#whale discourse

[a-minke-whales-tale]

CLCZ and P-shifters

A bit of a rant over some frustration of just how things are.

Lately there has been a fair amount of discourse showing up about P-shifters lately particularly that of "reclaiming" the word (it is disputed if it is reclaimable) and some of it I just find distressing. I was reading Rani's blog (@a-dragons-journal) and some of the history they had written about P-shifters compared to CLCZ (clinical lycanthropy/clinical zoanthropy). With my memory as it is, much of my personal memory is missing, and really I cannot remember so far back, or even how long I have been in therian and later otherkind communities.

But I do remember how whenever I would talk about my experiences, or talk about them in any real detail, I would always have to preface it with specifying that it was a delusion, that I knew it wasn't real. That I had to play this game of "showing insight" and double bookkeeping what was real to me and what was real to others. I remember hearing over and over that if someone would claim to P-shift that they were either lying, purposefully manipulating others, or very sick. And so the "price of admission" so to speak to my community was to make sure others knew we knew that our experiences were delusion and hallucination, if indeed we were tolerated at all. But all this basically had the effect to say that our experiences were not real, not like "normal" therians, something I would be reminded of over and over.

I admit that when I look at quite a few of those who call themselves P-shifters and want to "reclaim" it (at least at the current moment and those that I see who are already much more likely in the CLCZ sphere and so there is likely selection bias), it often strikes me as not so meaningfully different to how I and others experience CLCZ, with the notable exception of one being medicalised, and one not. Almost all the CLCZs I see and interact with and describe their experiences, we will write about that this a word given to us by the humans to describe what we experience. But we almost universally reject the belief it is a delusion. It is real to us, but the humans, the doctors especially that give us various markers like psychotic and schizophrenic, they see it as a delusion. Why they cannot see it, or refuse to believe it, people have different reasons for that. But I at least myself believe that if I stopped my medicine, my body would turn back into that of a whale - I feel it, and see it as the medicine in me weakens.

But to use the term CLCZ for yourself, it implies a number of things about you, among which that at some amount you know that others believe your experiences are a delusion, and also very likely that you are dealing with some rather severe mental health problems. Rani notes on their blog quite a bit lately of people attempting to "reclaim" the term, and that it has a long bad history and that the term was not meant to describe CLCZs, and that at least some of these people in the past took advantage of CLCZs, so it is entirely possible that the people using the term now I encounter are either not the same people, or only a subset, or people taken advantage of by mentioned malicious actors. However, I do understand the desire why they would claim it. The term CLCZ itself says basically "hey I am crazy and my experiences are not real or valid". Similarly so much of the discourse when people talk about why they accept (or really tolerate) CLCZs but not P-shifters is that we acknowledge it is delusion, and so ultimately that we acknowledge our experience is not real, or at least not real to others. Similarly for when writing about our experiences as CLCZ outside talking to other CLCZs, we have to play the game of double bookkeeping, what is not real to others, or probably not real, and having to tag things with unreality. I really understand the appeal, that desire, to not have to preface every interaction with others that our experiences are not real. I feel it very strongly.

To be clear, this is not a callout post of Rani or the people in the posts, if I had a problem or disagreement with them I would just talk to them (Rani at least), I think we are both reasonable enough people. Reading their posts and thinking about it over the past week or two is just what prompted this post.

Nor to be honest do I know if there is a good solution. It is incredibly freeing to express my experiences as real and genuine and have them believed as such by others like me and not have to minimise myself, my experiences, my memories. I have a couple CLCZ friends like me and I am so grateful to have them and have that space to talk with them. But is it good for use to express what we actually feel, or does it hurt others: others the humans mark as schizophrenic and delusional? I do not know. Even if I did, I certainly doubt there would be a one size fits all approach. I may want to have my experiences, and see those of other CLCZs, expressed genuinely, without us having to essentially reality check ourselves to be tolerated, but would other CLCZs? I may not want to "recover" myself, having been through medical systems I only want to be functional enough the humans will not lock me away again. Nor would I blame others if they do not wish to "recover" themselves. However, some people may want to "recover", no doubt for some people these experiences cause a lot of distress and pain directly (rather than indirectly of how we are or have been treated) and they may wish to seek intervention. But then the question is where is drawing the line between "encouraging delusions" and "reality checking"? Is stating my experience openly without reservation "encouraging delusions" in others. Really I do not know, though I often think people that are commenting about this are often not the people affected.

I am really just rambling now. I have written this over the past couple days. It is a mess. It is just a shitty situation to be in, and maybe there is not a good solution. Maybe sometimes, things just have to be a certain way and there is not anything that can be done.

Please I do not want to debate the validity of P-shifters, nor am I reclaiming the term myself, I only wanted to express frustration that CLCZs are only tolerated if we make it known we know we are delusional, or others see is that way, and having to minimise our own experiences to be tolerated.

[eddieintheocean]

Reminder that dolphins are not inherently evil

You cannot apply human morals to any animal

Just as people call sharks evil or orcas evil or hippos evil

None of these animals have the ability to apply morals to situations like we can, they simply do the things that requires them to survive

Cetaceans are incredibly intelligent and social, but they still should not be deemed evil in the same way as we apply morals and good and evil to humans.

If sharks, dolphins, orcas and hippos are evil because they kill animals to eat them then maybe have a look at humans who have driven many marine animals to extinction

[namu-the-orca]

I don't know how "ask box trick or treat" works, but hi, I bring you a photo of my most beloved plushie since I was about 4, in return for a trick or a treat perhaps? Their name is Finke

(Pls excuse the fact that I managed to accidentally unfollow for a moment while trying to send an ask, whoops)

Ohh thank you for the trick or treat, you did perfectly! I love your little plushie, they are so cute and the name Finke is really sweet. I also have a very old killer whale plushie however they don't have a name. For you I made this painting as a treat:

"You were my friend"

It's about the killer whales from long ago who lived under human care, when marine parks were just starting out. And the things they went through because people back then didn't really know what they were doing yet. Pools too small, healthcare very subpar, training not up to modern standards. Whales were regularly manhandled for procedures, or the pools simply drained for cleaning or vet checks. And yet these animals placed their trust in the people they met. Even if those only stayed a while, came and went, put them through painful procedures, took care of them only as a summer job.

It is strange, looking at those old grainy black and white photos. Like a different world back then. All these whales. All these people. The blurred face of the trainer is supposed to represent the anonymity of the people they met. Contrasted with the delicate trust they received from the whales regardless.

[fayewoodss]

I know this subject was beat to death long before me, but when people talk negatively about the dream team (not in a good faith, nuanced critical way, but genuinely just being vitriolic and hateful), the conversation immediately veers into anti-neurodivergent and ableist talking points. It's fine to dislike them and be normal about that dislike. You have that right. But when discussing why you dislike them and you immediately bring up proven lies and disgusting "psychoanalysis" that is literally just "this [INSERT NEURODIVERGENT TRAIT HERE] is bad and evil," you are not being some holier than thou warrior. You are actively harming many people.

I know that being neurodivergent myself leads to projection onto these CCs, but pulling myself out of parasocial land, one of them is literally diagnosed with ADHD and has openly speculated having ASD, one is currently seeing a psychiatrist about ADHD diagnosis, and the last one has had multiple discussions about neurodivergency with the previous two. Not that diagnosis is what makes them "valid," but these are content creators that, for all their privacy, have been very open about neurodivergency and it's challenges, including their own faults. It's clear that people exploit their vulnerability and openness with that topic and use it against them. This isn't uncommon by any means, every neurodivergent person has experienced it, but seeing it get brought up again and again and again is so exhausting and borders on dangerous at this point.

And honestly it's gone beyond dangerous for Dream before, so you'd think people would learn...

[catandgirlcomic]

Who Supplies the Krill

[a-book-of-creatures]

One of the notes on the sea serpent post had this to say and I think it’s a very good point!

I’d say it’s all in how you frame it. It’s the age-old question. Like, what is a dragon? Is it “any large mythical reptile”? Or is it “a mythical serpent from European folklore that originated in the Greek drakōn, itself almost certainly an exaggerated description of a python or other large snake”? The first description could include the Chinese long, the North American horned serpent, the South American boiúna, the Australian rainbow serpent… the second, meanwhile, is a lot more restrictive.

So, in this case, what is “the sea serpent”? If the description is “a serpent that lives in the sea”, then yes, Leviathan could indeed be one of the older versions.

However!

The legend of Leviathan is that of the chaos battle, the defeat of an older water or water-adjacent deity to create order out of chaos. This is derived from the likes of Lotan and Tiamat, and there’s a clear degradation of the concept, from chthonic deities gradually being demoted to dragons/serpents of chaos and eventually great beasts that inhabit our world. It’s complicated. Leviathan also sometimes has multiple heads, something which I don’t associate with sea serpents. Tangential but worth mentioning.

Serpents that live in the sea have existed for a long time. Laocoon and his sons were killed by them. Aelian mentions them. Jormungandr is a big serpent that lives in the sea.

But it was the Scandinavian sea serpent that created the modern conception of the sea serpent as a serpent that lives in the sea which exists, and can be seen. It precipitated the whole sea serpent craze. Sober eyewitnesses reported sea serpents from all over the world.

Also it is literally called “sea serpent”. Not Jormundandr or Leviathan or Tiamat or whathaveyou, but “sea serpent”, not a proper name but the name of an animal. The great Scandinavian sea serpent is, indeed, referred to as such (sjøorm).

It was Olaus Magnus’ account that created a mythic landscape in which just about every unfamiliar thing in the sea became a sea serpent, from decomposed whales to long strands of kelp

to large sea life towing marine debris

to skim feeding sei whales

to whale penises

to stranded oarfishes

to whales tangled in debris (or maybe just another whale penis)

So yes, Leviathan (and Jormungandr) precede the sea serpent, and could be considered the origins of the myth, I agree! But for a more restrictive definition, I would say the sea serpent as we know it was born with Olaus Magnus’ account.

[simeons-hips]

something to be said about spending an unknown amount of money for a card in a gacha vs a known amount for a garunteed card

[batemanofficial]

i have. a whole host of personal gripes with mogai-oriented spaces that i won't get into here (because i value not being doxxed) but i must say that i am very concerned by the hyper-transparency culture that seems to be the standard of accountability in those spaces. i just saw somebody's carrd that had all of their professional diagnoses, their dob, and their suspected future diagnoses based on their current symptom presentation and i don't think i need to tell you that it is not a good idea to share that info online. you have no idea how valuable your phi (protected health info) is and how vulnerable you are to fraud and identity theft. it's not a hipaa violation if you distribute your phi, but i am begging everybody who reads this to learn the value of a good secret and keep all that shit a) to yourself and b) organized so that you and your doctors can access it easily (but not other people!!!!)

[iwhoneverbelievedinwar]

I can't answer that, but looking it up, it seems that what Ishmael calls the sulphur bottom *is*, in fact, the blue whale. And he has the whale sizes all wrong. The blue whale is apparently the biggest living animal, and even right whales are bigger than sperm whales (all this I'm getting from Wikipedia so may not be entirely accurate).

It may be that Melville himself didn't know (he describes the sulphur whale as elusive and rarely seen, it's entirely possible that he was just speaking from experience), but since Ishmael spent a whole chapter putting his new job as Very Important and Very Respectable it's also possible that he took advantage of the fact that the ocean animals weren't easy to study and claimed that the whale he was hunting was the Biggest and Mightiest Thank You Very Much.

"Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."

well Ishmael, you are entitled to your wrong opinion i guess

[t4tpumpkinduo]

i keep seeing your posts about iwtv and being like ohhh i should watch that and then i see the fandom discourse posts about it and im like actually.... maybe i am good.... /SILLY

PPFFB nono that's fair like. my god. the level of media illiteracy and horrific racism this fanbase spouts sometimes is sm of the most ghoulish, most evil and cruel i have ever interacted with and that's putting it Light iit's Like. it's extremely disheartening and awful, and unfortunately, very very rampant.

HOWEVER!!! i must say that despite my (warranted) haterisms to parts of the iwtv fanbase, it's also one of the most intelligent and creative ones i've interacted with. the art is amazing, both written and drawn, the analysis (when not done by the morons in the previous paragraph) is deeply engaging and thought provoking work! i've legit lost track of time more than once just reading iwtv meta, and i'm more than happy to share the blogs of sm of the ppl who's posts have done that if anyone is interested :] i've for sure reblogged some of their posts here!

and for iwtv itself, it's a fantastic show! the music, the framing, i have like. v v few complaints about it. it's truly incredible idk how to even describe it in a way that does it justice. don't let let one wack ass fanbase bar you from such a great piece of media smile if you're interested i definitely recommend it!

[thenatezone]

The Whale is a realistic representation of some people's lives and how they're perceived. The story is told through her eyes, not his, and that's how she sees him. You just think fat lives should be one kinda way.

So this is a person who thinks two things:

1. A movie that used prosthetics and CGI to artificially add about 300 lbs to its lead actor offers us a realistic representation of a fat person's life

2. It's me, an actual real fat person who doesn't understand that fat people's lives can encompass a broad range of experiences and emotions and NOT the movie where *checks notes* a man in a fat suit plays a sad fat man whose life is a living hell that he eventually ends by eating himself to death.

[spineless-lobster]

Virgin wellerman vs. chad greenland whale fisheries vs. gigachad bonny ship the diamond

[coulsonlives]

Unpopular opinion: there is no bloody fatphobia in The Whale and people need to chill the fuck out.

For starters, good luck finding a decent-sized pool of 600 lb actors of that gender, appearance, acting abilities, who fits the part on an intrinsic 'vibes' level, etc to choose from. How many 600 lb actors do you think are out there, and available? And more importantly, people gotta realize how hard it is to do anything when you have that much weight! And filmmaking is stressful. Add the rigors of filmmaking and being on set constantly, and you have a recipe for disaster. Literally a liability. The production might not even get approved because there's such a big chance of something going wrong.

The film didn't even make fun of fat people or stigmatize it. Charlie was fat because he was sad, not the other way around. But being fat also made him miserable in some ways. That's just what happens with a lot of morbidly obese people. It's not fun to be that fat. The movie takes the subject matter seriously and it doesn't glamorize it.

So like, people gotta stop. They're just losing their shit as soon as they hear the words 'fat suit' and ascribing a negative judgment to that, then trying to find things that are wrong, like, gasp, someone having a bad time because they're morbidly obese, even though the logic behind their anger doesn't check out and it wouldn't even be SAFE for the actor if they did find one. But sure, hire someone with genuine morbid obesity of that extent.

Maybe when they die of heart failure two weeks into shooting, people will eat their words.

And yes, morbid obesity is dangerous. You literally can't be 600 lbs and be functionally healthy! The pressure all that extra weight puts on your organs alone is dangerous, your skeleton doesn't change to accommodate anything, your body is constantly under stress. If anyone denies this, it's super, super obvious they're in denial of just how big of a problem morbid obesity is. That part isn't an opinion, it's physics, it's science, it's reality. There are autopsy videos of morbidly obese people who donated their bodies for science. They show all the effects and explain them for educations sake. Go watch a few. Or go read some studies.

[thermesiini]

the devastating outcome of the yuri/femslash polls

[notherefortheanonhate]

I, an uneducated idiot, am going to give my opinion in cetacean captivity, specifically regarding orcas. Specifically specifically regarding SeaWorld.

It's bad that it happened. It's bad that it ever happened in the first place, and when I get to hell I am going to hunt Ted Griffiths for sport for getting the whole thing off the ground.

(more under the cut because this is getting long)

I don't like the commercialisation of SeaWorld. Surely they can study the orcas without making them do tricks for large audiences.

"But Lauren, they stopped doing that!"

Yes, because the public outcry made them stop. They are a for profit company. They did not stop any of this on their own. They did not stop capturing orcas because they felt bad or realized it was wrong. They did not stop breeding orcas because they felt bad or realized it was wrong. I am not anti-zoo, or anti-conservstion. I am strongly anti-capitalist though, and I think SeaWorld as an amusement park needs a whole lot of side eye.

"So Lauren, you think the orcas should go back in the ocean, right?"

Honestly, I don't know. I am just an uneducated idiot, and I wouldn't presume to tell people what to do about it when they might know more than me. Also, historically, I'm going to be honest that it doesn't work well. We did Keiko dirty.

In a perfect world, I would call for wildlife rehabilitation facilities; huge, enormous ones, where all the whales that are family (really, truly family, so mothers would be reunited with their children first and foremost and then we go from there) in captivity could be reunited in sea pools, near enough where wild orcas (of their specific grouping/language) can call to them and they can call back while humans teach them the skills they need to survive in the wild, then release them. This scenario also relies on thriving fish/mammal stocks, which uh. Hmm. An issue for another time, but like I said, this is my idea for a Perfect World. In a perfect world, the other pods would snap up their old and new members easily. We know from Keiko that it is not entirely likely to happen. I also wonder if the captive orcas have their own kind of language borne from different pods being forced together, or at the very least if the younger ones do. The pods of their grandparents might be confused by them, at the very least!

"Lauren, that's not a solution. That's a pipe dream."

Yeah. Kind of. Honestly, it doesn't seem like there's any way to right a lot of these wrongs. It seems that it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing; we don't want the whales left in stagnant pools of glass and concrete; if nothing else, they don't have the room they're used to as migratory animals, and they don't have the ecosystem to interact with. We can't release them, they don't know how to be a wild animal anymore. And we aren't kind enough to the natural world to let them figure it out as they go along because they have lost the time they would have otherwise spent learning those skills.

"But Lauren, we know so much more about them now!"

I mean, I guess? Like I said, I am suspicious of the conservation efforts of teaching them tricks for our amusement, and how the captive breeding program that SeaWorld was running seemed to be more for SeaWorld's benefit than for bringing more orcas into our seas. I also don't know how much we can learn if the variable of captivity is there. Does this orca prefer fish because it was from a resident pod, or because they were primarily fed fish by their humans? If they were originally from a transient pod, was the transition to a fish-based diet difficult for them? Would it be difficult to go back? It seems so individual that we cannot possibly know.

BUT I acknowledge your point. Would we have cared to learn as much about them if we didn't have this experience? This capitalist push behind them? I don't think we actually would have. Look at sharks. They have less than 150 marine biologists dedicated to them right now, counting post grad students if I remember that YouTube video essay correctly. We wouldn't know to love orcas if we hadn't done this; hell, they might have been treated like the Great White Shark! It's good that we love orcas and we care about them! It means that we might make better efforts regarding the Chinook Salmon that the Southern Pacific Resident pod thrives on, or reducing pollution, or any number of things. I can't say what knowledge we have lost or gained because of specific actions. Again, it seems so variable that I cannot say. How many marine biologists today were taken to SeaWorld as a child? That seems quantifiable, but how many people didn't go into marine biology as adults because their experience wasn't as good; the weather was bad, their parents fought, the whales weren't performing as well as they did some other day? That the experience was coloured in some way in their perception, pushing them from the field? That's less quantifiable.

So that's my opinion on it. It's not good, and quite honestly it shouldn't have come this far in the first place. But there's really not much we can do about it now, except maybe letting them die with their loved ones.

[thekimspoblog]

As someone who's never been able to draw for shit because my hands shake and I have no depth perception, I am never going to have empathy for people who want to gatekeep against AI.

"Let me just tell a computer my cool idea, and it can give me a rough sketch by smashing together preexisting assets from Google Images, but do so in a way more seamlessly than I could with hours of photoshop" is a technology I've wanted ever since I was a child. And the criticisms my mom pointed out when I originally said I wanted technology like this; she wasn't wrong. Artists (the talented ones at least) have unique vantage points, unique styles, and that gets lost in translation when all the emphasis is put on just photorealistically combining a checklist of elements.

But the thing is, I'm not an artist. I don't have a style unless you count tons of eraser marks as a style. Drawing makes my hands hurt. So if I want to share what I see in my head, it's this or nothing. According to the anti-ai crowd, it's better for the creative landscape if I just DON'T GET TO SHARE my ideas.

Or wait no, they want me to pay them $200 for mediocre work. When you put it that way, I can see why they would be mad that something cheaper and better exists. I can see why they would need to push the narrative that prompt-based art isn't "real" art, because that's the narrative in which I owe them something.

Well I ain't got $200, and you can just die mad. The future is here and this technology is dope. If you don't want to be obsolete, maybe do more to have a unique style. "AI art sucks and is soulless, and nobody could ever derive any genuine human emotion from looking at it" and "AI is so popular; it's choking out man-made creativity and teken' our jerbs!" are contradictory positions; you do hear how dumb you sound, right? Usually when something is treated as paradoxically weak and strong, that's a sign you've bought into a moral panic.