#was from the get go like the point is other men wouldn’t in rape culture but women and their victims already know

[dykedvonte]

Something something perhaps the reason Curly lacks a truly undamaged ID where his face is visible is to represent how much damage Jimmy had already affected on him throughout their relationship and the way Curly obscured part of who he is and what he stood to unintentionally cater to this toxic influence in his life.

[theweeklydiscourse]

Why is nuance dieing?

The younger generation seems to be so much more obsessed with moral puritanism in fiction and irdk why. Could it be because kids these days don't interact with real people and are just chronically online so they repeat what they see on the internet?

Actually saw someone saying people who like fictional bad boys are the reason why men get away with sa & rape irl and countries are criminalizing abortion...

It's just so depressing to see that. This line of thinking is scary actually.

I don't remember people going this mad over morals when shows and movies like Vampire Diaries and Twilight saga were huge. It's like people have regressed.

The media we consume is becoming more and more didactic as we enter an age where it seems like every piece of popular media is obsessed with delivering their messages and themes like an after school PSAs. Media is becoming increasingly more sanitized and “family friendly” to appeal to the broadest possible audience to create more and more profits for corporations. This obsession with sanitized fiction has become commonplace with many younger people who parrot what they see online and on the media they consume and proceed to deliver underdeveloped takes on subjects they don’t fully understand yet.

It becomes even more interesting when people point to fictional narratives as the cause for societal problems when there are already larger institutions that have historically been responsible for what they claim fiction causes. They displace the blame for societal ills like SA, abuse, patriarchal violence and misogynistic legislation onto fiction, fan fiction and media that explores taboo subject matter. While I don’t deny that fiction has power, 90% of the time these people have no idea of the ways literary works influence our culture and default to a 1:1 “monkey see, monkey do” explanation for why people must consume the “correct media”.

Another factor is the way that people have become accustomed to moralizing their content consumption. They have convinced themselves that they need a concrete and righteous justification for their likes and dislikes and this has ruined the way fandom interacts with literature, film and other art forms. With this in mind, they can no longer dislike or even hate something without creating some moral justifications for why “hating this thing is actually progressive and righteous!” and in the process, conflate consumerism with activism.

The comparison to Puritanism is quite fitting in this case. After all, the principles of that religion were based in purity, obedience and censorious beliefs for self-indulgences and we can draw comparisons with the way people online discuss certain subjects. There’s a phenomenon where people will say something along the lines of: “It’s alright to like (insert problematic character here)! But you need to acknowledge that they are a bad person.” To them, it seems like a gesture at fairness and magnanimity when in reality, it is an attempt at exerting unearned moral authority over the tastes of others. It is a demand that a person proves their moral innocence to them in a performative manner that validates their need to feel superior. But it’s all performative purity because even if a person did explain/justify their fictional tastes, these people wouldn’t care and would continue to demand purity from others.

People can’t even discuss certain characters anymore without running into people accusing them of being terrible people who would approve of real-life violence and abuse. And I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t always like this, when did it change?

[vouam]

just found this guy’s answer to a question on quora (“is misandry a problem in the US?” or something of that nature) and was wondering what your reaction to it would be. there are some points i wouldn’t be sure how to refute, though it’s certainly not enough to change my radfem beliefs lol. i’ll copy and paste it since i can’t send ss in anon

Q:“is misandry prevalent in today’s society?”

A:“I would say so.

Woman: doesn't want a child so she secretly aborts it.

Man: doesn't want a child and is forced to pay child support for 18 years while being ridiculed as a dead beat dad

Woman: my body, my choice

Man: has his genitals forcibly mutilated for no good reason at birth

Woman: free drinks at the club on ladies night

Man: there is no men's night. Drink prices increase to cover all the free drinks ladies get

Woman: oh please keep yourself safe

Man: forced to sign up for selective services (a.k.a. draft) at 18.

Woman: complains about low paying job

Men: 67% of work place injuries happen to men, 93% of work place fatalities happen to men. No one bats an eye

Woman: mostly automatically given custody of children no matter what

Men: you can see your children on the weekend only and pay for child support

Man: simply accused of abusing a woman and goes straight to jail.

Woman: beats the man senseless and if the man defends himself goes to jail. If he doesn't defend himself he still might go to jail or if he is lucky police will tell him to quit making a big deal about it. Has 1 place in the country to go to for sheltering battered men despite the fact that women are the perpetrators of domestic violence some 40% of the time. Woman, have countless battered women shelters to go to.

Man: gets raped by woman at gun point being forced to give oral sex and held captive for days. Society has a good laugh

Woman: gets raped and her perpetrator is rightfully punished. No one is laughing about it. Woman gets psychological help and all kinds of assistance from society. Also if she makes false accusations of rape, ruining a man's life, no one says a thing about it and she is free to go on accusing.

Men: penalties for the same crime as women are much longer sentences.

Men: comprise 60 some % of homeless population

Men: comprise of a majority of suicides

I could go on but it's only going to anger the feminazis more and more”

reading crap like this makes me so mad tbh, like i understand moids don’t have easy lives just because they’re moids but GOOD FUCKING GRIEF it’s like they just can’t fucking get enough of acting like society wasn’t built by men for men. 🙏🙏 sorry it just gets me upset. anyway love ur blog!!

Oooof this is a really great ask so thank you for sending this in! I guess I’ll approach this by answering each one individually (although I might repeat myself)

Men pay child support while women can just have an abotion

This is a very strange argument. Because firstly not every country has fully legal abortions. 47 countries only allow it for health reasons, 43 to save the mother’s life and 22 it is fully illegal. A lot of men like this seem to forget that there are other countries on this planet. I’d personally rather be the gender that has to pay child support for an unwanted baby. Even in the case of legal abortions, abortions are not easy to go through. It is mentally very difficult and can be an invasive procedure. Women are shamed for having abortions in every country, even the most ‘accepting’ places.

Circumcision

I am very against circumcision and this was probably his most valid point(?) But his point excludes the fact that FGM is practiced in many countries and cultures. And while male circumcision is usually done for religious reasons claiming its ‘hygienic’ and has little to no bad side effects while FGM can kill women and girls, and is done for far more malicious reasons that I can’t even begin to describe.

Men’s drinks night

Does he know the implications of what ‘buying a woman a drink’ means?? Yeah, I’d much rather be a man in this situation 😭

Drafted at 18

I am against anyone being drafted, and I’m against any military work period. But men made this rule because they deem men to be brave and strong - a stereotype designed to benefit them.

Work place injuries and fatalities

Most injuries and fatalities happen with manual labour, construction/factory work etc. Same stereotype as listed in the point before this.

Custody over children

Again, this happens due to a stereotype that benefits men. Women are ‘better parents/nurturing’ while men are not and should go out there and work and achieve their goals while women stay at home. Literally designed to benefit men. Also, a lot of men view the custody struggle as a privilege because they cannot be bothered to be fathers.

Going to prison because of a simple accusation and less abuse shelters for men

This is the craziest point because men do not go to prison over some random accusation pulled out from thin air. In order to accuse someone of abuse, you need extensive indisputable evidence. Even then, the police will not take it seriously or the defence will win the case for whatever reason. These are the hardest crimes to prove in a court and the statistics show this. Less abuse shelters for men because they are far FAR less likely to be a victim. Yes, its’s sad but this literally proves misogyny is a thing rather than misandry - because I know damn well which sex I’d rather be in this instance.

People laugh at male rape victims and women are given full support/legal justice

I addressed this in the previous point. Women are ridiculed and not believed/not given justice at an extremely higher rate than men.

Longer male prison sentences

Same stereotype that I’ve said before about being stronger/braver vs weak/nurturing. The stereotype was made to benefit them. Also this ignores that a lot of the time there are other aspects to a crime that result in a higher sentence given. For example 1st degree murder done for financial motive vs sexual motive.

Larger male homeless population and male suicide rate

I guess this is more of a question of why men are more likely to be homeless or commit suicide. Make suicide rate studies suggest it’s harder for men to admit mental health struggles/reach out for help. Again, it’s sad but the strong brave stereotype was designed to benefit them, like I’ve said before. Permanent homelessness is largely due to addiction, mental health, childhood poverty, financial crisis, loss of relationships to family/partner. These can all happen to women, except a lot of the female homeless population are trafficked, resort to prostitution, enter abusive relationships to escape the streets. In a lot of countries, people seem to think its 99% men that are homeless, but its usually not. You just typically only see male homeless people sitting/sleeping on the street in public spaces - that’s a more terrifying place for a woman to be compared to a man.

—

I guess this guy’s main problems is that he:

- Thinks USA/Europe/western countries are the only places that exist

- Can’t see that bad things that happen to men are actually a result of stereotypes designed to benefit the male population

- Makes up statistics in his head that aren’t true

- Has a crazy victim complex

- Can’t see that the women’s position in his scenario is actually worse

I hope this helps with any future debates and refutes! And I hope I explained myself well enough 😭

[manikas-whims]

Recently, I'm seeing a rise in the most awful misinterpretations of some characters in Six of Crows, so I'm gonna address how wrong they are.

Before I start: if you haven't said any of what I'm going to mention here, then it means I'm not pointing fingers at you. Don't take offense for something you didn't do.

Now I'm gonna try to keep it as short as possible...

Part 1

"I don't think Inej loves Kaz." "Inej doesn't love Kaz as much as he does her." "Inej is ignorant." bla bla bla...

A cousin of mine (15 yo) read the books and said the same things as above.

I asked her what does love mean to her and she responded it meant "two people showing their emotions by acts like kisses, cuddles, etc." and "by being together with that person by the end of the story".

Obviously, that's not all to love. Younger audiences tend to not take note of the faint nuances the same way grownups do. Its just like watching disney movies and only later realising the ambiguous meanings in certain dialogues. But we can't simply say that age plays a major factor here.

While SoC is a YA novel and aimed for age groups 13-17 mostly, many adults enjoy the books.

I myself read the books this year (23 yo) and my perception of love is different from my cousin's. Love isn't simply an emotion or feeling or gestures. LOVE IS WORK. It requires both the parties involved to put in equal effort.

And so, when Inej says "I will have you without armor." , she isn't being ignorant at all. She does mean it in the literal sense. But also more than that. Inej is an honest person and says whats on her mind freely. She expects the same honesty in return. She says this dialogue because while Kaz seems to know a good amount about her— her full real name, how she was taken to Ketterdam and sold to Tante Heleen, etc. Inej knows nothing about him, not even his real name. The first thing she learns about him is that he had a brother and a vague "i had a lot of things."

And even with things Kaz doesn't know about her, she's ready to share. She tells him that it was easy for her to entirely dissociate when seeing her clients but she couldn't do it with one guy, the guy who'd seen her perform on the high wire as a kid. She shares this deep, awful experience with him and says its not easy for her either. In doing so, being honest about her past, she encourages him to take a step as well. To try and be a little honest about himself, share a small part of himself. She wants him to put some effort into their relationship because a simple "i want you" isn't enough. They both need to work on a lot of things to reach that "i want you". SHE ISN'T IGNORANT.

Later on, Inej realises, she can't ask so much honesty of Kaz because that one bathroom scene is an eye opener for both of them. She realises that she may have handled that kiss on the neck but what if she couldn't have? What if she had dissociated on instinct, as her defense mechanism? What if? Kaz adds to all that when he tells her to take the money and leave, forget him. But does she do that? NO. She thinks whether it would be better for her to find a kind man, bear his children and then sharpen her knives at night. And she realizes she doesn't want that because she can only be her true self (a kind woman who wields knives) with Kaz. She can only be her genuine self with Kaz. She thinks "he'd tried, they'd tried. They could try again." She wants to try again with Kaz. SHE WANTS HIM JUST AS MUCH.

Now for a moment, lets consider the other female character in SoC— Nina Zenik. We all call her an "Unapologetic Queen" for being herself, being proud of her body proportions and such. But if Nina was a woman of color, would she get the same hype? Don't say "Yes" because we know that won't be the case. Nina wouldn’t get the same hype for her plus sized representation if she was a poc.

And this, I'm speaking as a Desi. I know what I face in real life from people of other cultures. I've experienced a lot of stereotypes about myself as a South Asian woc. And while not everyone treats me the same, I do encounter alot of obvious stereotypical assumptions about myself.

Similarly, so many people when they read the "I will have you without armor" dialogue, completely stop looking further into Inej. Age factor is very miniscule. Most of this, whether you like it or not, stems from the internalized stereotype that "brown girls are mean and insensitive". Thats how we've typically seen them portrayed in majority of media and that's where many readers' thoughts immediately head to when they read the "without armor" dialogue. Those of you who say the quoted things mentioned at the top, don't bother to look as deeply into Inej's perspective as you do for Kaz or Nina or the others. You simply settle for calling her ignorant.

Did you ever give her more thought instead of reducing her to the stereotypical brown girl?

Did you ever consider that this girl has her own demons? That this girl was captured forcefully and sold into prostitution at 14!? That this girl sometimes even gets scared of touches from her own friends? That this girl finds it harder to handle contact that she doesn't see coming? That she suffered abuse and was rewarded with kindness by the same hands that touched her at the Menagerie!? That at some point she just fearfully anticipated for whatever was to come, be it a gentle caress or a harsh slap across her cheek? That this girl was raped again and again and again every single day when she was only 14? That she was violated and touched in places too private without her consent? That she was continuously treated so by men twice, thrice, even four times her age!?

Did you ever consider that this girl who struggles with so much didn't let her suffering define her!? That she rises above these atrocities and finds a purpose!? That she chooses to pursue her own goals and save any other kids from whatever horrid things she went through!?

Did you ever consider that despite everything this girl suffered at the hands of innumerable people, she wants to try again with Kaz?

For a girl like her to let Kaz kiss her neck completely unguarded (she doesn't have her knives with her in that scene)..to still be able to give her heart to Kaz, is a very beautiful thing. It means she trusts him so much more than she'll ever trust any other person..

Everyone expresses themselves in different ways. Thats what makes each human so unique. Just because Inej isn't saying poetic things in her pov chapters, doesn't mean she loves Kaz any less.

Inej Ghafa loves Kaz Brekker. And she always will. But her love doesn't mean she must give up on her own purpose. Kaz doesn't ask her to. And she doesn't ask Kaz to give up his position as the new King of the Barrel. They're equals who support each other in their goals. They're two people in love who will take their baby steps towards healing together.

Inej and Kaz love each other.

Inej and Kaz are together.

Inej isn't ignorant, just misread.

Rant over for now. Next I'll be talking about Matthias Helvar..:)

[mithliya]

I think you're right. I'm from the US and there's nothing inherently different about the men here that would warrant singling out MOC as worse misogynists. It manifests differently and its toned down a bit but I think that's only because feminists who were mocked and hated as radicals, fought tooth and nail for the most basic of our rights, which are being stripped by religious extremists and misogynists here too. We have child marriage, and revenge porn, and rape culture, and femicide, and domestic violence, and sexual abuse, and abortion bans, son preferences, and pedophilia, and patriarchal religious extremism here too.

Idk, I don't want to be insensitive to women who are worse off and I'm not trying to make it seem like I don't enjoy a great many privileges as a white woman from the US, but I guess my point is more that to say that I have a better life here because white men are inherently more civilized or something is false and also discounts the achievements that feminists have fought so hard for.

that last point exactly! women have it better in various western country because their country was already in a good state due to having a decent democracy and a strong feminist movement. if it weren’t for the feminists that fought for women in the US, or the UK, or whatever other western country.. things really wouldn’t be any better. we still see hints of the same misogyny that existed before at higher rates & more extreme ways in the west, but due to the work of feminists, a lot of it has now been outlawed and thus men are afraid to try the same shit. but go see how these men act when their misogyny isn’t punishable. go look at men like andrew tate who boast about going to other countries because they know they will get away with their misogyny more. men are the same ultimately. there’s just some who face consequences and some who don’t.

[antiloreolympus]

7 Anti LO Asks

1. Do you know what really gets my blood boiling about this comic? Persephone and Demeter's relationship.

In the myths, Demeter and Persephone loved each other more than anything. Their reunion is so important - it marked the coming of spring and growth. A whole cult was dedicated to this for crying out loud. Yes, the myths were far from perfect, but the Persephone and Demeter myth showed the strength of a loving mother-daughter relationship with Demeter searching endlessly to find her child that was ripped away and had her innocence forcibly taken.

Now, RS is not the only author to make Demeter this over-bearing mother type in order to put more positivity onto the Hades-Persephone relationship. However, RS takes this trend to a whole new level - to the point where I would even consider it misogyny.

How is it, she takes this beautiful mother-daughter relationship and makes it out to be an abusive and controlling one, and then takes the Hades-Persephone relationship from a forceful one to a loving, perfect relationship with no problems? How is it ok to ruin one relationship to elevate another?

I understand that many versions of the myth try to downplay Hades' actions, and even make it so Persephone actually falls in love with him and there is no rape. But it doesn't change that this relationship was problematic, and meant to represent the loss of innocence.

Then fans have the gall to claim this comic is feminist and then claim on top of that that Demeter and Persephone's relationship was the same in the myth? These fans clearly don't know the myths, and neither does RS.

Making Hades a good person is fine. Changing it up a bit to make Persephone's loss of innocence something else is also fine. But ruining Demeter and Persephone's relationship? Especially when Persephone has to spend half the year with her? So horrible. 

2. im sorry, but rachel cant introduce KRONOS coming back and then dropping it for several episodes to focus on a stake-less trail and persephone not knowing what lingerie to seduce hades in. like thats too much of an earth shaking development and huge stake plot point to just ignore for months to focus instead on something as minor as hxp's relationship, which only points out a huge flaw: why is hxp's relationship so minor in this? isnt the whole point supposed to be about them?

3. I think LO completely dropped the ball over Hades’ characterization. 

From the first ep I thought ok, this is good, we have some bones to see he’s not that lucky in love and is just tired and lonely, and while ignoring the creepy actions towards Persephone, I thought ok, Artemis hates him, Hestia hates, even Ares hates him, maybe once Persephone finally sees the underworld and probably gets to know him it’ll be a clever twist and they’ll be proven wrong. The underworld will turn out to be fair and just, the citizens will love Hades, he’ll be revealed to be a good leader and king and not like his brothers, it’ll be like everyone saying Hades of myth isn’t actually that bad, and it’ll help reinforce why this sweet and bubbly Persephone wants him, she sees the real him, not the mean rumors and assumptions, this is perfect.

And then it just didn’t happen. The exact opposite happened, actually.

We’re shown the LO underworld is cruel and unjust, where the poor dead are forced into slavery and Hades created a harsh class divide with him and him only on top, the citizens hate him, the underworld gods don’t trust him and openly seem ok if he’s taken out of power, he’s not a good leader and king and doesn’t even want the job yet keeps it for his own ego and grip of power m, and on top of it all he is just like his brothers, if not worse. He loves to get violent over any little slight against him, he hoards wealth and resources to enrich himself while his citizens starve and struggle to survive, he’s corrupt, he controls all the media and laws to bend to his will, sleeps with his brothers wife for centuries behind his back while claiming to be holier than thou, he has sex with his secretaries who are made dependent on him for any way to survive, and now he lusts after his barely legal intern who is also now dependent on him for her way to survive, and that’s only what I remember off the top of my head.

LO perfectly set up to prove Hades isn’t the devil or the false pop culture assumption that he’s evil and to show some actual facts from myth, and yet Rachel only ended up reinforcing exactly that and even making him even worse with her made up ideas, all while thinking having Persephone ignore or excuse it somehow makes it not bad or even a good thing. It’s honestly kind of impressive just how bad of writing that actually is. 

4. Chapter 172 is not that interesting. It’s setup had me excited to see Hephaestus and Hera and learning more about echo, but it’s cut so short. Because again the story can’t leave HXP out for 2 seconds.

I can also see why Zeus is gonna go insane. 

5. i agree w/ other anon. LO should have pulled a PJO or a BoZ and just made up OCs and have them interact with the gods than whatever Rachel thinks shes doing, which is lying she's being accurate and faithful while completely changing all of it, removing what is needed, and adding what isnt so that it lines up with no actual myth besides like, various 50 shades fanfic she read in 2015 and some popular tumblr text posts.

6 . the animation studio behind blood of zeus literally can only draw one face for the men and one face for the women and they were still able to make the gods all look distinct and hot while LO can't even bother to use more than 6 colors and can only have the women look as tiny as possible with the biggest boobs while the men are all just lego men.

7. ////FP SPOILERS////

Okay so like I stopped reading LO way back before season 1 ended, and a majority of my knowledge of the series comes from what I read here on your blog which is enough for me lol and I decided to read the latest 5 chapters just to see what's up (on zahard. I refuse to give the actual series any views)

And I just. Could not take the whole scene with Daphne running from Apollo seriously? The anatomy and art inconsistency was so distracting that i genuinely could not find it serious. Even when Thanatos discovers her hibernated body I couldn't take it seriously because of how she looked?

And when Hades had that call (??? Was it a call? Or his inner dialogue? I couldn't really tell ngl) with Zeus and said he's causing Persephone unnecessary distress, and that she didn't pose any threat. B!tch??? She killed a ton of mortals??? She has no control over her powers???? She's literally a fugitive for the aforementioned things??? She apparently woke Kronos up? (Idk if anyone knows about that, again my knowledge only spans to whatever I read here) Hello????

And I have a lot to say about the chapters starting the trial but I'll only mention one thing; Hades saying "I don't think blindly supporting my little brother would be doing him any favours (as a ruler)" had me cackling. This is coming from a guy blindly supporting a girl he's literally only known for a few weeks, who's like what, only recently turned 20? Sit tf down Hades you're not cool, you creepy ass overgrown smurf.

Overall I still hate this series lmao. Regarding art though I feel like I wouldn't be so miffed about the anatomy much if the character designs were consistent and the story was compelling. They literally change hairstyles and body types frame by frame, and it's distracting.

The timeline from what I read here is laughable. 4 years in publication with almost 200 chapters and you're telling me only like a month has passed canonically. That's wild and such poor writing.

And as someone who literally will sympathise with any lead character pretty quickly, the story makes me hate them. It makes me want to root against them. I also hate the fact this trash is somehow top ranked on webtoons when so many other stories are far better then it.

Anyway, many thanks to this blog for existing and allowing me to dump so much text here to vent out my hate for this series lmao. You the mvp fam, hope you're having a good day 🥂🥂🥂

[ms-demeanor]

Some meandering thoughts about jokes about rape and cultural changes in the last decade and a half

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad we’re in a place now where we DO question rape jokes and it would be much harder to get away with “raping Jonah Hill is incredibly amusing” as the center of a scene the way that you could in 2007-2013 but I do kind of feel like we don’t talk about how sudden that change was enough.

People talk about how you should have always known that awful things are awful but if you’re surrounded by rape jokes and pedophilia jokes all the time and that’s what’s funny to the other kids around you and the adults in your lives and what makes up the jokes in the movies you watch then it’s hard to act like you always knew it was wrong.

Dead baby jokes were a HUGE thing when I was a teen and in my early twenties and sitting around swapping dead baby jokes was just a thing we did, and tossed in among them were things like:

A joke about incest with the punchline “Get off me pa, you’re crushing my smokes.”

This joke about a pedophile murdering a child.

Let’s not turn this rape into a murder.

And hell, look at the activity graph for “soap on a rope” on urban dictionary:

2014 starts a significant taper.

Letterboxd has their “sexual assault against men played for comedy page” and if you sort by release date there’s a downward trend with 2014 as a really stand-out year for rape jokes about men in popular movies:

2010 - 10

2011 - 12

2012 - 14

2013 - 12

2014 - 18 (jesus, which includes a prison rape joke in “Paddington”)

2015 - 9

2016 - 9

2017 - 11

2018 - 15

2019 - 4

2020 - 1

(this is of course with the caveat that this is only what has been documented so far)

Shock porn sites used to be a thing and they used to be a COMMON thing. A thing that would get remixed and have late night hosts make jokes about them and that got parody music videos.

So on the one hand I was really glad that in 2010 the hacker conference WASN’T asking me to make a rape joke on their tee shirt, but since Pool 2 Girl came up at every single “this is what defcon is about” discussion and some of the guys from the con had printed up “lemonparty.org” stickers to slap up around town it wouldn’t have been *surprising* if they’d been asking for that.

If you were a teenager in 2005 would you have known how much of a dick move goatse-ing people was? We didn’t have the same culture of trigger warnings (not that I disapprove of trigger warnings, they are good and I like them) and there was very much an attitude online at the time of “if you can’t handle it log off.”

I think the fappening was the turning point for a lot of this stuff - I think that was a big cultural moment that changed a lot of people’s attitudes really quickly and I’m seeing echos of that with what Chris Evans is dealing with right now: people are a lot faster to say “oh, that sucks, don’t be an asshole, report people for posting the pics” while I remember sitting and arguing in an imgur thread because there were a bunch of people saying “if you don’t like it don’t take nudes” about the celebrities who got caught in the icloud leak.

People look at Shane Dawson’s (admittedly gross and incredibly inappropriate) behavior with a poster of Willow Smith and act like it’s unprecedented***** but as someone who remembers not only Olsen Eighteenth Birthday countdowns but ALSO the jokes about fucking the Olsen twins that came BEFORE they were legal that’s just bizarre. Seeing people my age and older react to James Gunn’s pedophilic twitter jokes like they’re worse than Jay Leno’s jokes about Michael Jackson (which were made on TV! Across America! On a major network!) is just. It’s bizarre.

I’m glad we are where we are now, I’m glad that making rape jokes in public or jokes about incest or pedophilia (or murder or abortion) is less common and less okay (especially in children’s media, jesus fuck) and more likely to get criticized.

But I’m also pretty sure I’m going to get called a rape apologist by *someone* for saying “2010 was a different time, rape jokes were more common and we didn’t realize how shitty it was” when it really was a different time and rape jokes were more common and most people didn’t realize how shitty it was. I sure didn’t. I do now, and I’m glad I do now. But pretending that we should have ALWAYS known this, pretending that this was NEVER acceptable, pretending that it WASN’T a different time is ignoring the fact that for over a decade there was an entire genre of pedophilic rape jokes (that were frequently also racist) centered around one celebrity and that people told these jokes in public and in pop culture *all the time.*

Does that make it right? Fuck, I don’t know, shit is relative. It was still largely acceptable to electrocute gay kids and people tossed around the word “faggot” pretty freely. Mean Girls is full of jokes about how awful it is for people to think you’re a lesbian and Superbad is full of jokes about getting people shitfaced so they’ll sleep with you (so date rape) and there’s an entire “cute comedy” from the 80s starring Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn that’s an extended rape-by-fraud joke. I think that as a whole we’re better now as people than we were in 2010 and the 90s and the 80s and the 50s and I don’t think that someone who made a sexist joke in the 80s is irredeemably evil and I don’t think people making rape jokes in the 2010s are rape apologists in 2020 and I wish there was a lot more understanding of both history and nuance in these conversations.

*****to be very, very clear Shane Dawson has been filmed kissing underage fans on the mouth and having explicit sexual conversations with his very young cousin - Dawson has done things that go beyond “inappropriate” and fall clearly into “wrong” “bad” “dangerous” “illegal” etc, which is all the more reason that it’s so strange to see people focusing on him fake masturbating on a poster of Willow Smith. YES doing that was gross but why is it even being compared to the way he’s been filmed interacting with fans? The lack of nuance, making “fake masturbating at a poster” and “creating a sexually abused puppet character” the same as “inappropriately touched and kissed minor fans and engaged a young child in explicit sexual conversations” is NOT GOOD. That is a bad thing. Two of those things are tasteless and two of those things are actively harmful and it’s the actively harmful stuff that we should be focusing on and part of why it’s really weird to see shit like “pizzagate conspiracist accuses James Gunn of making inappropriate jokes” like yes Gunn please don’t but can we maybe refocus and talk about the dude who can be pretty significantly assigned blame for a fucking shooting? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/james-gunn-alt-right-marvel-film-director-tweets

Actually, you know what, I thought I was done ranting, I’m not.

It’s purity culture.

YES you should attempt to do less harm with your language, YES you should attempt to not use slurs, YES you should try to avoid making rape jokes. But there’s an entire huge group of people who are willing to drag up rape jokes from a decade when rape jokes were REALLY REALLY common in order to say that nothing you say or do today matters.

And that same group is ALSO really interested in expanding the concept of what pedophilia is to include age differences in adults or liking the wrong style of drawing and it’s a purity culture silencing tactic and can we PLEASE stop pretending that gross, tasteless jokes are the same thing as actually sexually abusing people? Can we stop pretending that pointing out “rape jokes were more common fifteen years ago and I feel bad about it but that’s just the way it was and I don’t make jokes like that anymore” is the same as saying “rape isn’t bad and you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

It’s always good to try to be a less shitty human but if you’re only allowed to grow and improve and be less shitty if you never fucked up in the first place then it’s all just calvinist bullshit and none of us could ever really be saved in the first place.

I dunno, dudes. We got so careful about disapproving of the wrong kind of language that we let a white supremacist concern troll Disney into firing a director who caught the attention of the alt right by shit-talking the president.

I think perhaps we need to reexamine some strategy here.

[hereliescorri]

On Barbarian and hating things

I found this movie deeply disappointing, but also everyone is loving it so I don’t want to yuck everybody’s yum by going off about it. But that just means I can’t talk about it. And then I realized, wait, I have a blog no one reads that I made specifically just to talk about and remember my thoughts, feelings and experiences.

So yeah.

This movie was disappointing as fuck. And when I saw it in the theater, I REALLY tried to convince myself I was enjoying it — a thing I do when, a) I was super excited about something and don’t want to acknowledge I had a bad time, and b) know that not liking it is going to put me at odds with other people. Despite how it may come across, it makes me deeply uncomfortable to hate things that other people like. Or, to be more precise, to hate things other people like when I don’t feel like we can talk about it. The cool mix of neurodivergence and childhood trauma from an abusive household means that I feel the need to explain myself so I don’t seem like an asshole… but most people find it asshole-ish if you expand on why you don’t like a thing. Then they feel like you’re telling them they’re dumb or wrong, when really it’s an attempt at explaining your feelings. And that whole childhood thing makes me super paranoid about my feelings, too, since mine were never valid, and having any would get me yelled at or punished. So, bit of a double-edged sword. I feel the need to explain myself when I hate something so I can be understood, but I also think everyone hates me and is mad at me if I explain myself when I hate something.

All that to say, the whole movie I had that sinking feeling that I wasn’t having a good time, but deeply NEEDED to so I wouldn’t have to tell everyone I hate another movie they like.

But it was ass.

The lead makes the dumbest decisions possible at every single point in this movie. You get one or two bad decisions to move a plot along. If the plot relies on a character always doing the thing no person would actually do, FOH. There is no peril in this movie that Tess does not cause herself. And once I’m at the point where I’m like, this person has chosen poorly too many times, I do not care whether they live or die. I remember there being a moment where I crossed over into that, where I was just like, “Fuck’s sake. Kill her then.”

The movie tries to say something about men and misogyny I guess, but it feels thown in. Like they wrote a movie and then were like, oh wait, everything needs a blatant message now. It’s about… rape culture? But it’s not about rape culture. While Justin Long’s character is a vile casual rapist who gets his comeuppance, the monster in the film is a victim of generations of rape and incest that leave her deformed and unable to speak. We’re supposed to see her as grotesque. The sagging breasts, the barren gums, the bulbous belly. How terrifying, the body of a severely abused and disabled woman! (I’ve seen The Shining and IT btw, so you’re gonna hafta go harder than that to shock me) What’s worse, we get the classic rape reversal, where we get catharsis from seeing a rapist be sexually violated by having her gross tit shoved in his mouth. We’ve been criticizing movies for the casual sexual assault of men for ages, and yet here it is going all Wedding Crashers on us.

As a side note, I find it very corny that the movie is called Barbarian and all she can say is “bar bar bar bar.” If you’re familiar with the etymology of the word barbarian, it’s said to have come from the ancient Greeks not being able to understand foreigners and thinking their languages sounded like “bar bar bar bar.” Perhaps we’re supposed to take something out of that about how she’s just misunderstood, but I suspect they just thought they were being clever. After all, I know that because I’m a nerd. I can’t imagine they expect the audience to make that connection.

Anyway, there’s also some kind of commentary about urban blight here that is completely stranded, with a little ACAB side quest as well. And while cops and urban blight are bad, they have nothing to do with anything in this movie. I suppose it just gives a reason why this woman would be able to wander the neighborhood. And to let us know this is happening, we’re introduced to an expository Black man; a wise and all-knowing homeless dude who exists solely to tell us what’s going on and then be unceremoniously ripped to pieces in a jump scare. Booooo. Not here for it.

In that scene we’re also told that she’s not the worst thing down there, which leads to anticipation of an even bigger big bad. What kind of showdown could we be in for?? None. No showdown. No bigger big bad. Turns out the abusive rapist dad is down there, but he’s on his deathbed, and instead of being a threat, as soon as we meet him, he kills himself. Okay? Again, I can maybe see what they were going for — the guy who made the monster is worse than the monster. But we’re promised escalation, and it never comes. If he’d been dead already, it would have changed nothing about the movie. This is also why the flashback feels like an afterthought, and one that doesn’t work. Sure, I can get behind the idea that our monster is misunderstood, and she’s become this way as a result of horrific abuse. But this movie doesn’t have the tone to pull that off. Everything is framed as funny and/or shocking. There is nothing in the tone until the very last scene to even vaguely humanize the monster. I have seen only one person come out of this movie talking about receiving a moving message from it. The vast majority of responses are HOLY FUCK THAT WAS INSANE! The tone of the movie tells you you should be grossed out, you should cringe, you should laugh. So the idea that it’s saying something profound about abuse and the unheard is just silly. Especially since she still gets ganked in the end.

I think the best execution of any of the themes in the movie is when AJ throws Tess off the tower to save himself. That is his character. That is a perfect encapsulation of all the cancel culture dweebs who claim to be very sorry and to have changed and then are mad when everyone doesn’t take them back with open arms. It’s absolutely what a guy like him would do, and for a movie to go there is both surprising and hilarious. You can’t help but startle laugh. Why wasn’t this the focus of the movie? Why explain the monster? Why try to tackle a half dozen other social issues? Why do we even need Tess’s job interview? Simply to go, “Oh, white people. Always scared of the city?” So, so much unnecessary message that bogs down the movie.

And all so we can watch a severely abused woman die. Pass. The hardest of passes.

So when the movie ended I was like, “It’s fine! Three stars!” But I was lying to myself for all the reasons I outlined above. I don’t think Barbarian is good or fine. I think it’s shit. And I think it’s okay that I think it’s shit. And it’s okay that it worked for other people. But when you’re used to people being dicks about disagreement, or feeling like you’re attacking them personally, or perhaps worst of all, dimissing you outright, it can feel like it’s not okay. Probably some film PhD anger lingering there, too, with dudes constantly telling me I was wrong or had childish taste for not liking their artsy bullshit.

Having a podcast where I can disagree with someone has been helpful and therapeutic in some ways, and I’ve got a wider circle of people I feel like I can chat about these things with without judgment. Still, sometimes I worry that everyone just sees me as some know-it-all who has to be right, and that’s not the character I’m trying to play.

[fromthefishbowl]

Can you elaborate on how they don’t see Marwan as a person please ?

Okay, so... here's the thing: most, if not all, the people who claim to be constantly working against racism in fandom are, themselves, so fucking racist it's incredible. Racist and xenophobic and antisemitic and overcompensating like hell because they know they're shitty people but actually working through their problems is too hard so they have to pretend it's the others, who are racist and xenophobic and antisemitic.

They pretend to like Marwan because they can use him as a prop for their internet wokeness and virtue signalling, and they pretend to care about racism in fandom spaces because it's one of the easiest ways to gain attention and followers. But we all have seen what they do when one of them is outed as being actually racist to the point of using racial slurs against MENA people: they fall into silence and make excuses and then get mad when people won't let them move on as if nothing happened because they think they didn't do anything wrong ever. Sending death threats, rape threats, insults, harassment, writing slurs against the people they pretend to be campaigning for... all this shit is normal, to them.

Their attitude towards people like Marwan pops out when they interact with actual MENA and Muslim people: they belittle them, insult them, send them links to articles written by white Americans about how to discuss Islam.

Just look at how they write Nicky: they perceive him as "white" - lmao - so they use him as the token racist character that can embody their dumb thoughts about Joe/Marwan - which... again, it's incredible how xenophobic these people are too. Like, it's clear that they are in this fandom because "brown man give us brown points uwu" and they couldn't give a shit about any of the characters, not even Joe, because if they actually cared they wouldn't have propped up an artist who draws him a thousand shades darker than how he actually is -. So Nicky, the character who is canonically always shown as being head over heels for Joe, turns into a racist, ignorant gremlin uncaring of his husband's culture and who doesn't respect him.

Like... even the whole debacle of "if Nicky rapes Joe it's fine because colonialism" is so fucking stupid. These people just like to imagine Joe/Marwan being abused. It's a fetish they turned into morality. Like... it's fine if you want to be fucked by Luca, you don't have to make up a discourse around it. You're fine with the thought of being dicked down by Chris Evans, you should be fine with the thought of being dicked down by Luca Marinelli too. Literally the only difference is that you're xenophobic and it really shows.

But to go back to Marwan... I was talking about it with a fandom friend, and they said that they like to "defang" him and his characters: they are scared of him, so they need to neuter him, take away from him any characteristics that make him """big""" and """scary""". It really says something, the fact that Len the Defender of the Weak Moroccan People and Undiscussed Maghrebi Princess, in that long ass post about how much of a victim she is, talked about MENA men being dangerous thugs and used Majid as inspiration: she couldn't make him defenseless and small and uwu, because Majid is aggressive, hot headed, a criminal - which... what a fucking shallow read of his character, my god - so he scared her and was the first thought when she came up with the idea of "lemme write a woe is me post and include how dangerous and unruly the MENA men I know are".

So when they write Joe they make sure to eliminate every possible thing that scares them. Canonically, Joe is protective, active, aggressive when people hurt his family; he is open and charismatic and loves deeply, but he also doesn't forgive easily; he hunts down Keane with the specific purpose of murdering him for having shot his husband and insists that Booker needs to be exiled for a hundred years for what he did; he is not religious in any possible way, and when he swears, he says the names of Catholic saints. But he can't be these things, because Marwan is a brown man - fuck, how much I hate relegating people to their race. So fucking American, I swear - and if a brown man does these things then he scares them, so they turn him into this... weak, demure creature who cannot get mad because otherwise it's racist, who cannot stand up for himself and his family because otherwise it's racist, who cannot do this or that because otherwise it's racist. They make him religious to the point of being almost a fundamentalist, but orientalize Islam by taking away any restrictive aspects and make it all flowers and rainbows. They write Joe as the stereotype of the Noble Savage: he can only be positive things because somehow he hasn't been corrupted by the evil white civilization to the point that he even lets his husband insult him. Ooooh, how big is their Joe's heart!

And the same thing is applied to how they want people to perceive Marwan: he's just a widdle boi. When people were joking about him being a Dutch fuckboi - which... he is, he really is -, they were going mad and saying it was racist. Why would it be racist? How? Because Len told you about that stereotype about MENA men she got completely wrong? Marwan is a charismatic, handsome guy who clearly knows how he looks and who works in an industry where he is constantly around people who are as beautiful and charismatic as him. He is aware of how good looking he is. He talked in interviews about how he likes to "chat up girls". He makes fun of it himself, and yet we can't talk about it because "Brown man with a sexual life they can't control" scares them, it makes him an actual person and not just a picture or a video they can reblog with dumb tags about his looks immediately followed by racial slurs.

They defang him. They neuter him. They take away his humanity because, if Marwan were human, he'd have "bad" characteristics too, and they just can't have that because then he'd become scary again.

And like... let's always remember that when Len saw him with a look she didn't like and that made him look like probably 50% of MENA men who are over a certain age, her first instinct was to insult him with a racial slur and think it was something cute to do.

[soranis-sunshadow]

Hordak can’t catch a break even on his birthday...

Oh fandom, you really like this sort of drama don’t you? 

A few days ago, on Hordak’s birthday, there was this ‘interesting’ post in the tag – since, apparently it’s impossible to get any peace even on that day.

I was  too tired to answer it at the time after being on call the day before so, here’s my delayed answer to all of that:

First off: this post has this bit in it when asked what that person dislikes about SPOP.

 He doesn’t need to get a redemption and he doesn’t get one in the show. 

None of his actions constitute a redemption arc. The man merely acknowledged his personhood and freed himself from his master and God. That’s what his arc was about: the right to have a personal identity. 

He gave himself a name and wanted to be his own person. That’s it. That’s all he wanted.

The man was merely freed from Prime’s influence- an influence he was born into since he’s been specifically manufactured to serve as a disposable mass produced soldier and worshipper of Prime.

 If the argument that Catra was “forced” to commit crimes and thus she is not completely guilty of them since she was under duress – then the argument doubly holds for a person who has been directly programmed and conditioned to do so under the threat of death or mental rape (purification).\

Even while away from Prime, he was still conditioned to obey and brainwashed by Prime’s cult. He literally knew nothing else – he was not meant to. It’s how indoctrination works.  

Prime’s clones aren’t people to Prime, they are tools. Those clones, while cut off from Prime still want to serve and please him: That’s what Wrong Hordak’s purpose in the show is- to show us just that.

Hordak is not considered “OK”  because Entrapta likes him. Hordak is merely shown – by Entrapta that he could live apart from his cult and have worth outside what Prime tells him he has. 

Just like real life cult victims, he needs an outsider to help him see a way out of the cult. The nature of indoctrination and brainwashing makes it impossible for the brainwashed person to know they are brainwashed unless someone points it out.

Now for my favorite thing:

and

oh and

Oh boy… this makes me just so damn uncomfortable.

To offer a bit of context as to why. I have never been on social media before SPOP or in any fandom and as such, I have never encountered the ‘all men are evil’ discourse that seems to infest these places. It’s been quite a bit of culture shock for me. 

What is it that makes anyone think it is ok to judge a person because of an accident of birth? (being born male)

Why does hate for 50% of the human population get such a free pass on these platforms? Misandry is just as terrible as misogyny. You are being biased against another human because of their gender. I don’t care that males are perceived as ‘privileged’ – that doesn’t make it ok to be terrible to them unprovoked. 

How does hating all men help achieve equity?

Do you realize that this sort of discourse is exactly how you radicalize people against the very cause you are championing? You breed hate and adversity for the rest of us who actually want to to have a discussion on the topic. 

I’m a feminist myself (in a country where feminism is hard-work) and let me tell you, making all men hate us does nothing but push away potential allies and make it a lot harder for our voices to be heard.

Feminism is about equality, not women dominating.

Now onto the second post: the one comparing Catra and Hordak with the question of which of them is a better person. 

This whole war orphans that were personally abducted and tortured into serving the horde HC that some ppl have is really starting to get boorish. This has been going on for more than 6 months. 

I have no idea why everyone thinks he went down chimneys and stealing babies left and right while cackling villainously. The man had a busy schedule of brooding in his lab, wallowing at his inability to use insulated cables and having his device blowing up in his face with the occasional Skype call to Shadow Weaver to see what the Horde is doing. 

And yet, to a part of the fandom, this is what he looked like:

( @bat-burrito​ made this one and it’s glorious) 

And if you don’t believe me about the lab recluse thing, you don’t have to, the show pretty much states it for me. 

and 

+

Hordak is a recluse that stayed in his lab and let the running of the Horde and most operations to Shadow Weaver and later Catra. He did not personally abuse anyone and he is not the origin of the cycle of abuse.

Shadow Weaver was a child grooming manipulative woman before she even joined the Horde – she did this to Micah while she was not “evil” or presumably abused by Hordak.

Even if you want to HC that Hordak abused her somehow, he is still not the one who started the cycle: Horde Prime is. 

The whole fandom seems to forget about the eldritch monstrosity that created a whole army of brainwashed slaves to worship and die for him. Prime is the one that sent Hordak to die and gave him the motivation to try to prove himself worthy of life and love. If you want to point fingers, point them at the origin of all of this. This fandom has a strange Prime blindness. He is never talked about when it comes to being the start of all of this.

If Prime didn’t exist, Hordak wouldn’t exist. If Prime hadn’t sent Hordak off to die, then his clone wouldn’t have accidentally ended up on Etheria. None of the things in the show would have happened.

Adora would have died of exposure in a field, the monarchies on Etheria would have continued as they are and the planet would have continued to exist in despondos. 

He is a dictator, yes. So are the princesses. Monarchies are dictatorships where the ruler is born into power. Hordak gained his through military might while Glimmer was born with hers and enforced it with tradition. I don’t really care to play “who’s the better dictator”. The princesses have their power because of the runestones- magical rocks put there by the First Ones to channel the planet’s magic and use it as a weapon. How come no one talks about that?

Do you think a king/queen keeps their crown without effort or subjugation of their subjects? 

Also, Hordak had never interacted with Catra before SW dragged her before him to be judged. He was indifferent to etherians in general and didn’t seem to care which of them were his underlings so long as the operations were running smoothly. He was more focused on his portal and returning home than on anything else. He did not set out to “ruin lives” or quest for power. What he wanted was to return to his deity and become a mindless part of the whole again – that is as opposite to power hungry as you can get.

Catra was directly abused by Shadow Weaver throughout her childhood. That makes Shadow weaver responsible for 100% of that abuse.

Catra was found in a box by Adora and adopted by Shadow Weaver. Hordak didn’t know or care that she existed.

He is responsible for the war, he is responsible for the war casualties and the property damage. He is not responsible for Shadow Weaver being a terrible person and mother figure.

Again with the orphan thing. We have 5 cadets in the show. 

Adora was found in a field. 

Catra was found in a box. Lonnie, Kyle and Rogelio are unexplained. The only lizard ppl we see in the show are in the Horde or the Crimson Wastes. The other two could just as well be the children of some of the soldiers. 

I may harp on about what a bitch Shadow Weaver is – the reason I do so is because she is legitimately terrible to the two girls in her care.

I was the unfavorite growing up, I WAS the Catra in my family who could do no right while my sibling was the golden child. I don’t however hate Shadow Weaver. She is a cartoon character in a show and she does the things she was written to do. Hell, she is a very compelling and believable villain. Her motivations are clear and she is consistent. Her voice actress portrayed her splendidly and her character design is superb. I like her but that doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge her role in the story. I don’t however make up parts of the story to make her more evil than she was or treat my headcanons about her as absolute fact. 

Again, sigh: Prime is the worst villain in the show. He is quite literally Nyarlathotep and does this to planets: 

 This to people: 

and this to the people he created to serve, worship and love him: 

How is that not worse?

I love Catra and it genuinely annoys me when people erase her agency or try to paint her as one-dimensional victim. Catra was an antagonist for most of the show and she rocked it! She was 400% more efficient at it than cloneboy. Give the queen some damn respect and recognition! Catra had a lot of agency and her actions moved the plot of the show more than those of the protagonists. (they were mostly reactive).

Catra pulled the lever of the portal in a moment of distress after a breakdown, a Shadow-Weaver related breakdown because that’s how trauma works.

Hordak didn’t make her do it, he didn’t send Catra after Adora either. These were Catra’s choices. They came from a place of hurt but they were her choices still.

The portal was a means of transportation, not a weapon. Building it was not Catra’s mission, it was Hordak’s. He built it so he could contact Prime and either summon him here or go home –whichever course of action Prime wanted. Again, Hordak wanted to go back to this:

...

The only person who knew the device was dangerous was Entrapta and she tried to warn Hordak about it. Catra was the one who stopped her, violently so, then sent her to die on Beast Island- the fate Entrapta saved her from a season ago. Catra then tried to have Hordak open the portal before it was ready.

When he wouldn’t – she pulled the lever herself because that is how desperate she had gotten at that point, to show Shadow Weaver how wrong she was. That is how hurt Catra was by her mother figure’s betrayal and abuse.

Don’t take that away from her. Don’t call it curiosity or naivete or whatever. She knew the portal was dangerous but she wanted to prove Shadow Weaver wrong so badly that she didn’t care at that point. She had been pushed that far. 

Catra’s actions led to Angella’s death but she was not directly responsible for it. She didn’t activate the device to kill Angella, it merely happened accidentally. Catra was however glad it happened and wanted to profit from the aftermath of her death.  

Hordak didn’t care or plan to kill Angella personally. There is no in-show moment where any of that is portrayed. Since he doesn’t care about the specifics of running the horde seem to know what they are conquering at the moment, it seems that that was usually a task reserved for his second in command. 

^ - troop movement ordered by Catra

Hordak doesn’t even know what his own army is doing.

Again with the Hordak “drilling into orphan’s minds”… I seriously doubt that any of them had ever seen him out of his lab or that he came up with the propaganda himself.

Manipulation is more Shadow Weaver’s game not his. For all of Hordak’s faults, he is not deceptive or manipulative. If anything, he is woefully incapable of spotting lies. (it might have something to do with him being born in a society where lies were almost impossible because of the hive mind and Prime being able to browse his thoughts at a whim- as such, it wouldn’t be a skill he would have been able to develop).

Hordak canonically despises deception and lies.  I really don’t understand where this image of a manipulative and cunning Hordak comes from. He wouldn’t be able to plot himself out of a paper bag if his life depended on it.

First off.. S4 Catra was his equal, not his subordinate. Don’t take that away from her. She earned it.

He doesn’t look that threatening here... 

And again:  Prime created the system. He made clone slaves and programmed them to serve. His clones have hardware installed for the express reason to facilitate his control over them. He has a religion in place to make sure their thoughts do not stray from his purpose. I am legitimately boggled by this fandom’s tendency to completely forget about his existence.Does anyone really think that these people that are born “prechipped” and programmed to know nothing but Prime’s Light are really knowledgeable about human morality?

That they would know that conquest is bad when that is the express reason for their creation? 

If I were born in that situation, I’m not sure I would have known any better. Hell, if any of the clones even try to disobey Prime, they would get either mindraped (erased) or killed for the effort. They really have no choice, even if they knew that killing in Prime’s name is wrong (they don’t) they really can’t do anything about it. They have no choice but to be what they were made to be. I find it personally abhorrent when these designer slaves are held accountable for what Prime has made them do.

And to the people that say Hordak was free of Horde Prime once he was stranded on Etheria.. That is not how indoctrination works. The fact that I can’t go to church this Sunday because I’m locked in the house and can’t find the keys doesn’t make me an atheist.

Hordak was serving Prime even on Etheria. He keeps mentioning it to both Entrapta and Catra. He started the war because that’s what he thought Prime wanted of him and that’s what he’s been programmed to do. Personal and informed choice really doesn’t factor into his decision at all.

He is not sympathetic because Entrapta likes him. Notice how I haven’t brought up his relationship with her up to this point?

He is sympathetic because he literally had no choice but to do the things he was indoctrinated into doing. He was build and programmed for it, just like all the other clones. They are not able to deviate from that because of the way Prime functions and rules over them.

There is no point in the show where Hordak relishes over his status as a ruler or the “luxury” it affords him. He does not engage in the same behaviors his progenitor manifests.

There is no point in the show where Hordak relishes over his status as a ruler or the “luxury” it affords him. He does not engage in the same behaviors his progenitor manifests. He attempts to emulate Prime in order to project authority in the only way he knows how but since those are some really big shoes to fill, he is woefully inadequate. 

If Hordak had been power hungry, he would have stayed in despondos and ruled his own faction. Being away from Prime is the most powerful and autonomous he’s ever been and yet, he wants to throw all of that away in order to be a powerless, nameless part of the whole. What Hordak wanted was to be enslaved by Prime because that’s what he had been created for.

“vengeful” – and how did Hordak manifest this vengefulness? Who did he take revenge on in the series?  

“apologize” – when and where in his 3 minutes of screentime would he remember everything after 2 mindwipes, realize that the whole worldview he had since inception is wrong, realize that he had been mistaken into doing the horrible things he did and then go to all of the characters and apologize for it?

Would anyone be convinced of that had it happened in 3 minutes? I’d rather they don’t redeem him than do a shit job at it.

Very true. He’s not a better person. He’s just a person in an impossible situation. Both Hordak and Catra were handed a raw deal, I don’t understand why everyone insists on pitting them against one another. They both did bad things and they were both in horrible situations. The specifics don’t really matter since neither of them would have done the things they did had they been more fortunate.

This is the exact reason for which I don’t hold Cara’s actions against her. Catra’s only model of success was Shadow Weaver. She emulated her abusive mother figure because she had no other example and because she wanted to please that woman. It does not excuse the way Catra acted but it explains it.

I really don’t understand why some people want Catra punished. I’d rather she get love and help. That is what she needs. In time, she will want to do better and be better by herself. She doesn’t need to be forced, heavens know, she’s been forced enough as it is.

They are really different. Catra got an abusive, shitty and violent childhood. Hordak got this:

He was literally robbed of a childhood. 

She was taught by Shadow Weaver that weakness gets you killed. Hordak was not allowed to have emotions to begin with, or thoughts of his own, or a name...

Comparing to victims of abuse to see which one of them is more likable is such a strange concept to me.

Catra was robbed in s5 too. I don’t hold that against her. I  blame it on the writers. S5 could have been a lot better. 

[variousqueerthings]

Daniel LaRusso: A Queer Feminine Fairytale Analysis Part Three of Three

(another massive, massive thank you to @mimsyaf​ )

part 1

part 2

8. Queerness and femininity and masculinity and the colour red and *record breaks*

If we spin the record aaalll the way back to this paragraph: “…looking at what it is girls and women in fairytales have/don’t have, what they want, and how they’re going to get it. It’s about power (lack of), sexuality (repressed, then liberated), and men.” Reading Daniel as a repressed, bisexual boy in a society that doesn’t accept his desires it’s interesting looking at how he moves through the world of the Miyagi-verse, at how threatened other men are by him, at how obsessed they are with him.

He’s out in the symbolic woods and these large boys and men see him and decide for whatever plot reasons to come for him. And they are large and violent and attractive and apart from Johnny again, they don’t have the nebulous excuse of fighting over a girl and even that excuse dies by around the midpoint when Johnny kisses Ali just to get a rise out of Daniel. He’s not trying to “win her back,” he’s not even really looking at her. He’s just trying to get a reaction. They don’t have any of the fighters in Rocky’s excuse either of Daniel being a macho opponent. 

You can read whatever subtext into TKK1 and TKK2 (which becomes especially tempting once CK confirmed that the guys he fought at seventeen have been thinking about him ever since – for thirty-five years), but TKK3 is where it’s really At in terms of obsession and lust and forbidden desires.

Silver is presented as both a handsome prince who saves Daniel and mentors him (where Miyagi is undoubtedly cast in a fatherhood role) and later on becomes twisted into a dark secret that Daniel has to keep, while he turns that thing that Daniel loves (karate, it’s… it’s karate… it’s also men, but it’s definitely karate, because karate makes him feel… things...) into an abusive, violent version of itself.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But he’s also offering him something liberating. Whatever is going on in that nightclub scene is about something other than breaking Daniel down. Even the bloodied knuckles aren’t just about revenge. It’s about giving him something that he isn’t, in the end, willing to receive, at least not from Silver. In that roundabout, strange way of these feminine fairytales, it’s exploring hidden desires through the metaphor of karate.

Daniel wears red because it’s his colour. In the movies he wears red a lot. Often in scenes with violence in them (the beach/the hilltop in TKK1 and the date/the destruction of the dojo/the final fight in TKK2), but he also has a variety of shirts (and in TKK3 pants) that pop up all the way through the narrative. He wears a red jacket when he accepts Terry’s training, when he punches a guy in the face, and when he tries to get out of the training again (as badly as that goes).

Did anyone consciously think about red’s link to desire, obsession, and violence when they made these? Eh. But is it there symbolically? When he meets Johnny, when he fights Chozen, when he’s in emotionally fraught situations with Terry? Hell yeah.

Probably the most lust-and-violence infused red is that aforementioned punching-board-until-knuckles-bleed bit – not that I thought Terry was going to pull him in for a kiss, because I knew, logically, of course he wouldn’t right? There’s no way… is there? Or later on when Daniel punches that guy and ends up with blood all over his shirt and Terry once more grasps him, euphorically. Blood is violence. Blood is also desire. Red is Daniel’s colour, even though he doesn’t acknowledge it come Cobra Kai. (Maybe he just needs someone else - cough Johnny Lawrence cough - to inspire it in him again).

Daniel LaRusso’s narrative is exploring that most feminine of fairytale tropes: To want and be wanted by monsters and having to hide those desires.

“Maybe this time that strange churning in my stomach that feels like a mix of anticipation and fear will turn out good for me.” - Daniel’s mind.

At the end of the story, Daniel saves himself, with all of the strange mixed narratives around it, and the acknowledgement that the end of The Karate Kid Part Three isn’t satisfying and its aftermath will likely be delved into in the next season of Cobra Kai.

Nevertheless, he saves himself. Not from Silver or Kreese or Barnes, and not entirely, but he makes a decision not to give in to fear (and he continues to try and live by that decision, making it over and over again for the next thirty-five years, even when the return of Cobra Kai makes that difficult for him). 

He doesn’t do it by being the strongest in the land or even through a lucky shot (although that too). He does it by refusing to be like the male antagonists that surround him, by telling them they have no power over him. The narrative isn’t just his getting lost in the forest and all the monsters he finds there, it’s about how he redefines power for himself within that forest. 

He’s a man who isn’t violent, whose victories include helping out a girl whose ex-boyfriend just broke her radio, successfully doing the moves to a cultural dance he’s trying to learn, sitting with his father figure while he cries over the death of his own father, telling a girl that she’s just made her first friend, and breathing a sigh of relief that a tree that got broken has healed. 

Daniel LaRusso is a good boy is the point!

Karate is a metaphor. It can turn into many things: A series of lessons learned about how to be his own man and take care of his own house, a respect for the history of the father teaching him and sharing his home and story with him, fear, desire, masculinity (and the different forms that can take). 

When a tall, handsome stranger offers to teach him karate in the dark, without Daniel’s caretaker knowing how to help him, and twists that karate into something that hurts him - when he reclaims that, over and over, that means something too. 

This man is fine and definitely isn’t carrying the weight of buried karate-based queer trauma - could a traumatised man do this? *stares blankly at a former tormentor as blood runs down his forehead*

9. In Conclusion Daniel Has Kissed Dudes… Symbolically… But We Can HC Literally:

So there’s Daniel and his coded feminine fairytale narrative. It’s all a series of fun coincidences.

1. Ralph Macchio is just Like That

2. Red. All the red. 

3. large portion of his storyline is about lack of power. Yes, he regains that power by the end of the first and second movie through A Fight, but generally he is framed as powerless opposite these almost monstrously physically powerful boys/men. And in the third one it’s barely even about physical prowess (he’d still lose a real fight against Barnes or Silver) and more about regaining lost autonomy off the back of a manipulative, abusive relationship with an older guy.

4. The third movie in particular is narratively a mess, but if reimagined as a fairytale makes a lot of sense (because it’s secretly all about how karate is bisexuality and Daniel gets manipulated through that desire to be better at karate).

5. Queerness and femininity and themes about hidden desires that can only be approached sideways through couching those desires in symbolism: Handshake meme.

6. The fact that the more I think about it, the more feral I am for a Labyrinth AU.

7. To sum up over 5000 words of text: The inherent homoeroticism of wanting to be slammed against a locker by a bully, but extended over three movies and ever-more inventive ways of hurting pretty-boy-Daniel-LaRusso.

Johnny’s not going to be happy when he realises Daniel’s got other ex-rivals buried in his closet...

10. Some Other Stuff Aka The Laziest Referencing I’ll Ever Do

Further reading on trans Matrix

Further reading on masculinity and rape narrative in The Rape Of James Bond

Youtube Video from Pop Culture Detective (Sexual Assault Of Men Played For Laughs)

Some film/TV references in this: Dracula (Coppola), Princess Bride, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Labyrinth, The Matrix, Rocky, Princess And The Frog, Cinderella, Enchanted, Shape Of Water, Swamp Thing, Phantom of the Opera 

Some fairytale references: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, The Wolf And The Seven Little Kids, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Company of Wolves (Angela Carter), Through the Looking Glass, Princess Bride

Also referenced is Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel and the subsequent musical Funhome. Further thoughts on this by @thehours2002​ and @jenpsaki​:

https://thehours2002.tumblr.com/post/650033577171533824/daniel-larusso-and-fun-home-click-to-enlarge

https://jenpsaki.tumblr.com/post/650530225997971456/cobra-kai-fun-home-inspired-by-goldstargirls

My list of Cobra Kai meta posts

I wanted to delve into fairytale movies more, but then I was like “fuck, I have actual work to do,” but I was interested in the ways male and female characters are written in these stories:

The Last Unicorn, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, Legend, and Stardust.

The Last Unicorn is an interesting one because she’s not really human, until she is. It’s more like The Little Mermaid (the fairytale, not the Disney film) in tone, and of course there’s a pretty substantiated rumour that Andersen wrote that one as a metaphor for falling in love with another man (who eventually got married). 

Andersen in general is just fun to analyse as someone who popularized so many fairytales and exists as an ambiguously queer historical figure – might’ve been modern-day gay, bi, ace, but we’re just not sure. All your favourite fairytales can be read through the lens of queer loneliness and ostracization. Just like horror.

Anyway I didn’t go into the whole Little-Mermaid-Last-Unicorn transformation bit so much as the Monstrous-Desires bit, but I think there could be something to that too, with monsters representing otherhood and all. Stardust is a kinda-almost-this, except she sticks to her human form and all is okey-dokey by the end, she’s allowed to marry the handsome man and be a star.

The Never-Ending Story has Atreyu and Bastian and because of a lack of female characters, an interesting bond between the two of them, but mainly Atreyu is absolutely a go-gettem Hero Type and it’s just interesting to see how Bastian relates to him as both an audience insert, but also eventually as his own character in that world.

The Dark Crystal contains certain… androgynous elements of feminine and masculine coded characteristics in the main character because of how he’s not human, but also they do have a “female” version of his species that he needs to go save (and bring back to life) by the end, so in a way it’s both more and less heteronormative in its characters.

Legend sees another example of a monster (literally called Darkness and looking like a traditional devil) trying to seduce a princess through promises of power, and she “goes along with it” in order to trick him and succeeds in that trick, but is ultimately saved by the male lead. 

In conclusion: I don’t even have Shrek in this.

[mollygetssherlockcoffee]

Pembroke

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader

Summary: Based on this prompt! A NYPD Detective won’t leave Y/N alone, so Spencer intervenes. 116 - “I broke your nose, and I’m sorry for that. But what you’re doing isn’t fair.”

Warning: Sexual harassment. Sexual wording. Swearing (I think). Just genuinely inappropriate words and behaviour. Blood.

Words: 1, 475

A/N: This related to a TV show... but do you know which?

Master List    Permanent Tag List

“Y/N, maybe after this is through, we can grab a drink?” Detective Pembroke suggested.

If you could go back and punch your past self in the face, you would. Then you’d kick her ass. Then, you’d shot her for good measure. What the hell had you been thinking five years ago? Oh right, you hadn’t been thinking, you had just been horny.

 In fairness, the problem wasn’t that you had a one-night stand, it was, rather, who you had that one-night stand with. Keith Pembroke was a detective who was completely full of himself. A tall man with broad shoulders, dark hair and dark eyes, he was sure he was gods gift to women.

 You had regretted it quickly. On a moment of weakness, you had hooked up with him and from then on, he had tried to hit you up numerously for booty-calls. Your last seven months in the NYPD was a nightmare of avoiding the other Detective before you transferred to join the BAU.

 However, since you had returned to New York, and to the very precinct you had previously been stationed at, Detective Pembroke had been trying to ‘make the move’ on you. He had asked you out for dinner, for lunch, offered to pick you up at your hotel for breakfast. He had suggested grabbing a drink, taking a stroll through the park. He had even outright just suggested you going back to his place for a romp in the sheets.

 All in the space of forty-eight hours.

 It was frustrating to say the least. You had repeatedly told him that you were completely uninterested. He still persisted. You told him you were in a relationship, he didn’t care. He didn’t even care when you pointed out that your boyfriend was on your team, and in the very same precinct.

 Spencer had wanted to step in, but you had practically begged him not to. Firstly, you didn’t want to cause a problem between the BAU team and the NYPD. Secondly, it was nothing you couldn’t put up with for a few days. And finally, Spencer, bless his heart, was a delicate flower. Pembroke wouldn’t be opposed to becoming physical, but Spencer was not a man who used his fists to get his way.

 “As I’ve told you before, Detective Pembroke, I am not interested” you repeated. “Also, its Agent Y/L/N.”

“Come now, one little drink won’t hurt” he pushed, taking hold of your arm and pulling you closer.

“I don’t want to go for a drink with you or socialise with you in any way. I’m not interested. I’m in a happily committed relationship with a man who respects me… why would I go for you?” you snatched your arm back. “Leave me alone.”

“I’m telling you now, honey, you’ll be in my bed again before the week is out” he laughed, his voice following you as you left the room.  

  Spencer had heard what Detective Pembroke had said to his girlfriend, and it infuriated him. Spencer was grown enough to admit he wasn’t the best with dealing with emotions, he could become quite petty with someone when they upset him. However, for Y/N sake, he tried to keep calm around the detective.

 He watched as Y/N left the room and Detective Pembroke, smiling to himself, walked over to where Spencer was standing with two other NYPD officers. While Detective Pembroke knew that Y/N was dating a member of the BAU, she hadn’t been specific about who it was. why? She didn’t want him hounding Spencer, which she wouldn’t put past the man.

 “Still after her, Keith?” One of the officers laughed, sipping at his coffee. “When are you going to give in?”

“When she’s in my bed” Pembroke laughed, grabbing himself a drink.

“She’s told you no multiple times, don’t you think you should respect that?” Spencer asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

 Spencer didn’t understand men like Detective Pembroke. He didn’t understand how a man could view a woman as ‘just a pussy to keep you warm’. The way men like his spoke about women made Spencer sick.

 Spencer was raised to respect women, to appreciate them, to care for them. It was obvious that these men weren’t taught the same.

 Detective Pembroke and the two officers continued to laugh. They continued to speak degradingly about women, and, in particular, about Y/N. Spencer could feel his blood boil. What gave men the right to act this way. If a woman said no, a man should accept that, apologise, and move on. What entitled a man to push for access to a woman’s body, when she didn’t want to give that access? Realising it or not, Detective Pembroke and the officers were promoting rape culture, which, in their line of profession, was something they were meant to be fighting.

 Well, Spencer thought, everyone should be fighting against rape and rape culture.

 They kept speaking, kept saying the disgusting things. They didn’t care if Y/N or any other woman, wasn’t interested. They’d push and push. Spencer’s fists clenched as they laughed, speaking about all the filthy things they’d have Y/N do for them.

 “I can’t wait to have her on her knees for me” Pembroke said, eyes watching Y/N through the window as she spoke with Rossi. “Cock so far down her throat she won’t be able to say ‘No’.”

 It was the straw which broke the camels back, as they say.

  Your attention was suddenly drawn to the breakroom of the NYPD station. You rushed forward, pushing through the doorway and entering the room, mouth open in shock.

 Detective Pembroke was bracing himself against the table, his hand covering his nose but you could clearly see the bloody pouring from between his fingers. His eyes were focused on his attacker. You followed his line of sight and gasped.

 Spencer stood in front of him, an officer holding him back, with blood covering his knuckles. “If a woman says no, they mean no. its not a maybe, its not an invitation to try harder or a request to force them. It. Means. No.”

“What’s going on here?” Lewis Walker, the precinct Captain walked into the room.

Spencer ignored him, continue to speak to Pembroke. “You don’t get to speak to or about women like that, you have no right. Being a man and having a badge does not permit you to encourage rape and rape culture. It’s disgusting. I broke your nose, and I’m sorry for that. But what you’re doing isn’t fair.”

“Agent, calm down!” Captain Walker ordered, pointing a warning finger at Spencer.

“This is calm, and its Doctor” Spencer corrected him, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Detective Pembroke has been sexually harassing Agent Y/L/N since we arrived. Maybe you should take a further look at you detectives and keep a better eye on them.”

 With that, Spencer stormed towards the door, grabbing you by the wrist and pulling you with him.

  After the ‘scene’ in the break room, Detective Pembroke hadn’t spoken to you again. Thankfully. The insistent dinner or drinks requests had stopped, and so had the ‘appreciative’ looks which had previously been following your every movement. While you weren’t pleased that it had taken Spencer punching him and calling him and his captain out in front of everyone to stop him, you were happy that he did at least stop.

 Spencer hadn’t gotten in any real trouble for his behaviour. Hotch had taken him aside and had a word, but that was more for appearances sake. Everyone was aware of how Pembroke had treated you, and none of them were sorry to see him with a broken nose.

 Stepping out of the interview room and into the bullpen of the precinct, you smiled at Spencer. “All three kids are home safe, and Mr and Mrs Hobbins confessed.”

“Well done, I’m so proud of you” Spencer smiled, reaching for you.

 His hands cupped your face and he pulled you in a for a sweet, loving kiss. The kiss is gentle and soft, but your toes curl in you heels. You love it when Spencer kisses you. Its like electricity hums down your spine and your chest expands as you take in a breath of fresh air which is all him.

 “Come on” Spencer says, pulling back from the kiss. “Let’s go get a decent coffee and a doughnut to celebrate. I think there’s a Starbucks down the block.”

 It as he’s pulling you towards the door that you catch sight of Detective Pembroke. He’s looking at you both in shock. Obviously, he hadn’t worked out that Spencer was your boyfriend, even after he threw a punch for you. Some detective he was.

 You shook you head, casting him out of your mind as you happily followed after your boyfriend. Starbucks coffee and a doughnut sounded great.

Permanent Tag List: @sskhair​​ @sammypotato67​​ @spencerreids-wife​​ @yoongi-holland​ @bucky-babygirl​​ @youareperrrfectls​​ @alexxcorona113​​ @tired-draculina​ @rachelxwayne​ @itsmoony​ @shigarakis-fifth-hand​ @andreasworlsboring101 @fantasticalfuchsbau​ @itsmyblogandillreblogifiwantto​ @ourmrswonderlandlove

[disaster-j]

I’m confused by some people saying Dan would’ve gone to jail if he wasn’t a cop. I’m not super familiar with the Thai legal system, but looking at their self defense laws they look similar to many in the US. He likely wouldn’t have gone to the jail in the US cop or not because you’re typically legally justified in shooting back if someone shoots at you. The fact that he hit someone else may be relevant but probably still isn’t enough to send him to jail because his actions would likely still be considered legally reasonable. In the US at least the trucker who shot at the police could actually be convicted of murder for the death of Sean’s dad but idk if Thailand has felony-murder rules. This is not to justify Dan’s actions, he was wrong, but just to say that this goes back to the point often made in the show that the laws themselves aren’t always fair/moral. It also shows the failure of police training and culture and how to avoid situations like this in the first place plus how being a good person who enters a corrupt system with good intentions won’t be enough to prevent you from getting blood on your hands. The system is also why that trucker and Sean’s dad ended up in the situation in the first place, they were being exploited by others because the system only protects those at the top and allows them to use those below them as scapegoats. This of course all then culminates in Dan being forced to make a choice between the gang and his parents, and I think he chose the way most people would’ve. But his mistake wasn’t the betrayal in my eyes, it was entering the system and then staying in it after everything that happened. I obviously can’t say for certain what would happen legally, my (somewhat minimal) experience is in US criminal defense and mostly juvenile defense at that so not really many self defense cases, but I think some viewers are making the issue more narrow and individualistic than the show perhaps intended and forgetting that laws don’t mirror what we think is moral.

Legally speaking whether he went to jail for that or not would depend a whole lot on whether or not the cops WANTED to have him punished. Police in thailand are said to be quite brutal and biased and the law is easily manipulated to protect criminals and hurt innocent people everywhere in the world as it is. But considering this specific situation I doubt he would have gone to jail or gotten any kind of punishment at all.

While it's true that A Lot of people do go to jail for killing people in self defense when you actually look at the stats the demographics are skewed. It's disproportionately women who are punished for hurting or killing men in self defence, even in extreme cases of rape or abuse. In predominantly white countries men of colour are often punished for self defence as well. Dan is neither a woman nor living in a white nation, additionally Sean's father being a criminal would mean the courts would have little sympathy for him or his case. The only reason Dan may have faced consequences in that situation would be if he owned that gun illegally. The law was on Dan's side and would likely have been on his side even if he wasn't an active duty cop. That's part of the point. The main issue isn't that Dan shot back when he was shot at, what's important is the complete disregard the system shows towards human life. Towards the lives of the people they see as wrong or beneath them. Most people in Dan's position would have instinctively shot back because that's just how people react. It's how they're trained to react. The bigger issue is the cops justifying Sean's father's death just because he was involved in illegal activity. Saying it was okay for him to die because he was a criminal. Even more than that the problem lies with how poor people become scapegoated for the crimes of the elite class. All Sean's father did was drive the truck, but he still got framed in death for crimes far bigger than his means. His death was never seen as the tragic event that it was for Sean and his mother but was instead an opportunity for Tawi to get off scot free.

[random-thought-depository]

It occurs to me that one relatively sympathetic aspect of these people might be that, their founding population having been abducted as small children and raised by an inhuman monster, they might lack a lot of the stupid prejudices that regular humans in a low-tech setting are likely to have if real history is any guide.

Think about what’s going to happen with that first generation. It sounds to me like the dragon abducts them when they’re very young, the better to brainwash them. The dragon is probably both ignorant of and uninterested in a lot of human culture, it just wants to raise up some dragon-worshipping brainwashed thralls. Which is probably going to be bad in a lot of ways, but it also means the transmission chains of a lot of stupid prejudices get broken. There’s no-one around to tell those kids that darker-skinned people are inferior. There’s no-one around to stigmatize left-handedness and force the left-handed ones to hide being left-handed. There’s no-one around to socialize them into complicated and rigid gender roles and tell them men should be in charge. There’s no-one around to tell them they shouldn’t share a washing bowl with a Cagot. There’s no-one around to tell them some people are Untouchables and karmically deserving of low status and suffering and you should take a ritual bath if one of them touches you. The dragon probably doesn’t even know about half that stuff and doesn’t care about most of the other half. The dragon might actually actively discourage a lot of prejudices like this if they do show up, because they’d interfere with its human stock being efficient thralls (“You’re telling me you want to reduce the military effectiveness and productivity of my dragon cult because you don’t want to share tools with people who have a particular surname? Yeah, no, we’re not doing that; any tool that is not personal property belongs to me and will be used by any of my thralls who is doing work that requires it”).

What happens when these kids reach puberty? The dragon probably wants its dragon cult making babies, so it’s probably going to tell them how baby-making works and make it clear it expects them to make some new thralls for it sooner or later, but as long as the thralls are making approximately the right number of babies and aren’t killing each other it probably won’t care much about the details. So... These people are going to start experiencing attraction to each other and sometimes falling in love with each other, and... Some of them are going to fall in love with people of the same sex, and there’s no-one around to tell them homosexuality is wrong. Some of them are going to fall in love with more than one person, and there’s no-one around to tell them they aren’t allowed to have multiple partners, and there’s no-one around to tell them that people who already have a partner are “taken” and off-limits, and there’s no-one around to tell them that if you’re a man another man having sex with your female partner is a huge deadly insult to your honor. The original write-up talks about dragons selectively breeding their human thralls, so there might be significant reproductive control and coercion happening, but it’s probably pretty orthogonal to the sort that happens in patriarchal societies.

This is simplifying in ways that might paint an over-optimistic picture. Even small children may have picked up some prejudices from the societies they spent their first years in. And some of that stuff might get reinvented. Children often detect and react with hostility to difference even without much or any prompting from adults, and I suspect some prejudices of this sort are ultimately rooted in that sort of reflexive xenophobia. And I think at least a rough “men do more of the fighting and heavy labor, women do more of the child-care and less strength-intensive work” division of labor is probably going to emerge, because it’s a natural and logical reaction to physical sex differences in a low-tech context. Though on that note, I can think of a few factors that might work to keep dragon cults more gender-equal than regular human societies:

Dragons likely won’t want their cults getting too numerous. A numerous cult would be harder to control and more likely to develop power centers independent of the dragon. Dragon cults would also be more secure against external threats than other human groups of their size, because they’ve got a giant fire-breathing monster on their side, so they wouldn’t have as much pressure to make sure they’ve got lots of fighters to defend their land (though the dragon would likely be a “tall poppy,” it’s likely that lots of people will want to kill it to stop its depredations and plunder its hoard and have the glory of defeating it, so that’ll partly cancel that out). Put this together, dragon cults might be at least a little less pro-natalist than their regular human neighbors. I mean, they’ll probably still have big families by modern standards because of how many people die young in low-tech societies, they’ll probably still need to have 3-5 children per couple just for replacement rate, but this might make at least a little difference. And high birth rates, large families, and pro-natalism are an important load-bearing pillar of strong gender roles; it’s not an accident that we started treating women a lot better after we invented or popularized vaccination, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and birth control pills (the first three things made high birth rates unnecessary and even undesirable, the last thing made low birth rates easier to maintain). Compared to other human women, dragon cult women might have more time and energy to devote to things that aren’t making and raising babies.

I think dragon cults are also likely to be socially hierarchical but economically communalistic, with little private property and relatively high social mobility. From the original write-up it sounds like dragons want totalitarian control over their cults, so they won’t want their cults to have power centers independent of the dragon. Dynastic families and sizeable accumulations of private property are power centers independent of the dragon, so the dragon will discourage their formation. In low-tech male privilege societies powerful families and stable inherited property are major bulwarks of patriarchy; they make it important who your father is, and they make it important to avoid family instability that may result in division of the property or otherwise endanger the family’s claim to the property. If patrilineal descent chains don’t matter much, women are likely to have more sexual freedom and by knock-on effects of that more freedom in general and are under less pressure to marry early and produce lots of potential heirs for their husbands.

Finally, the write-up mentioned dragons selectively breeding their human thralls for size and strength, and maybe implied also selectively breeding them for precocious physical maturity. If they’re doing that, dragons might also selectively breed their thralls for reduced sexual dimorphism. From the dragon’s point of view, why wouldn’t you want to double your pool of potential strong fighters? So after two or twenty centuries of selective breeding dragon cult women might have size and upper body strength a lot closer to males. Dragon cults would probably still have some kind of “men do more of the fighting and women do more of the work compatible with having a baby or child in close proximity” gendered division of labor, but reducing sexual dimorphism would tend to weaken gendered divisions of labor and hence gender roles in general.

I mean, we’re talking about a creepy high-control cult here. And “nobody was there to tell them...” would definitely have potential dark sides, like “nobody was there to tell them rape and incest are wrong” and “nobody was there to tell them that an adult shouldn’t casually slap around or beat up a child when they’re angry at them.” They’d probably develop some taboos on that sort of stuff just to keep their society somewhat functional, and the dragon would probably give them rules against the aspects of that sort of behavior that might lower their efficiency as thralls or endanger the viability of the dragon cult, but “basically functional levels of rape, incest, and casual physical abuse of children” might look pretty horrifying (though given what a lot of actual historical societies looked like I’m not sure they’d really be worse on the rape and casually beating up their children fronts than their non-dragon cult neighbors). So this isn’t going to be any kind of utopia. If dragon cultists showed up in a story they’d probably be bad guys. But, like:

“And because they serve dragons, they sometimes get the good stuff. Picture a 15- year-old kid with the physique of Conan, wearing the golden armor of ancient kings and armed with magic spears. The kid is also illiterate, covered in fleas, and thinks that humans were created by dragons.”

I suggest that this kid might be a girl, who has a girlfriend and a boyfriend, in a world where a female person being a warrior and interacting on a footing of easy familiarity and equality with rough violent men and having multiple partners is very much not a regular thing in most human societies. And while from one point of view this person is a brainwashed slave of a giant fire-breathing mammal-like reptile, she can look forward to having a lot more personal freedom than most non-dragon cult women (e.g. the 15 year old farmer’s daughter whose father and older brother she just eviscerated). Would fit into: “And its not hard fascism either.  Their barbarian tribes don't chafe at the collar.  They've believe in their dragon.  And when you stand in front of a dragon, you can see why.” If that girl has some idea of how much less freedom and power she’d probably have if she’d been born into one of the surrounding more normal human societies, that knowledge surely cements her loyalty to her dragon. It’d make the whole thing more insidious in a way.

-----

Aside: the one thing that kind of bugged me about the Goblin Punch post is where it says dragon cultists “never build cities or roofs.” So what do they do when it rains, or is freezing cold, or burning hot? I’m interpreting this as they live in tent-like structures and don’t build permanent houses with thick walls, cause otherwise that bit is just grimderp.

[antiloreolympus]

14 Anti LO Asks

1. To the one anon: good question - how is it that the mortals dont know who Persephone is / assume she is a minor goddess and therefore its okay to mess with her but the gods (or Olympians / underworld denizens) know exactly everything about her (despite her being there only every so often and only being 20ish) - enough to say shes "wearing her signature white color" during a murder trial.

Also the reason why Persephone is wearing white is because

A). RS wanted persephone to always be "dressed as a bride" (and have Hades dressed as a groom respectively) to show that their matching / is supposed to be a visual cue that their eventually gonna be together.

B). I believe this is RS way of saying that Persephone (despite murdering some mortals) is innocent because in purity culture White = innocence, virginity, youth etc. (Even though RS explicity ssid she wanted to go against purity culture morals shes very much leaning into them). 

2. why are Psyche’s eyes yellow even in her human form? Is she sick??

3. honestly? LO is just gossisp girl at this point, espect even GG (at least in the first season) bothered to saturze the rich and was calling out how wealth and power makes them corrupt assholes. meanwhile LO is just GG season 2 and on of being like no no, the poor people are the evil people and the rich people are the oppressed ones! all while also fawning over their  wealth and status and being way into grown men wanting to bang barely legal teens and claiming to be "feminist" somehow.

4. Tumblr is well-known for broken tag system. Check the post' tags before complaining that it's op's fault. How about you guys not tag greek mythology when posting about LO? LO is not one-shot or short fancomic. It's also definitely not considered actual greek mythology. LO is years long webcomic with huge fans. LO has its own tag. Tell your fellow fans to stop using the greek mythology tag.

5. I would argue nyx is the only woman with a unique in design in LO but thats only because she looks like a deformed chicken woman. why was my night mom disrespected this much 😭

6. So now that LO is back from break and I can finally read chapter 170 - Why oh Why do ALL the female characters Have to be defined by their male love interests??? (Or really just love interests in general).

I understand LO qualifies as the "romance" genre and there are certain stipulations or I guess themes or what have you that make it romance but for f*cks sake.

Psyche being worried about Eros loving the "fake" her I kinda get, but really? Thats your most pressing concern?? Hera is defined by her garbage marriage to Zeus - King of the gods (of which is why she is Queen of the gods). Hestia + Athena are now defined solely by their relationship to each other (not the TGOEM or their respective traits of being a goddess of the hearth + goddess of war, strategy etc etc).

Aphrodite is defined by giving Persephone "relationship" advice (e.g: telling her to curb stomp Minthe because "nymphs dont take things from gods" - doubly implying that people are things to own) And by her jealousy of Persephone in the first place because Hades made a comment about how he thought Persephone was prettier than her. And also because of her "house of debauchery" (Artemis'  words) - and relationship with Ares.

Persephone is defined both by Apollo raping her and by her fated future status as Queen of the underworld (so her relationship with Hades). Hell, even the minor characters such as nymphs are defined by this relationship status / standard. Minthe is defined by her mean spirited personality yes, but Also because of her abusive relationship with Hades prior to the introduction of Persephone. Psyche is defined by her relationship woes with Eros. Daphne is defined by her relationship with Thanatos (and because shes a flower nymph) but also mostly because she looks like Persephone.

Rhea is defined by her marriage / relationship to Kronos (lets ignore the whole "fertility goddess power" plot for a second). Even Aetna is defined by Haphestus creating her! Is there not a single character (especially female) is isnt defined by their romantic love interest???Sorry. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but thats definitely how ot comes off as of late, in regard to the latest chapters.

Okay, same anon as earlier - I take it back somewhat - we have Artemis and Hecate that are not defined by their romantic relationships - but rather their lack of one.

However the way they are shown - it still comes off as a standard - "Artemis is stingy / a stick in the mud" because shes not romantically involved and is "barbaric" (according to Hera). And Hecate is still somewhat defined by her being Hades' employee (and cheerleader for him and Persephone to be together).

So technically yes, we have at least 2 characters that are not defined by their romantic interests / relationships, but they are still held to the standard of their "un-ladylike / undesirable" because their not romantically involved.

(I guess I should count Demeter, but only because shes more defined by just being "Persephone's overbearing mom" )

7. i think whats also kinda weird about this trial is like?? persephone is obvs framed as not liking the attention (bc duh) but she didnt like the previous press either, she wanted to be private, but wouldnt being with hades force her to be in the spotlight that makes her uncomfortable? also the citizens of the underworld already dislike hades, why would they want a uncontrollable felon as their queen, even if she found innocent? idk the whole thing just makes the endgame less plausible, tbh.

8. love that rachel was able to find a random deity name to name her random nymph the greek word for "beans" meanwhile apparently cant google actual greek names for even one off characters? like andrew, ellen, george, alexis, damian, luke, phoebe, sophia, and so any other english names are also greek, but she cant even bother with that? what exactly is her "research" if she cant even bother to spend 30 seconds googling greek names? at this point LO seems determined to be as un-Greek as possible.

9. wait so everyone in LO went from having no idea who persephone was, to her only showing up on ONE magazine cover, to now being the most well known person with a signature color? all in the span of two weeks with no genuine public outings? how does that make sense? also white isnt even her signature color if 90%+ the female cast and even a lot of the men ((including ZEUS) all wear it too.

10. the fact the courthouse WASNT the areopagus, aka the place in greece where they say the first ever trial ever happened and where the court system was invented, is just another point of rachel talking out her ass about being "respectful" or "researched" on greece and their mythology. its literally one of the most famous mythology spots ever with some fantastic stories to it and she's just like "nah! boring rectangle will do!" like why even both with mythology then if its this devoid of it?

11. Anons are saying Hades in the FS chapter is leaning down and talking to Persy like a child. Say it aint true.

(I wanna see. I thought RS was finally giving Persy adult proportions). 😨

12. So wait, hold up. I kinda get where RS is coming from with the law school in the underworld (because Hades is supposed to be a kinda Judge, jury, executioner situation in the afterlife when it comes to mortals and their "punishments" and whatnot). However, is RS stating that the ONLY law school / courthouse exists in the underworld? If so, why? Why wouldn't Athena be there then. She's a goddess of strategy and justice (among other things).

Also is RS really implying that Hades owns not only the banks and underworld but the law too? She really wants Hades to be a Gary Sue along side her Mary Sue - Hades controls everything that matters and since its his realm and blah blah blah rules, Zeus, king of the gods cant do anything about it.

(Which is dumb. Because you would think that because Persephone committed the crime in the mortal realm / on, or near Olympus that therefore she would be brought back there to dole out justice under Zeus jurisdiction because she committed the crime in His Realm). 

13. FP Spoiler ahead:

Why on earth couldn't the reporters have Greek names? There is so much wrong and bad with this story, yet this irks me so much. It is Brenda all over again.

14. i dont really get the point of the trial plotline, tbh. even persephone says she should be punished and held accountable, but hades is framed in the right for trying to go against that and weasel her out of it. so?? plus zeus has legit reason to punish them? persephone is a danger to others, demeter and hermes both committed treason to cover it up, and hades was harboring a fugitive of the law and is now trying to force the system to let her go. how is zeus in the wrong for this?

[vampiremeerkat]

I actually forgot about that squirrel. Lol They will probably cancel or censor it, give it time. I heard they’re doing a reboot of tiny toons. If Fifi la fume is in, it shows how hypocritical they are. She does the same exact things as Pepe, but she gets positive feedback, still has a fan base, and on some sites is more popular than Pepe. And I don’t want her to get canceled either. I have Pepe le Pew merchandise I collected or loved ones have given me over the years since I was kid. Things that have sentimental value. I have a Pepe figurine my grandmother gave me so many years ago. A Pepe shirt and keychain my niece gave me. What am I supposed to do with it now that he’s supposedly a symbolism of rape culture?Throw it away, so people, these strangers out there don’t think I’m a rape apologist? Will I get harassed or weird looks now? I hate that all of sudden I feel like a horrible person for liking him and having a different interpretation. All this cancel culture is toxic. Causes more harm than good. Cancel culture gives people an excuse to harass others. They could’ve written him in another way. But they decided to just cut him all together. I know there’s so much going on in the world, and I shouldn’t care about this but at the moment I can’t help it. I needed to vent. I’ve been harassed before for liking certain fictional characters even way before the pandemic, for years, and I’m just tired of it all. I want it to stop. There’s characters I don’t like, but i refuse to waste my time trying to cancel every character I don’t like. I concentrate on the ones I enjoy.

I can’t say with certainty what the entertainment industry will do. Fictional women have been exempt from criticism for a very long time now; they’re free to molest or stalk a target. Or well, “free” in the sense that they and/or the show they're part of don’t get cancelled over it. Pepé Le Pew is ridiculing the men the complainants think he’s honouring. Not a single child or adult believed that what he did was alright. The man is a walking joke, which was the point. Donald Duck was portrayed as a nazi supporter once, yet his face is still being printed on shirts today, because everyone familiar with that episode knows it was 40s anti-nazi propaganda, and Donald was merely having a nightmare. It’s the same deal with Pepé. The average Joe understands he’s but a cheeky fool and his cartoons aren’t pro anything. That the Space Jam 2 staff got worried has little to do with what the regular crowd thinks of the character. What could happen is that Warner Brothers examines this soft ban and the few loud bloggers who agree with it, and hastily concludes that this is what all customers want. Pepé could be excluded from future projects for the next 10 to 20 years or so, but if you walk the streets with a Pepé hat, I can promise you that no one’s going to look at you funny. No one worth your time, anyway. They’re still selling Pokémon posters with black-skinned Jynx over where I live. The “anger and disgust” news articles report on isn’t always as great as insinuated. But let’s also be honest: it’s not like Pepé was ever a part of the main Looney Tunes crew to begin with. He was barely in the first Space Jam. Even if I believed Pepé were a despicable character, I wouldn’t give Warner Brothers an applause if they announced a ban. How do you ban an underused character? It’s fine to worry about nonsense. This nonsense is what’s supposed to be our temporary escape from the real troubles of the world. If our forms of escapism get tainted or taken away, all that’s left is double the worry. It’s a bit like yanking the pacifier from an infant’s mouth, I suppose. Pacifiers don’t symbolize anything “cool” or truly important, yet we all need one in our lives.. So, I guess.. it is important.