#we frequently make racist jokes about each other

[bl00dn0t3-x3]

me: fried chicken and watermelon muncher

my pgf: fucking dreidel spinner

apparently she'd be ok with it if i said the slur for jews which is 💀💀 like i'm not gonna do it but sick i have the pass

[dear-ao3]

hi. you did not ask for it but i feel inclined to share with you some bits and pieces of indycar lore.

-georgina. georgina is a mannequin that hangs on a bridge at barber motorsports park, one of the tracks we race at, during the 2024 race there she fell down in the middle of the race and onto the track, a driver ran her wrist over and shredded it, the safety team loaded her up into the back of their truck, and later the driver who hit her (scott mclaughlin) posted a photo of him holding her hand up.

-will power ‘double birds’. it’s self explanatory, will power is a menace in the purest form of the word, and he is NOT afraid to flip off fellow drivers or, most famously, race control.

-the firestone firehawk, aka murderhawk. highly loved by fans and drivers, the mascot for firestone tires (which is what indycar uses) who is always at indycar races, frequently seen looming ominously around whoever they can get their hands on, hence the nickname murderhawk.

-bus bros. cannot even begin to explain the depths of lore here but im sure someone would be happy to. once a youtube series and friendship between drivers and teammates scott mclaughlin and josef newgarden (highly recommend watching the videos, very funny) it ended rather abruptly after rumors about their demise had been circulating, teammates who once hugged after every race win won’t even sit beside each other anymore.

-the AMR safety team. that’s all. they are amazing and we love them, SO fast and incredible, if nobody got me ik the AMR safety team got me!

-santino ferrucci. we all hate the guy, hes an absolute asshole, homophobic, racist, etc. most recently he put hands on a driver and then called said driver’s teammate his ‘little boyfriend teammate’. there’s a video of it on indycar’s youtube channel called ‘tempers flare between santino ferrucci and kyle kirkwood’ if you’re curious.

-arrow mclaren curse. this team is just… something.. their drivers have good personalities, but oh my! is the team itself horrifying! and this year we had 4(?) 5(?) drivers that all had the same seat! obviously at different times but it was Scary.

-we all love the month of may. the indy 500 is held in may, which brings a whole month of celebration and racing, from the indy gp, to parades to practice to qualifying to so many other events to the 500 itself, it’s an amazing month full of so much energy i cannot even begin to describe.

-bus lot pranks. speaking of the indy 500, during may, the drivers live in a bus lot at IMS, in their fancy RV’s, it’s like a frat house, which obviously leads to pranks, my personal favorite is when they filled conor daly’s hot tub with orbeez.

-it’s also important to note that indycar is small, the community is small, the drivers frequently interact with fans both in person and online, which is great! but it also means watch what you say because there’s a very high chance a driver will see it, our series is welcoming and non toxic! we want to keep it that way. 

-david’s bike. david malukas signed for arrow mclaren, but never actually got to race for them because he broke his wrist biking. he frequently makes jokes about it as he is very chronically online. he is also dubbed lil dave, that has nothing to do with his bike i just thought it was important.

-the milk gimp.. an absolutely terrifying indy 500 ad from 2014.

-the hate cauldron. back in 2022 three andretti drivers all made contact with each other during a race, which led to chaos, thus the birth of the hate cauldron, theres a video of it on here somewhere, and also when it was reborn this year!

doesn’t even scratch the surface, i’m just running out of brain power here, also a team got raided by the fbi this year.

oh and indycar’s youtube channel has tons of full races posted, they’re currently uploading the ones from this year, i recommend watching the 2016 indy 500, and i’m sure people would be happy to share their fav races to watch !!

by george. thats a lot of fun facts. thank you very very much send as many as u want (again pointing you to @ainti-pretty to send any and all fun facts)🫶💞 particularly enraptured by the bike saga (is david...still in indycar? did he just get launched off the face of the earth except to meme on twitter?) and the bus bros drama. seems bonkers. also to clarify your social media point.........do you mean on like twitter/instagram. or have they infiltrated tumblr. thank u bestie 🫶💞

[starswallowingsea]

Suguru Geto is a fucking eugenicist and I'm tired of people just brushing that aside to make silly gay fanart of him: an essay.

Hi hello JJK tag I have come to drop one singular essay to you and I do hope you'll at least listen, since it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this essay, lets first define eugenics and why it's bad. Strictly speaking, eugenics is the movement for "racial purity" that requires the planned reproduction of people only within narrowly defined racial categories, as well as the elimination of undesirables within a population (oftentimes people of color, disabled people, and queer people) via sterilization or death. The movement began in the late 19th century and continues to some extent to this day. You can read more about it here if you're interested.

Eugenics goes hand in hand with other forms of bigotry and manifests in how people refer to each other, including some of the ways that Geto refers to non sorcerers within the manga, even before his death and subsequent possession of his body by a spirit. Geto refers to regular humans as "monkeys" and cleans himself in response to coming into contact with him. This sounds familiar, doesn't it?

This wording is very intentional on the part of Akutami and the translator. Geto is a villain and meant to be someone we see in disgust and while there are sympathetic villains in other series and I'm not going to say that you can never like villain characters (some of my own favorite characters are villains who have done fucked up things before), there is a difference between the two. Geto is specifically a representation of eugenicist, racist, xenophobic beliefs that exist in the real world. He is not someone who is fed up with the system, he is not someone who just wants to fuck around and find out.

This comment here further emphasizes my point. One of the core ideas behind scientific racism and eugenics is the idea of biological races or that people with different skin tones have different, distinct biological functions in their body. An example of this in our world involves GFR production and "race corrections" in kidney tests (source) that are only just starting to be phased out in the medical field. The idea of needing a race correction for something like kidney function is a product of scientific racism and indirectly plays into eugenics. Denying that people are the same race or even species as you because of uncontrollable factors (sorcerer abilities, skin color, country of origin, sexuality, gender, etc) is uh. Not a good thing!

"Monkeys" is a word that comes up frequently with Geto's talks on non sorcerers as well. It's a loaded term and again a deliberate choice on behalf of both Akutami and the translator to use it. Historically, due to scientific racism in the field of evolutionary science specifically, black people and people of color were assumed to be more closely related to monkeys and therefore "less evolved" than white people. It's a loaded word used with intention by Geto and by Akutami in the writing of Geto's character.

IN CONCLUSION can we please stop woobifying Geto as a character. His ideals and goals are an important part of him and watering him down to do gay shit with Gojo is really not what we should be doing with him in fan works. Yes Gojo's reaction to losing his friend to essentially the far right pipeline of eugenics and fascism is realistic and it's okay for Gojo to feel hurt and betrayed by this, but the reality is that Geto broke away because he believed so strongly that the world needed to be cleansed of non sorcerers and Gojo eventually accepted that he lost his friend, no matter how much it hurt to let go. This is an important part of Gojo's character arc and development but to ignore the everything about Geto's beliefs and never acknowledge them, or god forbid make JOKES about this stuff is a surefire way to make sure disabled people and people of color don't feel safe talking with you.

Notes:

I cannot stop you from shipping Satosugu or any other Geto ship. This essay was meant to inform people of the deeper meaning behind Geto's beliefs and maybe help some people see that real life issues are reflected in the media they consume. JJK is not a work that shies away from handling harder topics and this is no exception.

I will not be responding to any bad faith arguments on this post or in my inbox. If you have a genuine question feel free to come talk to me and I am willing to have a civil discussion with you about it, but calling me names or insulting me will be met with a block button so just save yourself the trouble and block me first.

[shivasdarknight]

Time for your regularly scheduled, "Killjoy Hour with Enya" because we're being a killjoy about Dawntrail (:

So first and foremost: fuck Square and the XIV team for taking this angle. We could've gone any direction and we're going with Colonizer The Adventure. They looked at what we did on the Steppe with Hien and went "let's do it again! :D"

Mandatory CW for racism as it pertains to the indigenous peoples of North America, Mesoamerica and South America, and discussion of the genocide enacted by Spain against Mesoamerica and South America.

(Sections and the first letter of each sentence have been bolded for ease of reading)

But to explain further: Square has a really awful track record with their take on Tural, the "New World", especially in their handling of the Mamoolj'aa that are in Eorzea. This has been an issue since ARR and has been frequently criticized due to their extremely anti-indigenous writing. The way they handle the Eorzean tribes (which have been known as "beast tribes" and "beastmen" for a good part of the past decade that XIV has been around, I Should Not have to explain to you why that's deeply problematic) is an issue in its own right, but I'll only touch on what we've seen of Tural in the game itself and why this doesn't bode well for Dawntrail.

Let's get the obvious one out of the way first, this fucking shit:

For those unaware, this is the New World set. It's a craftable gear set from Heavensward that players can wear as a goddamned costume. I shouldn't have to be saying this in 2023, but this set has caused a great deal of controversy because it's a bastardization of plains tribe regalia. Square never should have added it to the game, but here it is and players constantly wear it in further offensive glams.

The only instance of this set being used with NPCs is in the Blue Mage quests and what we see of the Whalaqee. Again, to those unaware: the ARR Blue Mage quests are an extremely racist storyline that plays into white savior narratives and more offensive caricatures. The only representatives that we get to interact with of the Whalaqee are a little boy in this outfit (who's also extremely pale), and two Mamoolj'aa who are the lackeys of Martyn, the job trainer for Blue Mage - a white man! Further, the magic is notably not from Eorzea and is instead a cultural practice of the Whalaqee that Martyn took and turned into profit, and he's who you're supposed to work for. You are - yet again - considered a master of the practice, and this is written in mind with a default white man in mind considering Meteor being the stand in for everything. There is in-game appropriation of cultural practices, clothing, and tools but it gets worse the further you go into them.

The main plot of the ARR quests is that the Whalaqee are dying from a plague brought toTural by Martyn and other researchers with the Arcanist's guild 🙃 There were two trips: one to study Blue Magic, and one where people from the first trip went back because they found ceruleum in the sacred lands of the Whalaqee and began drilling for it. But remember: you only get to meet the Whalaqee through the two Mamoolj'aa and the Whalaqee child. The fate of the tribe rests in an Eorzean's hands because they put the medicine behind a bet for the further profit of Ul'dah. Win the carnival and make the owner a bunch of money and you get the medicine; lose, and they go raid the place for ceruleum and wipe out the tribe. It's a deeply offensive storyline that turns past and ongoing horrors that indigenous peoples - especially those of North America and Mesoamerica - have faced and are still facing into some trivial goal for a questline for a joke job that's solved through the white savior trope.

Then, of course, there's how the Mamoolj'aa are generally treated. Like the other ARR tribes and anyone the game doesn't consider civilized, their dialogue is written in broken speech patterns to reflect "lower intelligence." They're one of the only ARR tribes (next to the Qiqirn, who only got that somewhat through the SHB Qitari quests) that haven't gotten any kind of humanizing that the others have seen over the years (and even then, that's only been recently). Throughout ARR-HVW storylines, they're portrayed as extremely aggressive, are often throwaway mercs for hire around La Noscea, and they have them use this "cultural dance" of theirs that's described as extremely suggestive and is frequently used to sexually harass the white women of Eorzea. They're also seen in the Wanderer's Palace (Hard) as "aggressive barbarian" types who enslaved the Tonberries, which were originally the Spoken of Nym (so y'know, predominantly white society that became malformed and gangrenous tonberries). And your job as the Warrior of Light is, naturally, to exterminate them. There's other stuff like the naming of abilities they use (frequent use of barbarian/barbaric, which in it of itself is problematic), the totems and standards that you're actively encouraged to destroy, the shaman stuff + the fact that again: they're the only ARR tribe that never got the same kind of humanizing lens that tribes like the Sylphs got early on, or like the Amalj'aa got only recently.

Dawntrail looks to be as if it might be that humanizing effort that began in Stormblood and was most prominent in 5.X (ARR-SHB tribe side quests don't count as it's side content, not MSQ), but of course there comes the problem: beyond them never treating the Mamoolj'aa with any respect in the content we already have, they've already framed 7.0 as you meddling in the rite of succession for this new area. An area that is ruled by a two-headed Mamoolj'aa that we have to help overthrow (which is not new, as a two-headed Mamoolj'aa was already shown in The Wanderer's Palace (Hard) - but that one was portrayed as brutish, unintelligent, and played into inbred stuff as...the final boss of the dungeon who gets a special end dungeon cutscene to showcase the Tonberries brutalizing his corpse). And again, this plot thread isn't new! We already helped Hien do that to the Steppe back in Stormblood! This is yet another instance of the game treating imperialism and colonization as a fun thing for you to get in on, especially since they're using the setting and the getting to the setting as a summer vacation.

The fact that they are framing Dawntrail as summer vacation-like is insidious. You are a party of fantasy Europeans sailing to fantasy Mesoamerica/South America to meddle in their governing process.

And let's quickly go over that: the fact Tural is the "New World" as you search for "a city of gold."

These names are rooted heavily in European colonization. The idea that Europe is the "civilized Old World" and that the Americas were the "uncivilized, waiting-to-be-conquered New World" is what drove the colonization of the region, especially in Mesoamerica and South America. The term "New World" is inseparable from white supremacist narratives about the colonizers that engaged with the peoples of the Americas. It's bad enough that XIV introduced Tural as "the New World" to begin with and populated it with a fantasy race that's characterized by violence, a lack of intelligence, and sexual harassment + a gross caricature of North American plains nations, but they have now made it into the destination for the Scions' "summer vacation adventure"? So that you can go do an imperialism there, too? They even framed it as some tropical paradise as if that's not an extension of how colonization of these regions is perpetuated today through the tourism industry.

The other term - city of gold - was a myth that was used as the excuse to ransack Mesoamerica and South America. You've definitely seen it, as that was the entire plot of Road to El Dorado. It was under this pretense that Spanish colonizers decimated indigenous populations in the search of glory and gold. The search for the "city of gold" in the "New World" was a mass genocide - enabled through widespread massacre, and a vicious plague that wiped out 80% of just the population in Mexico alone.

In Mexico, the pestilence reached the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, before its fall in 1521. Pathogens also reached Peru, inciting a civil war among the Incas. Both of these situations were extremely favorable for Spain. The plague—cocoliztli—was the most devastating post-conquest epidemic in large parts of Mexico, wiping out somewhere around 80 percent of the native population.

(from "How Aztecs Reacted to Colonial Epidemics" by Richard Herzog on JSTOR)

This is not a subject to touch upon lightly in any respect. And for XIV to use it for their "fun adventure in a foreign land" is deeply inappropriate and frankly disgusting. But is anyone surprised? This is the same company that ignored the demands of the Saami council to remove the offensive Far Northern attire from the store.

What I'm disappointed the most about, however, is the number of fans chomping at the bit with angles about a tropical tourist destination, taking the summer vacation angle the devs are actively encouraging, and even stuff with pirates (do not get me started on how white pirates contributed to colonization of the Americas). As a friend put it very aptly: how do you see "new world," "city of gold," and a fleet of European ships sailing towards fantasy Mesoamerica and not get skeeved out at the prospect? This isn't something you should be excited about because they're having us role play imperialism Yet Again. But this time, it's all to the tune of "tropical summer vacation in a foreign land". And y'all are excited to join in?

I don't want the expansion to turn out this way. We barely have any information on this, I understand. But what I've laid out here is what the game has already done with regards to Tural's pre-7.0 depictions and what they've shown they want to continue perpetuating. If Dawntrail turns out to be somewhat decent (and it better be better handled than Thavnair and feature fewer white people populating the countries that are inspired by black and brown cultures), then fine. But as it stands, Square has not given us any reason to trust them in how they've handled their indigenous stories leading up to 7.0. This entire concept is rife with the potential to be extremely offensive and extremely racist, and the main takeaway most fans seem to have from this isn't that this is a gross depiction of indigenous cultures, but instead a fun summer vacation with the Scions?

Really?

[tainted-liquor]

racism and 'hiimayee'/'mayearies'

hi! so, I know Im not posting as frequently as I should be n I kinda fell off, BUT! theres a reason for that that I will be discussing today.

so, around maybe a month or so ago I was added to an insta gc with a handful of writers. Some being ash, maye, Dalia, a mutual friend named Ash, who we refer to as Lash, and a few others. Keep in mind, just so there is no misconception, the dominant population of this groupchat was both black and queer. I am not going to define who as its not relevant, and I would like to respect everyones privacy.

So, one day in the groupchat, we were all joking around when maye decided to call Dalia, aka @primaviva, a b--der h**per.

Now, for some who are confused lets go over the term 'b--der h**per' and its history.

This is a racial slur that aims to offend the Latino community, specifically Mexican immigrants. it is a callback to the border laws that prevent non-U.S. citizens from entering the United States without legal documentation, otherwise known as a passport or a 'green card' that will recognize you as a U.S. citizen. Throughout history, the government has made it harder and harder to apply for U.S. citizenship. Especially if the person attempting to migrate doesn't have the appropriate funds to finance this kind of migration. This is a form of systemic oppression to further segregate POC from White America, and this system has been critized in the past due to its nature and America even being stolen land.

As stated above, this slur is aimed at Mexican Immigrants. However, anyone of any culture can be an immigrant. When Maye knowingly said this to Dalia, not only was she using a derogatory term used to berate those who spent years trying to find a way towards a better life against her, but she was also grouping her in a category that is not her own. Dalia is NOT Mexican-American. She is puerto rican and dominican. So not only does this term not apply to her, it groups the entire Latino community in a giant umbrella of ignorance that erases her culture, and throws it under one title that is not her own.

To put this into perspective, lets use a hypothetical example.

Jen is Mexican-American. Her culture has deep roots that contributed to everyday history. While some components of her history may be similar to other Latino heritage, they are not the same and differ in many ways.

Gabriella is Puerto-Rican. She too has some similarites to other Latino/spanish speaking cultures, but there is an entirely different story to how her people came to be.

Grouping Jen and Gabriella together is ignorant. Doing this overlooks and dismisses their difference in history and boils their culture down to one small similarity; Spanish. You wouldn't call Gabriella a deragotory term that doesn't apply to her, because not only is it racist, but it also takes a massive eraser to her culture and roots. To put these two under the same roof and unite them under one thing is essentially telling them "you're all the same."

Cultural erasure is already a big problem in non-white communities. Anything that differs from European american history is already not talked about, but to do this is just a slap in the face.

And to put the icing on the cake, this was her apology. Which took her 3 tries...

#1, which was already an issue in itself...an emoji for racism is crazy.

#2, which still wasn't sufficient for racism...

And #3, in which she attempt to deflect the situation by saying we use "problematic language". Which, is only the n-word amongst each other. Because we're all black!

She even got defensive when Dalia assumed she was Latino due to how quickly the word was sent like it was normal. This was not a PROPER apology, regardless of how lengthy it was.

And to make matters worse, this isn't the first time she's been caught saying some racist/problematic shit.

This post is lengthy, and for that, I apologize. But I would like to address one last component of this post before I sign things off.

As you can see in one image, Maye cracked a joke about 'curry' when talking about Pakistani women's education activist Malala.

Let's take a moment to explain why this is problematic, and how cracking jokes about curry when on the topic of Pakistan is an issue.

Pakistan is a country in South Asia that neighbors India. This country has a beautiful and unique history of its own that very rarely is taught in classroom settings, just like I said earlier with any sort of history that is not European. One of the racial stereotypes of its South Asia is their 'abundance of curry', and all of their meals being some type of 'curry'

This is again an ignorant and narrow-minded ideology regarding the topic of race and its similarities to other countries that are similar in certain aspects. It pushes people into a marginalized box, and labels them as 'all the same'.

I ask that you do research before spreading a harmful narrative about peoples culture, and don't be ignorant. Thank you for taking time to read this post.

[jade-kyo]

RvB 20th rewatch: s8

Here it is… honestly might be the best season.. idk 13 and 10 are up there too but g o d there is something special about 8. Fucking peak cinema.

DOC!!!!!!!!

Love how this opening scene parallels season 2

The thing you have to remember about this season is during the entirety of it Donut is just bleeding out in Valhalla… the entire time. And bro still survives. Fucking cockroach.

GRIF TUCKER FRIENDSHIP!!!!

“It’s not fair! I worship Church way before it was cool to worship him!”

I love that not being able to wear pants is the one thing that actually gets to Church

I AM THE BEST-

SARGE IS SO SMART!!!! Seriously his character is SO GOOD in the recollection I go FERAL

Shotgun

GOD the way my jaw still drops every time that warthog busts through the wall

Doc in the wall

WASHINGTON!!!!!!!

“Don’t do it you fuckeeeeeerrr”

They call Grif yellow so frequently how did I never notice it before 😂

DELTA!!!!!

LOVE this show letting its characters make bad jokes

I love how even as a villain Wash is still hilarious and fun to watch

DOC SAYS FUCK

Bad jokes my beloved

“Wash you can’t kill everyone you meet” // “why not?” Bro is so real for that

My beauty

My beloved

My queen

My goddess

AGENT TEXAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fun fact: Tex vs the reds and blues was the first thing I ever saw from Red vs Blue. My brother showed it to me when I was nine. I thought it was hilarious

“Buttons! Oh man I love buttons!” Quoted line

PROTECT ME CONE

“I feel defeated yet inexplicably rejuvenated!”

“Knock the black right off ya” // “that’s racist”

G O D

She so fucking sexy

Honestly I get Church. If I bagged a girl like Tex I too would commit war crimes

THE ICONIC CHEX MOMENT I LOVE THEMMMMMMM

DIVORCED VIBES MY BELOVED

Wash is so fed up… don’t worry babygirl you will rediscover your inner silly soon

“It not god dude, it’s church, he just thinks he’s god”

LOVE META AND WASH BEING A LITTLE SILLY

D I V O R C E D V I B E S

The whole scene between Church, Tex, and Tucker. It’s just so silly. I love them.

I feel like Wash still being a likable character is a big part of why him just switching sides at the end works so well

Washington used to wet the bed

Tucker getting frustrated with Tex and Church constantly getting themselves killed… taking notes…

Meta is just beating the shit out of a dead alien akdhkahsk

I love Sheila

I think we should rename the Chex ship name to divorced vibes

“I didn’t want to come back” damn Tex…

Here it comes… THE quintessential red team moment

MAYBE YOURE ALL HERE BECAUSE DEEP DOWN YOU WANT TO BE HERE

THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION THAT STARTED IT ALL IS THAT THEY ACTIVELY CHOOSE TO BE HERE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO BE HERE I AM FUCKING FERAL SEASON 8 MY BELOVED

RED TEAM HAS SUCH GOOD CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ITS SO SUBTLE YOU DONT EVEN REALIZE ITS HAPPENING AND THEN IT HITS YOU AND YOU REALIZE JUST HOW FAR THEYVE ALL COME AND I AKSHKAHSKSBAKHSKSBS

ICE FIGHT AISHKAHSK POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE FIGHT IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING SHOW F E R A L

Also love that despite everything Doc still helps Wash

HERE COMES THE CALVARY

God this moment between Church and Wash has so many layers I am frothing at the mouth

And here it comes… the moment they went from red vs blue to the reds and blues… one team with complete and total faith in one another

THE FACT THAT SARGE GRABS THE MEMORY UNIT OFF META SO IT WONT BE PULLED OFF THE CLIFF WITH HIM AHSKHAKSBAKHSKS FUCKING FERAL

Me when Church calls Caboose buddy and trusts him to remember him HAKSHAKSHSKSJJS F E R A L

AND THUS WASH IS FORCED INTO HIS REDEMPTION BY THIS GROUP OF MULTICOLORED IDIOTS AAAAHHHHH I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

“We always seem to find each other for better or for worse” usually worse

“If you’ve gotta live the rest of your life in a memory… you might as well make it a good one” screaming crying throwing up

Foaming at the mouth over here bro I go so feral over this season HOLY SHIT THE HYPE IS SO REAL THROUGH THE ENTIRE THING god I fucking love this show so much. Also I think this might be the longest one of these posts has gotten

[lorz-ix]

Okay, so my own experience as someone who can speak two languages natively and can communicate in english competently. There are a few cases I can distinguish.

Case #1: I know some people, mostly family members, who I frequently talk to in either of our 2 native languages, and we can basically switch them mid-conversation, or talk each in a different language while perfectly understanding each other.

Case #2: for most people, there's a single language I associate with them because it's the one they use the most, even if they know other languages. For that reason, trying to speak to them in any other language, for example in english, feels very awkward and forced, so I use the main one exclusively.

Case #3: anyone who knows a native language other than english can probably relate to this one, but I will sometimes forget about a word or phrase in day-to-day conversation (or find a word with no exact translation) and will bring up the other language simply to fill a void in vocabulary.

Case #4: sometimes you just make jokes in a different language for whatever reason. Often it's quoting memes, often it's just "saying ay dios mio right now would sound kinda funny".

So yeah maybe it's just how I structure languages in my brain or whatever, I expect other people to have a different way they do things, but I do find that media trope of the foreign character who randomly switches languages, often for the sake of comedy, to be annoying, stereotypical and not very realistic and often lowkey racist. I personally wouldn't say random spanish words while I'm speaking english to people who wouldn't understand them unless I'm explicitly trying to make a joke.

Different languages have different ways to pronounce words, different rules for grammar, it takes a lot of effort to re-wire your brain and literally change the way you think about words if you want to competently communicate, for example, in english instead of spanish in my case. That's why, if it's hard to consciously make the change, it's even harder to do so accidentally.

To close off, I feel like I should mention that I imagine some bilingual people are so comfortable and at such a high level in both languages that they can effortlessly switch them in the middle of a sentence (like I can with my 2 native languages) but I feel like it's less common than the average internet denizen who knows 1 native language and later learns a more universal language like english. And indeed, if someone isn't comfortable enough with their second language yet, it is indeed very likely that they will switch back and forth from what they would speak normally, because they haven't yet breached that barrier of "thinking" in the language you're trying to use at that time.

I know experiences vary, I know technically bilingual people can do the thing they do in media. I just don't think the average media portrayal is written by someone who understands or wants to understand the nuance.

tumblr posts about writing bilingual characters: bilinguals DO NOT change their language in the middle of the conversation! It's unrealistic!

me, who said the phrase "i have beaucoup de friends" this morning:

[athenaalexandria]

I get so angry when Europeans talk recently. They just punch down at Americans and make fun of us. They tell us our country history and culture isn’t important, that we are all uneducated idiots, that we’re fat and loud, that we make everything about race, and of course “at least our kids are alive” which is just an awful thing to joke about since it is an ACTIVE TRAGEDY that STILL HAPPENS.

It really does come down to almost a class divide, Americans are the poor and dirty idiots, we are the entertainment. We are blamed for things out of our control, or for reactions we’ve had to our abusive government. Cause guess what, most things are about race for us, our history may not be as old but it still was massively impactful to our current lives, we are fat because our government doesn’t protect us from the worst chemicals in our food and because we aren’t paid enough to eat healthy. Our country relies on cars because our government was lobbied by car manufacturers to make us car reliant. We are uneducated because our government is actively suppressing our education, not protecting our children, and not providing any childcare resources.

Then they will say “oh but stupid Americans always compare states to countries, they’re not the same”. Like yeah they’re not countries, but most states have the landmass and population to rival European countries. They each have their own governments with their own laws. The federal government is just like a stricter more homogeneous EU. It takes longer to drive from one end of the US to the other than it does to drive from Paris to Russia.

You make fun of Americans for never leaving the US, not thinking of the cost of travel which is often thousands of dollars, or the fact that visiting California for an Alaskan is probably just as exciting as if a Brit visited California and so why would they leave the country? And when we DO leave the country, you make fun of us for being loud and obnoxious and smiling too much and being too polite. First of all, tourists are loud, Japanese students and British families in New York are just as loud as Americans visiting Italy. Second, why are you mad at us for being happy, enjoying ourselves, AND DOING THE THING YOU SAID WE SHOULD DO BY LEAVING THE COUNTRY!? Like just because you think it’s weird we say please and thank you so frequently doesn’t mean you can make fun of us, you don’t make fun of Japanese people’s extreme politeness in such vicious and constant ways?

Finally if you’re gonna dish it out, learn to take it back. I’m gonna say Swedish and Norwegian sound the same, I don’t care that you had a war 900 years ago and are still racist towards each other and the Danish to this day, that doesn’t make me comparing your languages an opening to make fun of the children being gunned down. They aren’t props, this isn’t American TV, we aren’t your entertainment. Those are real kids dying.

In conclusion to my late night rant, America is a cesspit, but unless you’re gonna throw a rope or donate money to build a lift to get us out of this mess, shut the fuck up and check your privilege Europeans. Americans are not our government, we are suffering, and you telling us that cops aren’t that bad and we should just vote is the least helpful thing you could do.

[autisticandroids]

"Emotional in*est"- Do you even hear yourself? There's no such thing as emotional in*est. Just say you're a win*est shipper and go. I hate how freaks like you always try to grasp at straws to seem all "intellectual", when you're nothing but a freak who faps to things like ped*philia, best*ality and in*est. THAT'S why Jensen hates shippers. You don't want to see a positive queer relationship, you just want to read about Jensen getting fu*ked no matter who or WHAT it is. You're disgusting

now, i want to be clear, i received this ask at 2:46 am, about an hour after posting this answer. i want you to read that linked post. it’s a discussion of familial abuse. specifically, anon was talking about how upsetting they found the nature of trauma in supernatural - how none of the characters ever break the cycle. they mention how i had talked about sam and dean as a potentially emotionally incestuous relationship as something they found relatable to their own situation of familial abuse. i responded by agreeing that it’s upsetting that supernatural did that, and trying to comfort them a bit.

this anon saw that, and immediately not only accused me of incest fetishism, but sent similar anons to my mutuals.

@steveyockey messaged me this anon that he received, seemingly at about the same time i did. it’s clearly the same person. now, i love ziz, but we don’t have a significant public relationship. we don’t, say, talk about each other in posts or tags. i think i’ve mentioned her once. i reblog a lot of his posts and he reblogs a few of mine, but i have many other much more obvious public relationships, some of them with other BNFs like ziz. i expect that as they start to wake up, they too will notice that they’ve received anons like this.

all of this over explicitly talking about the familial abuse dynamics legible in supernatural, a show whose perhaps most persistent theme is toxic and abusive family dynamics.

the obsessive moral panic over the existence of wincest is fascinating to me, especially coming from destiel shippers. i’ve discussed in the past how i personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with people shipping wincest, as long as they do it far away from me, because i find incest gross and don’t want to hear about it. 

sam and dean have a dynamic in the text of the show that you could reasonably read as emotionally incestuous - they fill the role traditionally filled by a romantic partner. this is emphasized by the fact that when sam tries to escape dean, which he does with some regularity until season eight, which is when he just gives up, he always immediately finds a romantic partner, and is then eventually dragged away from her by dean. sam knows, on some level, that in order to escape dean, which he wants to do, he needs to replace dean in his life with someone else, in order to make it more difficult for dean to reclaim that role by force. 

this stuff is all in the text of the show, with not that much interpretation. it’s a pretty solid depiction of cycles of familial trauma and abuse. john parentifies dean (which is a form of abuse related to covert incest), dean turns around and does covert incest to sam. 

when i’m analyzing supernatural seriously, one of the things that interests me the most is the theme of familial abuse. this interpretation inevitably comes up when i’m discussing that, because it’s an intensely plausible interpretation of the text. the fact that i immediately get accused of being an incest fetishist (and a pedophile and zoophile?) for mentioning it seems to indicate that there is, frankly, something wrong in the destiel fandom.

but frankly, i don’t like this defense of myself. it’s a little too “no, not me! you have the wrong witch!” for my tastes.

even if i were an incest fetishist, it is intensely creepy to me that not only did i get an angry message about it, other people did as well. the wave of purity politics that has overtaken fandom spaces is intensely unsettling to me, especially the anti-sex bent that it’s taken in recent years. 

when i was a teenager, there was still a very damaging purity culture in tumblr fandom, but it was around social justice - how do you be the least racist, least sexist, least transphobic, least homophobic, least ableist person, and so on. this culture was intensely damaging to me, psychologically, exacerbating already present obsessive compulsive and other anxious tendencies, but at least i agreed with the basic project: i do think it’s good for people to try to become less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less transphobic, less ableist. i think that participating in a terrifying, abusive purity cult is a bad, damaging, and ineffective-in-the-long-term way to do that, but i think the intent is in the right place. 

however, because of certain changes in online culture, that kind of social justice has kind of become “cringe” and therefore fallen apart. like, it’s still present, but far less strong than it used to be. but the purity cult has remained, only now it’s explicitly only about sex. people will try and hunt down the most deviant expression of sexuality they can find, and put that on trial. it doesn’t matter what that sexuality is. i am frequently on record as saying that if wincest didn’t exist, destiel would be considered the irredeemably problematic ship of the supernatural fandom, and in fact i’m constantly surprised that i, personally, have never been cancelled for romanticizing abuse, something which i try not to do, but walk a pretty fine line on. but no one cares about the toxicity of destiel because rather than having a sensible barometer of reasonable behavior, everyone is simply fixated on finding and persecuting the most deviant option available. thus, since destiel is by comparison less deviant than wincest, it’s fine. 

but this culture doesn’t actually have anything to do with, like i said, a sensible barometer of reasonable behavior. it just goes for the most deviant option available. the same culture that comes for wincest shippers is the culture that comes for, i don’t know, people who ship the wrong she-ra ships. as you can probably tell, it’s been a while since i’ve been in a giant fandom full of youngsters. it’s not actually about the specific morality of shipping wincest, it’s about asking “who is it okay for me to hurt” and finding the most deviant people available for an answer. 

this is why they reached so hard to try and accuse me of being a wincest shipper. they wanted to bully someone, or perhaps they had a problem with me (though given that they don’t seem to have searched my blog, because if they had they would have found better ammunition, i suspect it’s the former), and so they accused me of shipping wincest - the worst possible accusation, an accusation that makes it okay to accuse me of anything and do whatever they like to me. 

like, you, The Girl (GN) Reading This, should be creeped out by this behavior. no matter what your opinion of wincest. even if you post “wincesties die” every day. because you will more than likely at some point in your life find yourself on the wrong end of this culture, for something which you consider totally innocuous. that, or perhaps you will be coerced into participating in some kind of bullying campaign, which is traumatizing in its own sense - even if you enjoy it at the time, it���s likely you will grow to regret it. hurting other people sucks.

i’m going to bed and i’m going to leave this as my last post until i wake up in like, four hours, so as many people can read it as possible. i would love for people to think about the kind of fan culture they’re participating in where not only me but people i interact with get sent these kinds of messages.

i don’t know, i feel like this *checks notes* fifteen hundred word essay i’ve written is a touch pearl-clutchy. anon hate is something normal on the internet. i get it about once a week, and normally i respond with jokes. some people are just assholes. i’m unusually sensitive about this kind of thing because like i said, i’ve had some formatively bad experiences with social justice purity politics. i also put a lot of value on having my cards on the table - if someone is going to get mad at me for saying “i don’t think wincesties should die” i would like them to get mad now, and not wait until i trip over a landmine. so those things were definitely part of the reason i wanted to write this.

but in this case, this person who decided to be an asshole was also sending messages about me to other people i know, which is creepy in and of itself, but also: i don’t necessarily trust the people i know in this fandom not to decide to shun me on the strength of an anonymous accusation of wincest shipping. that’s how strong the purity culture is in this fandom in specific. and i personally find that incredibly distasteful. like, you’re gay people aren’t you? you’re aware that mainstream society will always consider you sexual deviants no matter how respectable you are? yes? like this person wants to intentionally destroy my social connections and reputation. which is much more threatening than just saying nasty shit to me on anon.

[polandspringz]

I made the decision to watch all of the Case Files of Jeweler Richard in a day and I am ABSOLUTELY LOSING MY FUCKING MIND

(Technically I’ve watched up to episode 11 so I have 1 more episode left but am leaving it until tomorrow because it’s 1 AM right now- but I digress)

Spoilers for up to episode 10 of the anime, and apologies because I don’t know how to do read more on mobile so LONG POST:

Okay so FIRST OFF- On the cover this show isn’t explicit in that it has LGBTQ themes- it’s not labeled as such or with BL or Shounen Ai, the usual genre titles we see in anime. However, when I first tried to watch it a few months ago, within the opening minute I just knew (I just forgot to continue after that first minute until today). A lot of times with anime you can just tell things based on the art style or the dialogue, and if it doesn’t end up having those themes, then you get a situation like Balance: Unlimited where all of Twitter was tweeting “wait, it isn’t a BL???”

That being said, this series DOES have LGBTQ themes, one of the early side characters talks about how she doesn’t want to go through with her marriage because she realized she’s a lesbian or bisexual and is still in love with her old roommate. Another character expresses thoughts about romance and marriage in ways that I’m sure people who are asexual or a romantic can identify with. And this isn’t just with the side characters, oh no. The entire show is centered around the relationship of Richard and Seigi, and oh my god is it wild in how it is presented.

If you go on the wiki for this show, as my sister and I did, you’ll see a sentence along the lines of “Richard and Seigi frequently compliment each other’s beauty and say how much they like one another, to the point that everyone around them believes them to be in a relationship. However it’s unclear if their words are romantic or not.” And then if you go to their relationship page on the wiki, it just says Seigi is Richard’s boyfriend. So what’s the truth? (TLDR: the wiki is right. They’re definitely in love.)

Well the thing that had me rolling is that Seigi says he likes rich. A lot. Specifically throws around the “daisuki” line almost every episode. He says Richard is like a jewel, calls him beautiful and pretty. Richard picks him up in the rain after being dumped. They go alone to fancy restaurants for dinner almost every night. They flirt. It feels almost undeniable that what they’re saying is romantic, and that any kiss confirmation is unnecessary. There is a major plot line during all this though of Seigi trying to ask out his female college classmate however, and the result makes it sort of feel like Richard and Seigi are together but they’re in this open relationship with no labels so Richard just wants Seigi to have no regrets. The plot with the classmate really doesn’t do anything to their relationship. Richard and Seigi still are being as wild as ever.

And the reason I refer to this as being “wild” is partially because while watching my sister and I were riffing on the dialogue a little. For an anime, the show is very progressive in it’s ideas, Richard in episode 1 or 2 straight up calling Seigi out for something he said about a foreign customer and making him promise to not discriminate or judge anyone for their race, religion, sexual orientation, appearance, etc. (My sister literally joked “DONT BE RACIST” and then her jaw dropped when Richard said just that). There’s a multitude of moments in the first half of the show where Richard basically is just glaring at Seigi or telling him off later with a deadpanned expression for being xenophobic or just blunt about things that end up being rude to customers, and it’s because of how surprising it is that the show NEVER misses a moment to be like “YEAH ACTUALLY DON’T BE RUDE” that makes it hilarious. It feels almost unreal when everything you make a joke about happens two seconds afterwards.

Circling back to Richard and Seigi relationship though, early on I called on the idea that the show was going to have the trope of “he’s rich and from Europe so he’s illegitimate or something and he’s going to have to go back and Seigi will run after him in this big airport scene” and I basically got all that. Except that Richard and Seigi don’t meet up again until they’ve both been in England for a while and then we learn that Richard’s family are terrible people because a clause in their dead great grandfather’s inheritance made it so only Richard can inherit this 300 million pound Diamond but ONLY if he married a traditional English housewife. This clause is said to be VERY VERY strict in that it HAS to be an English housewife to the LETTER. And she must be TRADITIONAL. Of course, Richard is refusing to do this. So you’re watching them mess around in England for a bit, I got another cliche/trope I wanted when Seigi fell sick and Richard had to care for him in the hotel room, before the characters suddenly get a phone call and Richard’s cousin goes:

“Hey Seigi! Guess what? Turns out you qualify for the marriage clause! Despite being Asian, the will and the law consider a homosexual civil partnership equivalent to a heterosexual marriage, so you can be with Richard and then he get’s the Diamond! So I’ll see you at the safe where the Diamond will be at!”

(I’m paraphrasing the words obviously but the part about civil partnership was what I specifically remember being said, but forgive me for any errors, as my jaw was on the floor when the show threw that curveball at me).

In case you’re confused, I’m not saying this is bad at all. I’m just saying when watching this show, it feels UNBELIEVABLY HILARIOUS the way these things literally get thrown at the audience. Stuff you would never expect in an anime just punch you in the face repeatedly and I was so shocked from this “viable marriage candidate” twist that I did SENSE was coming (but thought of it more of as a joke, BECAUSE HOW THE HECK DID HE FIT THE CLAUSE OF A TRADITIONAL ENGLISH HOUSEWIFE) I had to pause the episode and rush to spit out the water I just drank before I choked. And if this wasn’t enough to kill me, we learn later on, that the reason this whole crazy clause happened in this dead man’s will was because he wanted to get back at the rest of Richard’s family because the man’s son was marrying a woman from Sri Lanka and LITERALLY SAID “THE WHITE SUPERMACISTS” WOULD HARASS HER so all of this chaos was to give the fortune to their side of the family and piss off the racists. I just cannot believe I’m hearing and seeing all this in a Japanese anime. There was even discussion of how Japan’s traditional gender roles restrict women, and it’s just like HOW IS THIS SHOW SO PROGRESSIVE??? It literally feels like I’m watching a paradox and it’s sad because it shouldn’t but it’s hilarious and enjoyable all the same.

Once again, and sort of a TLDR, The Case Files of Jeweler Richard is an incredible show. It’s an unintentionally hilarious ride that isn’t baiting because it feels like it’s definitely presenting Richard and Seigi’s relationship as romantic coded without needing a kiss or anything. It’s strangely progressive and open minded for Japanese media, seems meta at times, and has left me stunned in ten out of twelves episodes thus far that I’m so sad I didn’t watch it week to week to see the reactions of the fans live. I highly recommend this series if you’re looking for something to just get you to laugh or just a fun story involving two male leads with great chemistry.

Now, here’s a representation of me watching this show:

[toplessoncology]

another thought re: foreman and amber... at different points in the show, each of them literally occupy a space house usually fills, and are used to teach him something about himself. foreman is put "in charge" on and off again so many times, and amber is FREQUENTLY defined by her "taking house's place" in relationship to wilson. i think in these instances are the differences/missing pieces most evident - foreman won't punch down, but can't always command respect; amber loves wilson and affords him more agency in the relationship - distinctly un-house-like things.

another thread of this concept spinning wildly away from me and out of sight is how characters clock themselves or others in positions that they consider "being house" and that highlights so much on what THEY think of house - cameron makes a racist joke to foreman, says, what? i'm being house. wilson bursts in the exam room going i had a house moment!! when he made a medical decision based on a small amount of evidence and was right. when characters repeat house's words as their own, it's clocked - cuddy hears it when she's disrespected or argued with by his fellows, wilson hears it when he's given "advice" that is more manipulative than anything.

it all ties into how house as a character is such a mythological legendary figure or is at least narratively presented as such, because he's there even when he's not, and the definition of "being house" extends way beyond his actual person and things people know him for - each character has their own conception of what house is, and what it means to embody him. there's also something to be said about the moments where we as the audience are meant to understand that someone has Been House or Made A House Decision, but no character will acknowledge it textually. they have no problem doing so in other instances so i think there's definitely some insight to be found in where the line is drawn between what is named aloud as house and what is simply understood as him.

i wish so badly that we had gotten to see foreman and amber really really interact cause they're very like eachother in terms of narrative function and character. both of them ARE house, one step removed - foreman is black and amber is a woman, and neither of them can afford to be as messy and reckless as house can afford to be, because they know that they won't be seen as good enough even if they're right all the time. foreman is running from his personal life and feels like an outsider in every situation. amber understands her place and knows that if nobody likes her, she has to be right, to make up for it. both of them have the guts and the brains to be house, but they are just too far removed from the qualities about house that allow him to get to where he is in the world with very few barriers. they're both such fascinating examinations of what you can get away with when you're not at a disadvantage from the beginning

[binniedeactivated]

so reading your last beomgyu fic made me think about something... 😳 do you think you can write a college au smut where the reader is an exchange student and beomgyu is assigned to introduce her to uni rules (and stuff like that) but things go.. wrong?👀 shiiit, i've got a lot of beomgyu in my mind wth 🤣

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 | 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐢 𝐛𝐞𝐨𝐦𝐠𝐲𝐮 𝐱 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤!𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄 | 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐮!𝐬𝐦𝐮𝐭 𝐖/𝐂 | 2.7k 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 | 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐦, 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐥𝐚𝐩 𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤, 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐲𝐦·𝐩𝐡𝐨·𝐦𝐚·𝐧𝐢·𝐚𝐜 / 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐱𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐫𝐞.

a/n: hope you enjoy this! ily </3 

“babe they just assigned me a new student, I already told you that”. beomgyu spoke while throwing a hoodie over his head. he was on facetime with his long time girlfriend lana.

“i know and that pisses me off. we were supposed to meet up and I have another class in an hour or two. ugh can I just come to your dorm room after you’re done?“.

“yeah that’s fine I guess. It shouldn’t take that long”.

she scrunched up her nose. “you guess? so that means you don’t want me to come then?”.

beomgyu rolls his eyes.  he hated how she always caught an attitude for no reason. “that is not what I’m saying”.

“if you don’t want to see me beomgyu just say that then”.

“and why would I say that?”

“because. you’ve been avoiding me lately anyways. what is it? are you with someone else?”.

he shoves his feet in his sneakers. “I haven’t been avoiding you I have basketball practice. don’t you have my schedule? do you ever look at it?”.

she sucks her teeth. “whatever. I’ll be by your dorm in a few. I’ll text you when I’m there”.

sneaking a look in the mirror beomgyu flattens the small hairs that were sticking up from his head. it was getting late in the evening and of course he didn’t look as neat as he did this morning but he thought he looked pretty decent for now. he closes his room door and checks the messages sent to him from the floor’s RA.

room 325. he looks at the array of doors in front of him and realizes the room he was looking for should be around the corner. he turns down a few hallways and once arrived he knocks softly before shoving his hands in his pockets.  this arrangement was pretty frequent for him so he wasn’t nervous at all to recite the floor rules. it often went smoothly if the student didn’t have any extra follow up questions.

but once the door swung open beomgyu’s eyes widened. standing just beneath his nose her skin was the beautiful color of milk chocolate. her curly, black middle parted hair stopped just at her shoulders. her pudgy lips were glazed in lip gloss and her dark brown almond shaped eyes and curly eyelashes were nearly way too beautiful for beomgyu to even look into. he fidgeted nervously.

“um-hi hello I’m choi beomgyu i’m uh..this floor’s assistant RA”. he introduced, hoping she didn’t think he was a total dork for his stuttering. yet she gave him a small smile anyway. the whiteness of her teeth was blinding, might he add.

“hey I’m jasmin. Is there anything you need?”. she leans in closer while leaning on the doorway and beomgyu felt his heart throb. he discreetly backed up a bit to keep himself from being so nervous. she was just so beautiful and he never thought a girl like her would even want to transfer to a university in south korea.

“um-- I just have to lay down the floor rules. it’s a procedure done with every transfer student. uhh do you have a minute?”.

she nods before chuckling softly. “yeah but--are you okay? you seem a little..off”.

beomgyu shakes his head trying to laugh it off. “ah no no it’s just.. um- I’m a little worn out from practice today so I’m tired and my mind isn’t fully here”.

“Ah I understand”. she nods. And she did. playing a couple of sports back in america herself, she knew the feeling of a long day’s worth of practice. The both of them take awkward glances into the opposite directions avoiding each other’s gaze.

“so? do you want to come in?”. she invites after a couple a seconds of silence.

“yeah um-- sure this won’t take long”. he accepts. he hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid while he was in there. after closing the door behind him she kicks a small box further in her closet. it would be off-putting for beomgyu to see her sex toys firsthand. because jasmin was a nymphomaniac. she wasn’t afraid to admit that sex was her livelihood and she needed it every night and day.  it was a good thing beomgyu wasn’t paying attention to her at all though, more so on the way she decorated her dorm.

“wow it’s pretty nice in here. you decorated this all on your own?”.

“yeah. needed a chair to get to the high places but I tried. would you like a snack or anything?”.

“no no i’m fine. thank you though. so yeah- welcome to sejong dorm hall. you’ll love it here. it’s the most diverse out of all the dorm halls on campus. our rules are pretty simple. if you return late keep quiet, no outside guests allowed in the dorm hall, don’t damage any of the building’s furniture or belongings, no drugs or any intoxicating liquor and my favorite rule of them all, no sex of any sort”.

she laughs. “no sex huh?”.

“yeah. I’m sorry that’s the dumbest rule ever. the university really values study time and giving students a peaceful place to study even if it’s in their rooms. and of course if someone’s having sex in the room above, things aren’t as peaceful”.

she shrugs her shoulders. “eh I don’t know. I think I’ll still be able to calculate an equation or two with a bed rumbling above me“. she jokes, with her and beomgyu sharing a laugh soon after.

“but um- I do have a small request”. she says meekly.

“what is it?“.

“I have this kind of condition... and i was wondering if it can be excused“. she says lowly and beomgyu wondered why she was fidgeting all of a sudden. but she had to ask him, otherwise she’d be getting kicked out pretty soon.

“um yeah I can make some arrangements with the RA...what’s the condition?”.

she draws herself closer to him. beomgyu immediately grew nervous, backing himself into the nearby desk.

“I’m um--”. she semi-whispered. she places her arm on his shoulder, her lips were just inches from his own. “I’m kind of a nymphomaniac. if I don’t get what I want my condition will get worse. can i be an exception to the rule?”.

the way her pretty eyes stares at his lips in need. beomgyu didn’t know what to do with himself. he felt caged in. and he hated the fact that he was being turned on just by the seductive tone in her voice. he swallows the lump in his throat.

“I um---I don’t know if the university will allow th--”.

with no warning she pushes her pillow-like lips against beomgyu’s gently kissing him over and over before slipping her tongue in between his lips. she promised herself she would stop kissing him if he didn’t kiss back.

but he did.

she wraps her arms around his neck and allows the kiss to gradually grow rough and sloppier. beomgyu wanted to stop, he swear he did. but her lips were something he couldn’t get enough of. the way she kissed him with desire and passion like it would be the last kiss she ever had in her life. she clutches his wrists and slides his hands down to her ass.

“jasmin--”. beomgyu spoke in between the fluttering kisses. “jasmin I don’t think we should do-- this we’re going to get expelled”. yet the more he kissed her he didn’t know if he was trying to convince her or himself. what made things even worse about this affair was the sheer fact that he knew no one would ever approve of it. because jasmin was black. especially his girlfriend who would practically murder beomgyu if he ever found out he cheated on her with a black girl. but beomgyu disregarded skin color. he always did. he was never racist like his peers. his phone buzzed in his pocket. he fishes it out and glances at lana’s caller ID. jasmin pulls away with the same seductive glance before she hangs up.

“how about we make a deal beomgyu?”. she offers while pushing him backwards until he was sitting on the desk. she crawls on his lap and holds the nape of his neck sucking hickies into it. beomgyu’s eyes closed and a sigh of relief spills from his lips. her lips were different than the small pecks he was used to from lana. her lips were so hypnotizing, soft and perfect he couldn’t even bring himself to speak.

“if you keep fucking me and covering for me,”. she starts prior to leaving hickies in a few other spots. “I won’t tell your little girlfriend about this”. she finishes before moving upwards to kiss his bottom lip. she tongue kisses him once more. “deal?”. she smirks knowing she already had beomgyu wrapped around her finger. she reaches underneath her skirt and sluggishly slid her lacy panties down her thighs. beomgyu didn’t know how much his lips were parted due to pure shock and arousal. she tossed them to the side.

“deal?”.

he nods his head desperately and she clashes their lips rougher this time around. the more she grinds her hips against him the tighter his pants felt. it isn’t like he had to do all the work either. once she felt him get hard she unzips his jeans and pulls it out herself. she bit her lips and inches herself down on it until beomgyu was fully seated inside of her. she was satisfied, finally filled and wanted nothing but bliss to take her mind away.

“does it feel good baby?”. she asks softly.

and beomgyu, god beomgyu looked as if he could just melt. his eyes were lidded and hazy while he looked at her. she hadn’t even moved a muscle yet and the hairs on the back of his neck were already raising at how wet and tight she was. his mind boggled at how everything about her was so hypnotizing.

he clutches her waist and nods diligently. “p-please ride me”. he begs. she follows his plead and does as she were told, sinking down his dick slower than she reared up. beomgyu’s head drops back between his shoulders with an erotic groan.

“you have to be quiet gyu. remember the rules?”. she breathes loving the sight of the blonde-haired boy becoming undone.

“you feel so fucking good”.

she grins and continues with the rotation with of her hips trying to keep the meek moans that awaited in her throat at a minimum. he brings his head up and lets his hands bracket her moving hips. he thought he finally had himself under control through his weighty breathing. but jasmin does a thrust particularly hard that unraveled him all over again.

“s-shitt”.

she grins once more. “potty mouth”.

“i c-can’t control myself”.

and he couldn’t, especially with the room filled with nothing but their discreet moans, the squelchy sounds of jasmin riding his lap and the desk clashing against the bed in front of it. she quickens her pace,  being just as stubborn as the orgasm that ached within them both.

“fuckk this feels way better right?”.

by now beomgyu’s head was clouded. he wanted to groan as loud as he want  it was painful that he had to keep quiet. he resorted to low whimpers while gripping her waist tighter.

“don’t ask stupid questions. look whose the potty mouth now?”.

she wanted to say something slick back but she couldn’t. she was also trapped in her own clouds with her hands splayed on gyu’s chest. “oh my god”. she hisses, almost dreamy.

beomgyu gazes at her, “come down here”.

“w-why?”.

“because if you keep riding me like this I don’t know if i’m going to be able to control myself much longer”.

bouncing atop of beomgyu she leans her head lower to flatten his lips, the both of them drinking in each other’s moans to keep them from going directly through the walls. he reaches his hands down to cup her ass while her thighs trembled.

“fuckk--fuck keep doing that”. beomgyu groaned in between the pauses of their hot feuding tongues.  she ruts her hips down harder with each thrust with curse words of her own disappearing into the cavern of beomgyu’s mouth. without warning and in perfect sync the both of them reached their highs, jasmin still riding him diligently even with his cum dripping down her thighs. his hips bucked up into her still cumming, he decides to hold her up to refrain her from riding him no longer to keep from the overstimulation. she smirks while watching him finish. she kisses his sticky bottom lip yet again.

“fuck-- did I just cum inside of you?”.

she chuckles and kisses him one last time before climbing back down off of his lap pulling her skirt down. beomgyu sat up and straightened himself up again.

“don’t worry, I take pills beomgyu”.

he breathed in relief, zipping his pants back up. “good”. he stood up with his legs kind of limp and him kind of feeling tired. he didn’t know what he was going to tell lana when he got back to his room. he couldn’t believe what he was about to ask jasmin but he shoved down his pride. he couldn’t get enough.

“maybe, maybe I can get your number for whenever we do this again?”.

[thisdancingheart]

Remember YFIP?

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?

By Liat Kaplan Feb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html

If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.

That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.

Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.

The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.

A group of students brought the blog to the attention of our school’s administrators, who threatened to take legal action if I continued to write about them. Meanwhile, other Tumblr users had begun submitting screenshots featuring statements from minor celebrities. With graduation hanging in the balance, I shifted my focus away from my peers and toward public figures. I rebranded. Money and fame had protected them since time immemorial. What harm could my little blog do?

So I posted photos of Lady Gaga in V magazine with her skin bronzed to an unnatural brown. I pulled out troubling quotes from an essay Lena Dunham had written about a trip to Japan. I noted Taylor Swift’s since-changed homophobic lyric in “Picture to Burn.” My most popular posts tended to be about women — which makes sense, because the celebrity press tends to be more critical of them.

As it turned out, I had bigger things to worry about than dissecting the careers of celebrities I’d never met. On a winter morning, I woke up to the news that my older sister, Tamar, who was studying in Bolivia, had been in a bus crash, and the outlook was not good. I pored over research to escape from what felt like an impossible situation: my sister slowly dying of treatable injuries in a rural area thousands of miles away.

We held a public memorial service for Tamar in our hometown. Some of my classmates showed up, including a few who had written nasty things about me online. I found their shows of kindness insulting now, during what was quickly becoming the worst year of my life.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed. When a comedian I had posted about name-checked my blog on Twitter, I was giddy.

Then I started receiving threats. Someone sent me a screenshot of a house from Google Maps, claiming to have found my IP address. It wasn’t my house, but still. I realized that for every person on Tumblr who looked up to my blog, there were many more, online and offline, who hated it — and me. I started posting less and, eventually, stopped posting at all.

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me.

These days, there’s no shortage of online accountability efforts, the large part of them anonymously run. Some accounts post typically anodyne but occasionally explosive celebrity gossip. Others are explicitly aimed at naming, shaming and punishing people for all kinds of actions and missteps. My own work fell somewhere in the middle, I think; the information I posted was out in the open, but I was cataloging it to make a case against the veneration of the rich and famous.

As many have noted, the coronavirus pandemic has pronounced the distance between celebrities and the rest of us. And their actions have been subject to greater scrutiny — the vacations they’ve gone on, the parties they’ve held, the access they’ve had to testing and care during a health crisis that has taken millions of lives.

But celebrity culture began to crumble long before Covid-19. Mounting accusations of many kinds, whispered between industry professionals, had become too loud to ignore. Social media, which gave celebrities more control over their images and influence over their fans, also opened them up to new kinds of criticism. People have lost jobs and entire careers because of the kinds of errors my blog cited. Others have apologized for work and behavior that, re-examined in a contemporary context, just doesn’t hold up.

For years, I’ve regretted the spotlight I put on other people’s mistakes, as if one day I wouldn’t make plenty of my own. There can be an unsparing purity to growing into one’s social conscience that is often overbroad.

My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.

For these reasons, I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr. But doing that would mean erasing my own errors of judgment. I almost feel like I need to leave it up to punish myself for having made it in the first place. That, and I know someone could (and probably would) just pull it up on Wayback Machine. The internet, after all, never forgets.

~~~~~~~

[dirtyrottenraskel]

my take on yueki's personalities

yue 

notes / personality

cocky (but also like understated confidence - r e g a l af) 

kind of a nerd

maybe a little entitled, and a little bratty and suki loves to indulge her or to rile her up depending on her mood

books

seems soft but made of steel

strong sense of duty

socially intelligent - can be manipulative and suki (the dork) thinks it is so hot 

aloof queen bee typa beat

supportive, both in ur day to day and in going after your big moral life goals 

deep water - steady and powerful, often underestimated

untold depths, private yet surprisingly nurturing - master of deflecting away from herself

political nerd - well read, and when she has someone she trusts not to take advantage of her, she goes OFF 

distrusting of most people, has been used and ignored and underestimated her whole life

patient - homegirl knows how to play the long game

excellent at pai sho / chess 

she and suki have epic battles of wits - dif types of strategy but both are really into it and get a little too competitive (multiple board games have had to be replaced over the years)

loves travel bc wasn’t allowed to much, esp when she was sick 

was super repressed growing up - never let her be herself or really have any sort of independence

used to sneak out and wander around in rebellion and casually sabotage plans and decisions she didn’t agree with 

introverted, many opinions but keeps them to herself, discreet but well spoken

weaponizes secrets and information - doesn’t often use it but...she could

definitlyyyyy worries and overthinks and re-evaluates - worries ab social politics a lot

obsessive about picking things - wants it to be perfect

shes growing into her confidence as a leader

prefers quite intimate places

incredibly romantic

classic lit

planner for the future - visionary

kind / sweet / gentle - yes, but that’s also her “front” to a degree (seriously, i feel like she gets painted as so sweet and submissive and one dimensional by the fandom a lot of times and it freakin kills me)

INFJ-T (The Advocate) ((yes this is from 16p which i know is not super accurate but u can still catch her overall vibes from it ya know)

Creative/insightful/principled/compassionate/altruistic

sensitive/reluctant to open up/perfectionist/prone to burnout/not a fan of the ordinary

friendships / relationships

(<> indicates that they’re one of her best friends)

sokka - puppy love crushes, laugh ab it now, get into deep late night talks about responsibilities and leading, water tribe culture, prank wars (no one believes sokka when he says yue is a mean prank master (expect suki comes to see it in action lol))

katara - <> badass women friendship, totally would go to matches and protests together, tough girl shit, waterbending practice/duels - start of cautious, but then get rough in a good way bc they trust each other, they do water tribe food adventures together

toph - indulges her chaos, bonding over stupid royal upbringings, odd yet weirdly endearing pair

zuko - both sort of standoffish gay royals, but once they come to see that they are friends - take up similar spaces though, so only hang out in a group or rarely by themselves, they do hang out at like political parties and stuff when they get more comfortable together

aang - <> he has an impressive world view, yue is super studied and well read, so she and aang nerd out over past cultures together, and also their peace keeping nature, they have tea together often - usually after she and katara wipe the floor w/ each other

clothing / aesthetic:

blues and pale colors

classy and understated wealth

like those cute feminine button down shirts

dresses

like cold weather classy

complicated braids

sort of soft girl aesthetic?

pleated skirts !!!

i feel like she would wear ethically sourced fur (i don’t wear fur but idk how to get it in an ethical way - maybe it’s just fake??)

knit sweaters and skinny jeans and heeled ankle boots

light academia !!!

hella funky earrings - to mark her native pride and also cuz gay

from my readings, tattoos have a lot of cultural significance for Inuit women, and so i feel like yue would totally have some (when she comes of age ofc) 

suki

notes / personality 

extroverted 

also very strategic 

more spontaneous tho - will totally calculate the odds in a spilt second in her head and then just go for it

like still a careful planner, but willing to say fuck it, yolo if it seems right 

reflects on her mistakes, but more in like a healthy way - unless it was a leadership mistake, then it eats her up inside - worries more ab keeping her girls safe and making the right call

likes lively places

total bashful romantic

manages the present and the short term - realist

loves to do lists 

a little punch happy - loves to make violent threats, but also does it out of excitement and she’s just a really physical person tbh

steady, can come off as stubborn and abrasive but she really just wants what’s best for everyone she loves

harsh on herself and worries about her girls a lot 

always ends up in the oddest situations 

totally would kick someone’s ass for being racist/sexist/homophobic/etc 

dedicated to her training and her regime 

not a great cook, but she can manage 

would drink monsters 

has a weird relationship with femininity - took her awhile to reconcile strength and toughness and being assertive and aggressive with also wanting to feel pretty and feminine and embracing being a girl and how those things can coincide and amplify each other

abandonment issues - parents absent/dead 

was imprisoned - obvi she had several almost successful escape attempts, but she got really close to breaking 

was incredibly independent really early, grew up really fast and tries to make up for that now by sometimes being reckless 

tough/assertive/woman of action 

dry sense of humor/sarcastic - not good at nickname/pun humor tho

practical/dedicated/strong-willed/direct/honest/reliable/loyal/patient

stubborn/judgmental/difficult to relax/difficulty expressing emotions/too selfless 

friendships / relationships

(<> indicates that they’re one of her best friends)

sokka - <>  man they’re like platonic soulmates - she beat him up, and now they spar all the time, totally funny and crack jokes all the time, go skating together, they do shitty art together, and then show their lovers after zuko and yue come back from their high society mixers, broke her out of prison, m/f friendship !!! 

katara - also sparring buddies (suki will throw down at any literally moment (and tbh so will katara)), not close but will hang in a group - go to each other for advice 

toph - <> listen these two wreak havoc together, they help each other out a lot, i feel like they’re shopping buddies (similar enough style to frequent the same shops) toph knows suki won’t judge her for wanting to feel pretty and suki knows toph will be honest, they are both blunt sarcastic assholes and get along like a house on fire 

zuko - <> shows zuko how to like,,,enjoy things (and how to let go of some of that pressure to be always right and the adult and in charge bc they were raised with so much responsibility on their shoulders even tho they were just kids)? she is also super protective of him (once she trusts him), one of the only ppl who can match suki fully in hand to hand combat, both do the Disappointed Parent Look when the group falls into chaos, but by themselves, the two of them end up in hijinks

aang- suki enjoys his optimism and they’re just chill bros, they love exploring abandoned placed together 

clothing / aesthetic

sporty and skater mixed 

ripped jeans, crewnecks, vans 

green and yellow and dark red 

gym clothes/athleisure - lifting style gym clothes - cut off t-shirts and bike shorts

skirts too, likes to play into femininity

she’s a gold jewelry kinda girl - but stuff that won’t hinder her movements 

necklaces that end in the hollow of her throat & occasionally rings

definitely cuffs all of her jeans (it’s just bisexual culture ya know)

so many crop tops - some came like that, some were more of a diy project

yueki’s relationship!!!

nerd/jock solidarity 

feel the burden of responsibility and the weight on their shoulders 

they create a safe space between them, full of trust and warmth and vulnerability 

yue will read suki sappy passages from poetry books while suki polishes her fans 

they slow dance in the kitchen a lot 

they get good at ordering takeout - and they have some weird decision making process that only they understand - bc neither of them are great cooks 

yue would feel jealous of suki and sokka, if it weren’t for how stupid in love sokka was with zuko and yue can see that suki really only has eyes for her 

yue is taller than suki and it amuses her to no end to pick suki up and carry her away from a fight (we all know suki could get away if she wanted to, but when ur hot tall sexy gf throws u over her shoulder,,,,,,u don’t complain)

joke they’ve adopted kataang and zukka, bc they’re all dummies, but in reality every last one of them is stupid LMAO 

they love to do each other’s hair and it’s like super intimate and really cute 

sometimes it’s these epic elaborate hairstyles and then at other times, they try to see how many ponytails they can fit on suki’s head and how many little braid yue can do 

they travel EVERYWHERE 

since yue is royalty and suki is her body guard,,,, well i mean, they totally have to see these kingdoms they are doing trade deals with in person 

it helps that they're friends with a lot of them 

they stay over in everything from camping so they can stargaze to ritzy hotels with hot tubs in the bathroom 

yue gives suki rocks she finds on all their travels and suki lines them up on their mantle around the pictures of them in increasingly weird locations 

suki loves guarding yue’s meetings bc she gets to watch her absolutely rip a new one into misogynistic old men and it never fails to bring her joy 

While yue doesn’t love getting attacked, the ruthless efficiency suki defends her with is like,,,,,stupid attractive 

[mprjanedoe]

Statement of Harm & Abuse caused by Steam Powered Giraffe’s former bandmember Michael Philip Reed

I am making this post after reading Steam Powered Giraffe’s recent tweets about Michael and also seeing another tweet circling around from a fan/friend of his as well. This statement is being posted publicly to make the Steam Powered Giraffe fandom and community aware of the breadth of Michael’s harmful actions. Steam Powered Giraffe also tweeted encouraging victims to come forward privately with more information, and because of this I have sent this statement directly to SPG so they are aware of this now as well. 

This post is formed by input from victims, occasionally about each other, and occasionally through observations about themselves directly, that occurred over a span of roughly 10 years, informally through text and private messaging, as well as casual conversation at parties and during socializing. His victims should not be subject to more retraumatizing or identification due to fear of retaliation. Along this vein, I also do not wish to identify myself. Frequently his victims of abuse are non-romantic partners.

Michael and I were friends for a number of years. We became friends when I was 18 and he was 26. During the entirety of our friendship I watched him make friends with young women and notably - minors, as well as pursue relationships with them that blurred the lines of platonic and romantic behavior. I watched him emotionally manipulate multiple young women + minors in their teens he had as friends, often causing animosity between the people he was manipulating, which he then used to his gain whenever confronted on his behavior by scoffing it off as jealousy. Part of the emotional manipulation that contributed to this that I witnessed and was also victim to was a deliberate effort on Michael’s part to be secretive about all of the people in his social group who were in the category of young women and minors, despite all parties involved knowing each other in some way because they knew he was “friends” with them. Michael specifically had no problem chatting about mutual friends who were adults and men - however there was a notably distinct difference when talking about young women/minors. He groomed multiple minors that I knew, engaging in physical affection and romantic/sexual emotional manipulation. In some cases he waited until they legally became an adult to make sexual advances. In others, with victims as young as 15 years old, he did pursue and act upon sexual advances. In case it is not abundantly clear - this is sexual assault and in the context of engaging in sex acts with minors is rape.

Even in the case of victims Michael did not form an ongoing intimate relationship with, Michael was consistently friendly around young women and minors (predominantly met through Steam Powered Giraffe and before and after shows) in inappropriate ways, often openly flirting with them upon meeting them and encouraging them to keep in touch. There were many instances he initiated obtaining direct contact info with fans after meeting them, some he was privy to were minors at the time. I have witnessed this in person, Steam Powered Giraffe has received reports of this, and I have been told this directly by fans and friends of friends who have met him in passing. He regularly held chat rooms with young women and minors and in those chatrooms often made innuendoes and flirty jokes. 

In addition to Michael being manipulative to many young, impressionable people, he was also an irresponsible friend - which in the context of having a social circle filled with young women and minors, was negligent and dangerous. He actively participated in peer pressuring and coaxing his young “friends” into illegal recreational drugs - predominantly psychedelics and alcohol and encouraged friends his age who did those drugs to peer pressure his young companions into these behaviors as well. He not only peer pressured and coaxed his victims into using illegal recreational drugs, but also personally offered them as he had them in his possession. He also would solicit his “friends” to hang out with him at night and drink (most if not all of whom were under 21, so he had to supply the alcohol) and then disappear or offer to let people crash at his place and then rescind his offer last minute. This put his young victims in danger and at risk, especially when under the influence of alcohol. On a number of occasions where I wasn’t directly affected by this, I was one of the people with a car who would pick up our mutual friends left hanging.

As evidenced by another tweet circulating, Michael has also said a number of racist things. He has wallowed in his white guilt openly and unproductively with multiple people of color, seeking comfort and to unburden his conscience. He has frequently made his white guilt a focus and expected emotional labor from POC, and has said some very offensive and distasteful things, like repeatedly saying he wished he was a black man, and that part of that desire was because he felt his music should be sung with a black man’s voice. His wishing to be black is grotesque for a number of reasons: - because he wanted to be absolved of his white guilt without taking any personal action to dismantle white supremacy, and also fetishizing black people as there is no monolithic black voice, black people are all individual and unique and to fixate on an idea of something they may have that he wanted is racist and inappropriate to say the least. He also made comments in front of friends and at parties to a POC he was romantically involved with repeatedly saying this person was white passing enough for him, as he wasn’t normally attracted to women of color. He also boasted to multiple friends that much of his friend group were people of color.

All in all, after years of knowing Michael, seeing his behaviors towards myself and towards others, these very clear statements need to be made. 

1. Michael is a pedophile who has a long history of actively and physically preying on minors and young women. Michael has preyed upon minors and young women, and has coerced minors (under the age of 17) into sexual activity - which is sexual assault and rape. He has calculatedly manipulated young women 5-10 years his junior to be his “friend”, often treating them and implying they were in a relationship, and lying to other people involved, creating an extremely toxic social circle of gaslighted young people being manipulated and abused. He cyclically pulled from this group of individuals one at a time and withheld attention from the others to maintain control and silence of the entire group. This is sexual abuse, in any context. He has used his fame and social capital and his brand of charming and kind dude to make excuses for his behavior and seem like he would never be the type to commit it. When called out on this- he directly lies. Lying about his behavior even when presented with evidence is frequent. 

2. Michael is racist. He has made multiple racist comments to people of color who were close to him over a number of years, he has sought out emotional support for his white guilt without addressing how he should personally fight against racism and white supremacy. He has fetishized people of color and fixated on them. 

Those who have gotten close enough to Michael know that despite his kindhearted exterior, he can be shockingly cold and lash out in very cruel ways unexpectedly. He has done this to every single one of his victims that I’ve known, including myself, and his victims are anticipating the potential that he will retaliate in response to being called out for his actions. Private and informal testimonies from sexual partners and friends of a variety of ages, forms of relationship, and gender indicate severe emotional abuse. 

I would like to acknowledge my role in accountability in this situation for those who may be wondering why I am privy to all of this information but have not spoken out sooner - 18 is not a monolithic age of wizened adulthood - and being that I met Michael when he was nearly 10 years my senior and he pursued friendship with me, I was also taken advantage of for my age and naivety. I was a consistent victim of his emotional manipulation, and felt vaguely uncomfortable for the entirety of knowing and interacting with him, but also personally looked up to him and was charmed by the kindhearted well intentioned image he cultivated both publicly and privately. Upon reading Bunny’s tweets on the matter and reflecting on all that I have been aware of has occurred, it became abundantly clear that it was crucial to make this statement. 

To all who have considered themselves friends and colleagues of Michael’s who are in his age group - do not mislead yourselves that there were no signs of Michael’s behavior. This should’ve been dealt with much swifter than nearly a decade down the line when great irrevocable harm has been dealt to Michael’s victims, and there were many publicly visible signs that Michael was way too close with young people - predominantly young women and minors, even if the deeper grotesque details remained in secrecy. The same things that enticed Michael’s young victims to believe being close to him was safe and exciting, are much of the same signs that should’ve been clear to his peers were deeply inappropriate. Based on Bunny’s tweets regarding Michael getting “too friendly” with young fans, and being caught kissing a minor after a show years ago, it is abundantly clear there was a pattern of harmful predatory behavior that was appropriately investigated enough to stop sooner. I ask that all those who have associated with Michael who were peers of him as adults to reflect on this and take open accountability for their role in enabling his behavior either actively or passively in turning a blind eye and/or not investigating his behavior/personally challenging it.

We are asking that this statement is posted on all of SPG’s public channels for visibility - and that fans spread this information and that Steam Powered Giraffe does everything they can to deplatform and demonetize Michael. We are also asking that there is space for this information to spread and breathe and that things do not immediately or quickly return back to status quo within the Steam Powered Giraffe fandom. People have been seriously impacted by this and the trajectory of the lives of many youths has been altered permanently. Considering Steam Powered Giraffe’s success and fame was integral to giving Michael influence over his victims and the opportunity to meet them in the first place, it is only appropriate that there is a significant period of pause - in respect of the victims, and for those finding out about Michael’s actions to process this information.

[funnuraba]

A Rough Moral Overview of Archie Comics: Teen Propaganda Machine

Part 1: The 1940s

1941: Archie first appears in a small feature near the end of PEP Comics #22. His popularity builds rapidly, with the audience apparently writing in to express immense interest in the short monthly Archie comic.

At first the Archie story isn’t even mentioned on the cover, but Archie himself slowly starts appearing on the cover, always with PEP’s big star at the time, The Shield. The Shield on the cover is at first much larger than Archie, but he shrinks over time, and after Veronica’s introduction, she and Betty start to feature on covers as well. The Shield continues shrinking...

And by issue #49, the magazine is PEP Comics: Starring Archie Andrews! Archie quickly becomes its own imprint, and the only one of PEP’s lineup that survives into the present day. Ads in the magazine advertise an Archie radio show that was spurred by what was a apparently a massive outpouring of interest from PEP’s teenage subscribers. The concept of teenagerhood itself was a new invention dating from 1944. Archie’s reality included things like school, dating, and modern teen problems like trying to maintain a car and deal with wartime rationing.

Also, sending your dog to fight Nazis. (Note: the above are two separate stories; no Nazis ever actually invaded Riverdale. Oscar, Archie’s dog, gave birth on at least two occasions, including during her army tour, and eventually faded from existence.)

At this stage, minstrel-style caricatures of black men appear on occasion in Riverdale (as train attendants and no-account bums who steal clothing out of the trash), and Yellow Peril-style caricatures of Japanese people are a regular fixture in other PEP features like “Captain Commando and the Boy Soldiers”. As a side note, Chinese people are depicted quite differently in Captain Commando. At this point in US history, they were seen as important potential allies in the war against the Japanese. In Captain Commando, they’re drawn like actual humans in comparison to Japanese soldiers. One story shows a Chinese warrior who’s been bamboozled by foolish Buddhist ideals of peace, but finally snaps out of it and gets his followers to join up with US forces in resisting Japanese occupiers. Chinese-Americans were depicted less frequently, but also running in PEP for a time was a rather remarkable depiction (for the time) of a Chinese-American hero: Fu Chang, International Detective. Chinese people would later be collapsed into the Yellow Peril phenomenon in US pop culture and there were some very racist depictions within Archie Comics, but in the 40s there was a different perspective on display for a while.

(Captain Commando and his Boy Soldiers have since lapsed into the public domain; evidently the heroic quality of child soldiers lost its gleam after WWII and reviving the property was never deemed profitable.)

Also in the 40s, many, many stories end with a quite literal punchline in which Archie gets taken out to the woodshed and beaten by his father for causing trouble. This was PEP’s light-hearted humorous fare that apparently spoke quite deeply to a teenage audience of this era. The depiction of corporal punishment is neither “pro” nor “anti”, it’s simply an unavoidable consequence handed down from on high. Archie’s misadventures lead inevitably to physical punishment from an authority figure, no matter how much or how little he’s to blame for things going wrong. Mr. Andrews himself is sometimes a figure of fun during this period, but the 40s and 50s are the time when he most often feels like a self-insert for the writers and artists, who would have been closer to his position in life than Archie’s.

Archie’s position, though, isn’t entirely as the object of abuse. It’s pretty safe to assume that the writers and artists also grew up with corporal punishment and can sympathize with the experience--though they’ve now entered the stage of life where they understand that it was done only for their own good. Archie at the end of these stories is both resentful and rueful; he wishes it hadn’t happened, but there’s no room in the pages of PEP to contemplate a world where it doesn’t have to.

Violence was much more accepted in the 40s, including against the girls themselves--for their own good, in this case, but it’s still jarring to see a man give Betty and Veronica black eyes. Their crime in this case was, of course, being so silly and man-crazy that they nearly drowned him and themselves.

Often the violence was more cartoonish in nature, but it was only in the 40s that you’d see Betty showing up at Veronica’s door with Moe Szyslak’s weapon of choice.

The porter in this panel is one of the kindest portrayals of a black man in this period; the others (and the one depiction of a black woman that I noticed) are frankly unreproducible without heavy content warnings. Also in the 40s, fat and/or ugly women exist only as an object of fun or outright cruelty.

Vague “reducing plans” were advertised in the pages of Archie in the 1940s. This particular method was, as the name suggests, seaweed pills that were also marketed as chewing gum.

You may notice in some stories that the “ugly” and undesirable woman has very nearly the same face as Archie himself; the irony here is very likely unintentional. It’s rarely (seriously) suggested that there’s anything morally wrong with Archie aspiring to a girl much prettier than he is, but an ugly girl expressing interest in any boy is a figure of fun right up into... well, the present day. The Gabby pictured in the panel above her was a semi-recurring character, one of the only plus-size recurring characters ever depicted in Archie. As her name suggests, she was a gossip and one of the undesirable girls, but she was sometimes allowed to be friendly with Veronica or Betty without immediate karmic punishment. She’s also notable because she’s not only one of the only plus-size characters, she’s one of the very few plus-size female or teenage characters. Mr. Andrews, Mr. Weatherbee and Pop Tate all survived the 40s, but Gabby didn’t.

Betty at the inception of “Archie” (the comic) was just Girl. She rather liked Archie and he liked her, and he would try to impress/date her but end up having his monthly funny adventure. But only once Veronica was introduced did she start to gain more dimension, this time as Other Girl. Veronica was rather nice to begin with and it took a short while for them to start getting played off each other as “characters”. There was still little difference. Veronica was always rich and as a result became snooty fairly quickly, but her flaws were the flaws of an object. They existed to create difficulties for Archie, in his struggle to impress her, and Betty was differentiated only by not being snooty.

When Betty and Veronica were allies, it was because Archie had blown it somehow, and they were naturally compelled to be allies by virtue of both being girls. (When they didn’t like each other, it was also because they were both girls, and such was the natural state of being girls.) The panel above--both in the same pose, their identical faces lifted in scorn towards all men--would be echoed in other later stories, whether by chance or by accident.

Their posing in the 40s was frankly pretty ludicrous and transparent in its intentions.

Sexual attraction wasn’t explicitly commented on in the 40s comics in the way we understand “explicit” today, but it’s allowed to exist more openly than in later years. The va-va-voom effect highlighting the breasts would have to become more euphemistic as the decades passed.

In general, there was very little pretense in the 40s.

Artists had no qualms about showing the girls nearly in the nude (I cropped out a panel of Veronica in the bath above), nor about showing adult men leering at them. Even Mr. Weatherbee was occasionally moved by their charms. Generally adult men were “punished” for showing visible attraction, but only in humorous ways. It was more common for the teenage boys to drool over the girls, but the only disapproval shown when grown men did it came from women their own age, playing the role of scold or prudish spinster. There was also the occasional gag in which an adult man was misunderstood as a “masher” or peeper and received undeserved punishment from the supposed target.

There were various write-ups of celebrity activity in the 40s and 50s, and there too the attitudes towards women were pretty much what you’d expect, but even in the late 1940s the realities of life were not entirely veiled from teenage eyes. There was room for what would now be considered adult jokes.

Also in the 40s, Archie cross-dressed, like, a lot, in a way that noticeably vanished once the 50s rolls around. It’s always as a gag, and it’s usually noted that he makes an ugly girl, but in this era it seems to have been an idea that could be poked fun at without threatening the moral fiber of all America by the mere suggestion.

In fact, one semi-famous 1948 story, “The Battle of the Jitterbugs” (reproduced more fully elsewhere) revolves entirely around the girls and the boys competing in a “fair contest’ to see which sex is better at dancing--since boys only lead and girls only follow, it’s impossible to determine who can dance better overall. The obvious solution is for two girls to dance with each other and two boys to dance with each other.

Crucially, the idea is suggested by Reggie, the prankster of the group, framing it as a joke from its inception. Archie, the main character, follows through with it as a means of asserting male superiority. There’s also no possibility that two boys could dance, or two girls could dance, without the conceit of one performing the role of the opposite gender. But in practice, the whole thing does involve a lengthy depiction of two boys dancing together, and indeed, jokingly flirting with each other.

Again, the joke-flirting comes in the form of mocking from Reggie, both en femme and en homme. Archie, the protagonist and everyman, is uncomfortable throughout and finally throws Reggie right out Pop Tate’s door after Reggie goes too far in impugning his masculinity.

At this stage, the usual band of crones step in to punish him for imagined crimes against women, and he finishes the story sitting in bed with a broken leg, making a pronouncement that stands out rather sharply to the modern eye: “Confidentially, Jug! I’m no longer interested in women... or dancing!”

Veronica and Betty are significantly more comfortable with each other. In fact, it’s a rare 1940s story where they don’t quarrel with each other at all! Veronica’s femininity is seemingly unthreatened by the hat and pants, even though Archie Comics would continue issuing dire warnings against women in pants up through the mid-1970s.

It’s hard to imagine they lost after this! The tone of this page is downright celebratory, a rare occasion of early Betty and Veronica working together and coming out the victors of the story, not by one of them winning Archie, but by both of them showing their own skill at something without trying to show the other up. “Battle of the Jitterbugs” is a true rarity in these early years, a depiction of female triumph that doesn’t exactly defy the era’s pop culture as a whole--women were creating their own art even in the 1940s--but it does defy nearly every other Archie story up to the mid-1970s.