#tumlr discourse

[silvermare]

before i start on Tumblr Discourse™ i want to preface with the following:

I'm most likely autistic, my thinking is rigid and I am Bad at Social Rules

vampires aren't real and therefore i have thought *extremely little* about the ethics of them

sex work is real work and there is nothing unethical about people choosing to do sex work of their own accord. obviously sex trafficking is unethical as hell, survival sex work is something that shouldn't exist but does (but that's on society/government for it needing to be a thing in the first place, not the person doing sex work), but there are actually people out there that do sex work because they want to, and that's ethical as shit.

Consent is important to me. Informed consent is even *more* important to me.

I've got a lot of friends and acquaintances that are in the BDSM community and very few of them are Dom(me). Pretty much all the people I know follow Risk-Aware Consensual Kink, which means they go into a situation with the full awareness of the risk. High risk high reward or whatever, but at least they know the possible consequences.

My dad raises beef cattle. I have raised a bottle calf when I was a kid. I recognize the cattle as intelligent beings that we treat well for all their life till their last bad day when they go to freezer camp. Our thanks for their lives is treating them with kindness while they live, minimizing their suffering at the end, and not being wasteful with what we take from them. This probably affects my sense of ethics.

I grew up poor. Not "ketchup sandwich" poor, but "I saw mom cry over an overdraft notice multiple times when I was a kid", never had cable/satellite, never been to Disney anything, "vacations" were going to visit family a 12 hour drive away and my parents tag teaming driving overnight to minimize Awake Children time and also because they couldn't really afford to get a hotel room. We never went hungry, though, and community and sharing the load are values I grew up with. My dad plows the country road in the winter with the farm tractor and does other upkeep/maintenance he's uniquely qualified for, one neighbor had bees for years and we would get honey from them, another neighbor has an enormous garden and gladly shares his produce. Oh, and my dad's neighbor and also cousin also has a farm and different heavy equipment - mostly dad borrows equipment from said neighbor/cousin, but sometimes neighbor/cousin borrows something from my dad. It's truly a community. Supporting each other with what you have to give, be it time, resources, or skill, is just a way of life where I grew up.

So anyway, Stefan from the Patricia Briggs Mercyverse (as of current times) has a "flock" (for lack of better words) of humans who are aware of the risk and choose that life anyway. Some humans get power, some get freedom from a bad situation, one has her (blood) cancer kept at bay. They're people that could not be replaced by a sexy lamp in the book. They chose that life. High risk, high reward.

I'm not going to say that it's ethical for vampires to exist, because they don't exist and even if they did I feel like it would be silly (and potentially horrible) to debate the ethos of simply existing in the first place. World history kind of has a record regarding people in power debating the ethics of certain marginalized people from simply existing. Y'know. Like the Holocaust. I'm not saying that vampires are a marginalized people, I'm just saying people - humans - can't be trusted with the ability to debate the existence of really anything. The ethics of choosing to become a vampire is one thing, the ethics of simply existing another. Debate the ethics of *actions*, not existence.

As it happens in many vampire universes, Stefan does not choose to be made into a vampire. There's a whole bucketload of unethical things that happen there. But once he exists as a vampire, he's still sentient. He still has the capacity to make choices. Well, probably aside from Vampire Puberty Bullshit™ or whatever. But that's on Stefan's creator to manage. If you have a kid, it's your job as parent to teach them to not be awful and guide them into being an adult. If you acquire a dog, it is on you to teach the dog how to not be awful and take preventative measures to prevent, idk, a case of mangled mammal in your front yard. Vampires, of course, aren't real, so there is no way to know the Correct Way To Wrangle Your Fledgling. Also, this is probably controversial, but I think of humans as no better or worse than dogs or cows. If a human has something fundamentally wrong with them that they cannot exist without irrevocably harming others and giving nothing back, it is my own opinion that they should be treated like any other non-human who cannot exist without attacking/actively harming others and does not give back. Also, this is just my opinion and I do not expect others to agree with me. I also will not try to change other people's minds about it.

ANYWAY.

I'll grant you that there's a whole lot of unethical actions between Stefan's creation and current times, in-universe, but honestly? If I didn't have depression and got turned into a vampire, I'd probably still want to exist, too. Sure my entire existence requires that I consume the blood of those I use to be part of, but it doesn't require I kill them for such an act. If I wanted to exist and were transformed into a vampire, I'd probably look for people I could support - with shelter, with health, with whatever I had in my power to provide that they want or need - in exchange for feeding off them occasionally, so as to not drain any one person. Blood is a renewable resource, after all, and if your needs are not incompatible with someone else's existence, I genuinely do not see a lack of ethics in choosing to live as Stefan does - exchanging support for food, while not depending on one specific person at a time to prevent harm.

If it's poor people out there that most frequently takes advantage of vampires? The onus of ethics falls on the society that requires that to be an option in the first place, same as sex work. If the person is poor enough to revert to survival sex work or survival blood "donation", that's on society/the government for allowing this to happen in the first place. If my options were to work at <generic retail store/fast food place> or to let a vampire suck my blood a couple times a month? Vampires are only gonna take my blood, not my soul. People are awful and retail workers are underpaid, under respected, and treated horribly. (I myself worked retail for a couple years, which is why I'd choose the vampire every time. I bet lots of folk out there working retail would agree with me.)

So I guess basically vampires, generally speaking, are a pretty good analog for minimum wage retail/fast food employers. I'd call Stefan more like Costco - not commonly found outside of large metropolis areas, vastly outnumbered by predatory businesses, and treats its employees pretty well aside from still having to interact with people lmao

I know that’s kind of the go-to thing to show that a vampire character is “one of the good ones” or whatever but it actually seems a little bit more fucked up for a vampire to steal blood from a blood bank than for a vampire to attack people for blood, at least as long as it’s not the kind of vampire where a bite is instantly lethal like it never stops bleeding. 

People can recover from losing some blood but blood bank blood is constantly in short supply and is reserved for people who imminently need blood transfusion of a specific blood type or else they die.

[kickasstorrents]

discourse on tumlr in 2025 is like. If you have a vagina you are RACIST

[gooseinchicksclothing]

Hello, just joined the tumlr. Does anyone know a good place here where I could participate in some shitposts and bad discourse?