn-esque tragic hero that Weiss lusts after, but whoops. Like what am I supposed to think, that they're super interested in subverting expectations for the sake of women when Jaune is right there guzzling up screen time? Nah babes.

(Before someone comes in here talking about Adam-obsessed fan boys, I do not even like Adam, canon Adam is not only gross but far too two-dimensional for me to even enjoy, and my own ideas for rewrites involve me boiling Adam down to a concept and building him up again as if he was a different character as much 'Adam' as Ruby is Red Riding Hood. Nobody accuse me of being an Adam-obsessed dudebro or I will lose it. Because that's another thing that a lot of anti-RWDE people seem to do, is decide that the only reason anyone would ever talk about problems with Adam is because they're an obsessed incel man. And meanwhile I'm over here as a bi-women who dislikes Adam partially because he reminds me of my controlling 'my happiness is your responsibility' ex-boyfriend who we - long story - thought might've stabbed someone with a sword once. So yeah, not an Adam fanboy lol.)

[trans-androgyne]

You’re honestly one of the most approachable transandrophobia bloggers I know.

One thing I’d like to discuss about is that a lot of the transandrophobia is being spearheaded by white trans women.

It shows a lot that whiteness is still everreaching even onto gender. There’s BIPOC trans people (especially BIPOC transmascs) that get harassed and shut down by these large white trans women bloggers. One time I saw one of them say “that is moot” to intersex people not being including on discussions about AFAB trans women.

It’s a very important concept that people are aware that white women hold up racist structures, it’s the same with the big white trans women on this site I’ve noticed. Due to their whiteness they do not actually know intersectionality and assume their gender is the sole reason of oppression. That white concepts of gender, sexuality, and disability are a truth and applied to everything.

I’ve been vocal about being a BIPOC transfemme, and the blatant bigotry and cruelty from the big white transfemme bloggers just ring it bad for me. My culture taught me kindness and patience, so seeing this popular rise in aggression and entitlement in transfemme spaces has rendered them quite unsafe for the people they supposedly protect like me.

The best conclusion I have for this is that the rise in transandrophobia has ties to racism, ableism, inter sexism much more. I want my discussions of trans experience such as both transmisogyny and transandrophobia to be free from other pre dispositioned bigotry. That as a transfemme someone who they claim to protect, that the whole wider trans community needs to do better.

Take care and I hope your day is wonderful

Thank you, I appreciate your analysis here! The transfems I know have also pointed out that a lot of it seems to be coming from predstrogen’s very white online trans women social sphere. It seems like transfems of color on here also have strong criticisms of that group’s behavior, including acting like being a transfem inherently means you have all the best takes on oppression. I hope we can get some better, more intersectional perspectives in the conversation.

[crossdressingdeath]

Sera: The Empress is pretty. It'd be fun to drink and kill stuff with Gaspard. Briala is frigging funny. Elves-elves-elves, but it's really a pissing match with an old lover. Don't know the rest, but that explains a lot. [shrugs] They're all lying, but Celene's nice to look at. Good thing we're here to save her neck.

And here we see Sera's talk about helping the little people and sticking it to the nobles slam right into her anti-elf prejudice and say rather more about her than it was maybe intended to. Remember: Celene burned down the Halamshiral alienage and killed everyone inside. Gaspard is an expansionist who really wants to get back to that whole "forcing all of Thedas under Orlesian control by the sword" thing that was ever so good for Ferelden pre-DAO. But they're fine by Sera! It's Briala, who's fighting to help the elves of Orlais, who's the problem because *checks notes* she used to fuck Celene. Her desire to help the elves of Orlais? Meaningless. Who cares about all those lives ended by Celene to soothe her pride? Clearly it's just a pissing match between lovers and noble nonsense and Celene's got nice tits so what's an entire alienage's worth of dead elves between friends?

I genuinely don't know how people still fall for the Robin Hood schtick when Sera doesn't give a single solitary shit about helping one of the most oppressed groups of people in Thedas and wants to side with the woman who ordered the deaths of an entire alienage of them just because she's pretty. Best case scenario little miss "let's stick it to the nobles" didn't notice that Celene wiped out a whole alienage for the sake of her pride despite supposedly having a network that watches out for abusive nobles; worst case she straight up does not care about all those deaths because it was elves and elves "don't count".

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/756204827274625025/ive-had-to-deal-with-people-in-a-couple-of-my

Yeah one obnoxious thing I’ve noticed in those kinds of Discords is that people will so often bring up the specter of “disability” or “neurodivergence” to defend an oversensitive person who curls into a ball or cries or claims triggers, but never someone who deals with that by getting angry or aggressive in defending their points. Never mind that not only are there are a ton of neurodivergent people in the second group, but if anything it’s the more stereotypical behavior associated with some very common neurodivergences like autism.

(Is this a problem of too many people online claiming to be autistic who clearly don’t have it? Not just being self diagnosed which is fine and can be based on actual diagnostic criteria, but I’ve noticed more and more people who claim it who just don’t seem to fit ANY of the criteria for it and I think they’re confusing people about what autism and such really look like)

Even people who are themselves autistic people who tend more toward the aggressive rather than sad and uwu (and sometimes tbh passive aggressive) response, were lining up behind this person and making those arguments!

This person does that every time they’re ever criticized even slightly and in this case, it was for a racist micro aggression. It was infuriating to watch supposedly progressive people decide what they cared most about was drying the white tears, and instead refocus the conversation on the supposed ableism of someone telling her “I know you likely didn’t mean harm by this, but this is something POC hear a lot and is frustrating because” like in the nicest way they possibly could. I really think fandom spaces full of white neurodivergent people need to do better at acknowledging the privileges they DO have and asking themselves if they don’t prefer to have social justice conversations only when it can frame themselves as oppressed.

--

[nerdylilpeebee]

Really should be ignoring this, but- @beesproperty1

Israel engaged in a ceasefire with Hamas (one Hamas kept attacking them through, I might add) in order to exchange hostages and there was a new deal on the table to extend the ceasefire, possibly permanently, so long as Hamas kept giving hostages back. I haven't looked into the state of that deal, but this kinda disproves "they aren't stopping and have no plan to."

And they aren't displacing anyone. Warning people to evacuate areas they are going to attack because terrorists who attacked their country in the worst terror attack since 9/11 are stationed there, hiding behind civilian loan buildings is not "displacing" the populace. The manipulation y'all engage in is RIDICULOUS.

Ah yes, Gaza, the country that has been (at least supposedly) posting videos of the conflict the entire time it's happened has no cell service and is just entirely rubble now. Please ignore all the videos pro-palestine people spread that they claim come from inside Gaza and please ignore that the vast majority of Gazans are still alive (they wouldn't be if the entire country was rubble).

Also, here's a hostage testifying to the fact Hamas forced her to lie, not once but twice. As well as all the shit suffered, including the sub-par healthcare and torment at the hands of her captor's children (I didn't provide this before because I was in a comment section).

And you're damn fucking right I don't trust Gazan sources. XD Why would I trust sources that would be killed if they didn't say what Hamas wanted??? Literally the only truthful thing they ever reported was the old Palestinian woman saying Hamas steals their supplies.

No, they are not actually killing one person each. XD If you look at how many bombs were used versus how many people Hamas CLAIMS died, they killed, at most, .5 people per bomb. Odd for someone intending to "devastate the area," but okay hun.

And no, Hamas formed from the Muslim Brotherhood. Their formation had nothing to do with Israel. And frankly, it wouldn't matter if it did, killing innocent people is not justified because you say "oh, but we're oppressed." And it's really fucking telling that you think it does. Something tells me the other person in the notes there calling me a psycho should instead be calling you that.

They don't kidnap anyone. Most of the "kids" Israel imprisons are between 15 and 18 and most often than not they are arrested for violent crimes. Being a "kid" does not mean you get to stab your neighbor.

"Despite the fact Israel pulled out of Gaza 20 years ago, Israel occupies Gaza so it's not a country, just an occupied territory."

Cool. They still elected Hamas. They still consider themselves a separate country and so does a good portion of the world. They are still committing war crimes (which none of y'all care about) and quite frankly Israel did a damn good job "maintaining" this "occupied territory." Literally over 500 trucks daily before this war, they provided water, food, AND Gaza got billions in foreign aid. Hamas stole the food and the money and destroyed water infrastructure (something y'all also don't care about).

Except it was not actually blockaded. People called it a blockade, but that wasn't the reality. XD People spreading misinformation for decades does not make that misinformation true.

And it's funny you accuse me of being ignorant but clearly do not know anything beyond what Hamas has spoonfed you.

Actually the IDF did not kill Israeli's on the ground on October 7th, that is a blatant lie I've never seen y'all even TRY to back up.

And yeah, Israel also publicly declared the mistake and punished the people responsible. The individual soldiers disobeying their orders is not some evil act by the entirety of Israel.

And again, very funny you call me dumb when you trust the literal terrorist group to tell you the truth.

@row666 Wow, you really tried with that didn't you? XD Hun, sweetie pie, sugar-lump, please use that useless lump of gray matter between your ears. I was literally listing the massive fucking differences between the NAZIS STARTING THE HOLOCAUST and Israel retaliating to terrorists who have attacked them for decades. There is a really big fucking difference between these two events and the absolute AUDACITY y'all have to have to call me stupid and a psycho while you try to equate the Jews to the fucking Nazis for daring to defend themselves from terrorists trying to kill them all is insane.

[shuttershocky]

holy shit Hypergryph really straight up made it canon that Sarkaz have to deal with blood libel accusations

You know when i first read this ask I was kinda wondering what sort of metaphor for blood libel I'd be seeing but no, they just straight up have the Leithaniens accuse Hibiscus of stealing their blood huh.

It's crazy how fast Leithaniens go from polite to a mob.

Like we all know from Twilight of Wolumonde that Leithanien likes to go "oh look at us we don't discriminate against the infected we care about the arts and higher education we're so progressive!" only to turn on Mudrock's traveling group as soon as it became convenient and also hide that they had actually displaced and killed the original indigenous peoples there, but Lingering Echoes' take is more personal.

We see Hibiscus arrive in Vyseheim as a doctor for Rhodes Island and everyone's friendly and polite, she gets pulled into a village dance and invited to a concert, and everyone lets her do her job as a doctor, conducting blood tests to measure everyone's originium levels and the like.

Then we see Czerny's old relative say "What's a Sarkaz doing he-" before she realizes that isn't "polite" and tells hibiscus not to take it seriously and that didn't mean anything.

Then we see Hibiscus have a polite debate with a food stall owner over the healthiness of his food vs its taste and he acts really kindly towards her through their differences and even invites her to come back for his food someday, until Hibiscus walks off and he says

But then as soon as Rhodes Island's presence in the city becomes an inconvenience to the Countess Gertrude, she just makes a prophecy (read: spreads a rumor) that doesn't even mention a Sarkaz, and yet an incident goes from one drunk guy angrily accusing Hibiscus of her blood tests for Oripathy really being an excuse to steal their blood for Arts, into a whole angry mob out for her head in almost an instant.

They say using blood for Arts means she's in league with the Witch King, then get angry when she's unafraid of calling out the Witch King's prophecy as rumors and claims it's disrespect, then get doubly angry when she calls them out on the contradiction.

Personally, while I get that they're trying to say that even a society as supposedly progressive as Leithanien hides bigotry like all the other countries, and Hibiscus is one of the protagonists of the story so obviously they'd show the challenges she faces as a Sarkaz doctor, I don't know...

I kind of feel like depicting outright blood libel to show the discrimination the Sarkaz face becomes messy when some of the Sarkaz doctors like Warfarin are actually vampires? The scene even has to clumsily dance around that by having Hibiscus' first reaction be "Sir, you might have heard of vampires but I'm not a vampire Sarkaz".

I just think it's overreaching your bounds you know? Going for something that loaded with terrible history because you want the impact of referencing that history, but without thinking if you also made some of the oppressed group who are now acting as a Jewish analogue actual vampires because you thought vampires are cool.

I'm not Jewish though so I'm just speculating. I would defer to them for what their thoughts on this scene was.

[kaylinalexanderbooks]

What is jedis motives for being morally grey?

Hi! Thanks for the ask! (For the TSP Q&A tag game)

Well, this is a doozy. This entire thing has taken so much of my thought process because it's complicated and making it Make Sense is harder than you'd think, but I've come pretty far! I'll have to go into minor spoilers regarding Jedi's backstory, but I'll avoid anything too big. Here's the short version:

To start off, Jedi starts the series as part of what's left of a group called the Aequales, which used to be a group that rivaled the Refugae, which had taken over some of the world's (Alium's) governments and continues to attempt to do so. Alium is a world of powers and those without powers are called Inutilia, since they're deemed useless by society.

The leader of the Refugae is an Inutilia woman named Raissa Kamanzi, who believed she needed to rebuild the world to where her people were in charge. "You oppressed me, I'll oppress you" mentality. The leader of the Aequales was an Inutilia sympathizer, Atsila McLain. Atsila preached that there could be a more peaceful approach to settle this, and had a bit of a hero complex about her.

Alii get their powers at age ten, but if their blood test comes back without a result, they're declared Inutilia. Jedi was one of those kids, and unfortunately his father was a bigot. His mother Sori fought back for her son and then ran away with him and his sister to a more accepting Sector. To skip over quite a bit, Raissa Kamanzi did recruit Jedi to be a part of the Refugae when he was a teenager. Jedi saw her worldwide announcement, and he also wanted to fight back since he'd directly experienced many forms of bigotry. Unfortunately while he was there, he discovered Raissa's more violent, extreme methods, and deserted them. He was taken in by the Aequales.

At first, Jedi wasn't sure how to deal with a group that opposed the Refugae since he wanted equal rights, but the Aequales were supposedly for that, but with peaceful methods. This didn't change the fact that Atsila was not Inutilia nor did it seem like any progress was being made. Still, Jedi held on to the ideals Atsila gave out of hope for a better future. The person closest to Atsila, Carmen Asghar, was also Inutilia, and she ended up forming a close friendship with Jedi. Carmen's trust in Atsila helped Jedi also trust Atsila a little more.

But Atsila was also scientifically curious, and after seeing the effects Ceteri (the universe connected to Alium that is essentially our world) on Alii development - they seem to develop rarer and more powerful abilities - she wanted to study it and see if she could find practical applications. Unfortunately she was killed before these studies were complete, or even really started. The Aequales didn't disappear, but it caused many to leave.

Carmen refused to, and while the Refugae essentially ignored them after Atsila was gone since they were nothing without her but loose ideals, Carmen decided to focus on Atsila's last task: the study of Alii on Ceteri. Jedi helped her out with this because he had nowhere else to go and cared greatly about Carmen, having known each other for about thirty years at this point. As this goes on, Carmen hopes the results help her to discover new ways to defeat Raissa and get the Inutilia to be seen as equals.

How does this make Jedi morally gray? Well, the study is on Alii development which means teenagers/preteens are the subject, and they take advantage of the fact that adolescent Alii are naturally drawn back to their original dimension. The Aequales is also more based on ideals with no real action behind them. I won't unpack Atsila's psyche or motivation or anything since this is about Jedi, but she wasn't exactly what was needed to solve the issue.

Jedi wants to do what is best for people like him. He wants to stop the violence on both sides. However, he's become lost in what to actually do. He has values that he holds onto, and he wants to do whatever it takes to make those values real, but he's spent so long following other people who have not-good methods that despite the potential to be able to do so he's stuck, and the man doesn't have enough self-reflection to realize his mistakes, that this isn't working, and maybe using kids, even if those kids just kinda see this as a cool club to practice their powers and learn how to defend themselves, is bad and he shouldn't be doing it. He should actually be looking for ways to accomplish his goals, not the goals of others, especially if those others are dead.

So that's basically Jedi. Good morals, less than ideal methods.

TSP intro

TSP tag list (ask to be +/-): @thepeculiarbird @illarian-rambling @televisionjester @finchwrites

@nebula--nix @literarynecromancy @honeybewrites @the-golden-comet

[fatphobiabusters]

Fatphobia is so popular and normalized that you don't even need to watch fatphobic shit for YouTube to recommend it to you.

Making fatphobic shit is also so lucrative that you can get 500,000 views on a less than two minute video made by AI, meaning that you didn't even have to do the work yourself. All you have to do to get half a million views is put a picture of a fat person as the thumbnail and make the most unoriginal garbage pile of a pun that you can think of to slap on the video as a title.

And you want to know why?

You want to know why everyone and their mother loves to freely harass fat people? You want to know why this makes half a million views on a video that doesn't even meet the two minute mark?

It's because fat people are one of the only oppressed groups left who you can abuse and oppress with zero backlash. We aren't protected by anti-discrimination laws. There's a single organization that gives a damn about our oppression, and it's not even a powerful or well-known organization to people outside of the very small community of fat liberationists. You won't even be shamed on social media beyond a tiny percentage of accounts like this blog. I can't begin to describe how many fatphobic bigots I have dealt with over the years who were people who claimed to be "progressive" and said they supported equality. So many fatphobes I have dealt with had pride flag icons and argued to me that fat people aren't oppressed because "[insert whatever other group here the fatphobe was using this time] has it worse!" Fat people have even been thrown out of the body positivity movement that WE. STARTED.

So if I can't even rely on "progressive" people who give a shit about everyone else to give a shit about me? People who claim to care about equality and all of my other oppressed identities but treat me like the dirt underneath their feet as soon I'm not "fuckable" to them? You can see pretty fucking clearly how this world has a strangling hold on fat people and refuses to let go of their last punching bag that has zero consequences for pummeling into the ground.

The world knows that you will endure consequences (legal, financial, and/or social) for being bigoted against any oppressed group with a mainstream activism movement, so that's why conservatives and progressives alike wipe their brow in relief that there's at least one group they know is okay to harm as much as they want without having to worry of backlash.

And for the people who never developed their reading comprehension skills, no where did I say that other oppressed groups don't have it bad. No where did I say that other oppressed groups aren't still harmed today. Stop it with your bad faith takes and attempts to make this another "piss on the poor."

There's a major difference between what I endure as a fat person and what I endure for my plethora of other oppressed identities. If you discriminate against me for being gay, there's anti-discrimination laws and policies. There's financial losses to your business by the people who will boycott you. There's loss of reputation. There's loss of relationships, social status, and trust. People have even lost their jobs for being homophobic. It's not perfect, but it's far from lacking consequences.

But when I'm discriminated against for being fat? All those people who supposedly cared about me for being gay are not only silent when I'm discriminated against for my fatness, they often actively support the fatphobia I faced.

That is the fucking difference.

-Mod Worthy

[dykesynthezoid]

You know there are a lot of ways that an American person in the military could protest the actions of their government. Quitting their job is one of them.

To turn this man into a hero boggles the mind. As if everyone is not already deeply aware of what’s happening in Gaza. As if he has done anything to improve the lives of Palestinians. As if he did not have any other impactful way to protest. As if, frankly, any of the minds he was trying to change are really going to be able to feel the impact of one more death amidst so many. Who is this message supposed to be for? The US and Israeli governments? Why would they care? How many people have already died and they haven’t cared? Do you really think they’ll give a shit just because he’s a white American? (Look at how our country treats the veterans it supposedly reveres so much).

Self-immolation has its own complex history as a form of protest throughout various cultures, but for this man— a man from a country with free speech, where protestors have been getting away with following around the president— a man in a position of power over the people he is supposedly fighting for— to say, “the only way I can help you is to violently end my life”?

His death is a tragedy. I think of his family’s grief. I think of that grief adding to an already endless well. You can say it’s a “correct” response to an untenable situation all you want, but the fact that he was a white American serviceman and not, in fact, a member of the oppressed group in question, should tell you a lot. The focus becomes his own feelings of grief, not the actual suffering taking place. “I feel bad, so I have to do this.” It’s not the same thing as actually changing anything.

I pray for a day the left starts to care more about repairing the world and caring for others than they do destruction and empty statements. May he rest well.

[unpopularfanopinion]

if your defense of ao3 ignores the racism and zionism displayed by both users and staff then you are in no position to call people white supremacists. protecting bigotry under the guise of "free speech" while belittling and shouting down opposition is exactly what conservatives do. don't act like the people who disagree with you are republican adjacent when you've used their ideals to make your point as well.

i hope you snap your neck falling off that high horse lmao.

I am going to try to say this as simply, bluntly, and kindly as possible. I have not compared anyone demanding additional content moderation than the current legal stand they use to being white supremacists. I have compared them to conservative authoritarians. If you think being a white supremacists, or supporting white supremacy is inherently or intrinsically tied to conservative authoritarianism you are sadly mistaken.

A Frank Wilhoit gave one of the best description of conservatives and conservatism ever

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect

There is no marginalized group that is so inherently good and pure that they will not have members who desiring, power and control over others will try to place themselves as the protected in-group and others into the subjugated outgroup. (and oddly enough you're complaining about one such example of an oppressed marginalize group that successfully turn itself in a group of conservative, authoritarian oppressors. If you can't tell yes I am talking about the Zionists. While tight media control and propaganda helped them get away with it for so long, part if was also "Oh they were so harassed and oppressed in so many places and for so long. They has a people understand the pain of oppression. They wouldn't go harm another people.)

As I have mentioned in the past being conservative is more about a way of thinking and HOW you come to your positions rather than about the positions themselves. Studies have demonstrated that conservatives have a much stronger disgust reaction than liberals. So when an idea or concept triggers a feeling of disgust they immediately assume that thing to be evil, immoral etc. . . without truly taking the time consider if it’s actually harmful(or even disgusting sometimes it’s just different) This winds up making them fearful of change and non-conforming behavior.

This feeling of disgust also makes them feel justified in certain forms of bigotry making up all manner of excuses to call whatever disgusts them immoral. Such as supposedly leftist progressives being ablelist and claiming that any disabled person is basically a child and therefore featuring disabled people having sex(fictional or live action)is no different than CSEM.

Conservatism is more often less about the specific position a person claims to hold and more about how they got to those positions, and how they intend to fix the issues and problems that they find.

Conservatives hide behind claims of free speech when they wants to spam, harass, and troll people(and often using other people's equipment such as servers to do so) And I have noticed that when people like you actually seem to care about free speech on Ao3, when you want to spam comments, troll people, and harass people using Ao3's comment features either on news posts or on people's stories.

There is a lot to criticize about Ao3's response to reports of racist harassment, and how they resolve interpersonal disputes between volunteers, however none of that can or would be resolved by them even trying to make additional content rules or attempt to ban "bad fic" Because despite what you think someone writing a bad fic, or using certain tropes(tropes are tools, tropes are not bad) is not in and of itself harassment.

And also no, Ao3 staff telling one volunteer not to harass, and abuse another and reminding them of the professional code of conduct they expect from ALL volunteers is not proof of Zionism among Ao3's staff. Pretty much everyone involved in that fight on Slack on reprimanded for it but only one went crying to the internet about it. If that had happened between a Ukrainian volunteer and Russian volunteer and the Ukrainian volunteer quit would you be accusing Ao3 of being pro-Russia?

[azhdakha]

Honestly, I'm just fucking exhausted. I've never been more dissapointed by the people who claim to be for human rights than I am now. The mental gymnastics that these people do to justify massacres of Israeli civillians is insane.

"They were settlers"

"That's a valid form of resistance"

"Israelites should have seen that coming"

"Palestinian terrorists grew up watching their dear ones die, that's why they go berserk mode"

"That's just fake"

"Well, just a few Israelites compared to thousands of Palestinians"

"Well, I'm not saying that's good, but what about Palestinians?"

"You care only when it's white people"

"The beheadings have been debunked"

Stop. Just stop, shut up, look me in the eye and listen. Not a single argument in this world justifies massacring and torturing civillians and raping women. That's not a resistance. That's not liberating anyone. Massacres are not to celebrate. Two bads doesn't make a good. And false decapitation claims do not undo more than a thousand of deaths.

The whole west has been chanting Free Palestine for ages and you claim that no one cared about them. Do you think the government officials of different countries care about the "white" Israelites? Surprise - they don't. They care about their own safety and strategic points, and Israel is a strategic force for the USA in the Middle East. Are you trying to punish USA for that? No, the ones who are targeted are Israeli people. Jewish people all over the world.

If your whole reaction to the murder of civillians is "well, akshually" or "well, that's sad, BUT", or "what about", you don't care about human rights. You care about your narrative. If you keep trying to justify terrorism and blame the responsibility on someone else, you don't care about human rights. You care about your narrative.

If you have cared about people, you would have understood that murder of a civillian is wrong, rape is wrong. Point blank. Regardless if they're white people or not. Regardless if they are from the oppressed group or not.

"The both-siders" - is your brain binary? Are you are not able to comprehend and fit any nuance in it? Realizing and aknowledging that terrorism is inhumane without trying to justify and shift the blame AND caring about the Palestinian people and being against Israeli occupation is not mutually exclusive and can coexist.

If you do realize that the ones behind the idea of creating the state of Israel and turning a blind eye or even supporting the genocide of Palestinian people are the Western states led the USA, why do you want the solution to happen at the expense of Israeli commoners and Jewish people that you direct your hate on?

Palestinian radical Islamic terrorism is wrong. Western via Israeli occupation is wrong. Point blank. Both kill hundreds of people including their own that they claim to be protecting. Point blank. No but, not what about, no actually, no its their fault, no they were provoked, no they didn't have a choice.

You can live in your world of binary solutions and idealistic fantasy dreams about justice while more and more people are killed, or you can finally be realistic just one and actually care to find a solution that's achievable and that will finally stop or at least reduce deaths of people.

You don't care about people. You care about your narrative.

And one last thing: an proof check of the materials published about the war by Bellingcat.