#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.

[gooseinchicksclothing]

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

[yallemagne]

What discourse?

Babe, go into the DD tag and you will see it. Or maybe you won't because tumbr does hide quite a lot from some users. You'll see a thousand posts angry about "THIS THING THAT WAS SAID" but you may never see the thing that was said yourself.

I have to restrain myself from going deep into the conflict. I would love to talk about the book itself, not the harsh realities of fandom drama. A very simplified version is: is Dracula sexual or is Dracula abusive? My answer is both at the same time. But this is tumlr, and you must pick a side, point at the "opposite" side, and scream out "this person is [insert horrible thing here]".

The fact that it's happening this early this year is distressing to me. I thought we'd wait a bit, but we're getting into the ad hominem already. Maybe it started happening this early last year as well but I lacked perspective back then? But I feel like since there are so many more people who read Dracula this time around, there's an old vs new divide in the fandom. And since there was a greater percentage of newbies in the first round, people were allowed to have what are now deemed "incorrect" takes then but are taking an aggressive stance toward new people who have those takes now. Am I a hypocrite to point this out considering I've made ">:0 these new folks don't even know how wrong they are!!" this year? I mean... I was making posts like that last year too... because I had already read the book.

I've also just seen people coming into DD with the express purpose of contradicting all the takes of the previous generation of readers to stir some conflict. Some of them are kind of funny because... the "Dracula did nothing wrong" angle is just frankly ridiculous.

[primiera]

adults who watch bluey:

drama addicted rando's on tumlr: STOP DOING A DISCOURSE REAND ANOTHER BOOK I AM LITERALLY SO MAD AT NOTHING RIGHT NOW!!!!11!!1!!!

[dangerousbride]

People out here getting overly butt devastated about your opinion on an outfit on a 2D fictional character is just too funny!!! They really need to crawl out of their smelly hole and get a job lol.

I’m just that relevant get on my level everyone

[alexanderpearce]

top ten tumlr discourse

was jeffrey dahmer racist or not?

[crowfeets]

me: comes back on tumlr

me: sees some discourse that triggers me super bad

me: ...........................

[prodigaisons]

I really wish I had some screenshots left from the early days of wlw discourse to kind of. show where the whole femme/butch shit started bc I feel like nowadays there’s not many ppl still on the site who were involved? like it’s not common in the same way bc the Cool Liberal Thing nowadays is to use femme as a catch all for anyone feminine looking but there was this huge thing for a while where any cis q***r woman in kink would call themselves femme and they all hated lesbians for like. existing or smth?? the whole thing was confusing bc looking back many of these women were probably being abused by the (mainly straight) men they were dating but some seemed to legit be predators considering how many followed me, a 15/16 y/o with a pink aesthetic blog who had multiple extremely nsfw kink blogs following me

and it sounds so fucking fake now bc most of those weirdos have left this site or got over their obnoxious liberal phase so now you just have a bunch of angry lesbians who were really young when this shit went down and everyone else confused bc they didn’t see it since really only lesbians gave a shit

[emgay]

like trust me as someone who uses that type of humor to cope with my mental illnesses it really does bother me when ppl i kno to be neutrotypical use that humor as well knowing full well they dont actually relate to it in the way those of us who are mentally ill do but. whatever like its not that deep

whom is actually out here actively “rejecting healthy coping mechanisms” ? not to mention op called mental illness an “avoidable mess” and said to “better your own lives” in a super condescending way like ? tht post is just....smh MESS im too tired to dissect it plus op is like 17 so 

[swarovskinipples]

a female creator/creator of color/lgbt creator: is not up to snuff on bleeding-edge progressive tumlr/twitter discourse

fandom: fucking EUTHANIZE becky sugar

a multi-million-dollar corporation: buys out every other company to establish a media monopoly, perpetuates labor rights violations and censors pro-democracy political protestors

fandom: well that's gross, but there's no ethical consumption under late capitalism anyway :/ just don't buy lootboxes and remember to pirate :)

[anarchoanarchist420]

Fresh tumlr discourse: @burn-away-the-flags--begin-again and @gunsandfireandshit are the same person

[lancevance]

it’s just so weird to me discourse is more associated with twitter now than tumlr. every other website hated tumlr and its “sjws” in the beginning and now all of that stuff they complained about is everywhere. and now nobody even mentions tumlr at all lmao

[lavide]

imagine having to put down others to feel good about yourself yikes

[takaratomy]

ps2nocturne replied to your post: tumlr user ace-johnlock-in-the-tardis whose...

nd then like 50 discourse blogs pile on

worse is everybody who tries to put like their funny snarky comments under it as if the op is a real person who will see it and get owned

[wolfsonas-blog]

i'm not here to like, literally ever speak to that scumbucket lmao, better and smarter people than me have collected screenshots and taken apart their posts to reveal the nasty undercurrent - i'm just livid because, like, and you guys know this, i was the one pushing the "scary" discourse way back in ye olde 2014, i was the one who relentlessly kept on with that when tumlr disk hors was all just destiel vs wincest, and i do hate watching someone who Literally Hangs Out With A Pedophile using concepts i wouldnt shut up about to defend their uwu besties uwu thoughtcrimes :0!!! my people - that is, people with bad impulses, fighting every day to not to the So Easy bad things, getting no reward for it but doing it every day because its the only right thing to do - arent their shield for that, no matter how ableist the other side gets. i dont want someone who gave mic time to someone who sent nudes to minors to defend me. even if the things being said are cruel, and wrong. id rather no voice spoke up than be "protected" by someone using my discrimination to protect their minor-sexting mutual. between someone who doesnt feel safe near anyone with violent impulses and someone who really doesnt see the line between stigmatized mental illnesses and wanting to fuck twelve year olds i will take the first every day from now until i die jesus fucking christ how dare they.

[thefluffybunnybabe]

all of these things are the result of the internet. discourse is disagreement on a web site, and the current discourse is "can i punch another living being if that being brings me anger"

and terfs are "youre opressing me by making attractive males look too ugly that i would stop wanting to have sex with them because im incapable of an intellectual thought"

and for some reason the owner of the aquafresh user was a nazi but only tumblr couldnt give a shit about that, because tumlr only looks for hate speech in texts, whereas twitter uses text and picture analyzing ai to find and ban hate speech tumblr is good but worse than reddit and better than facebook

this site is an experience