#yes i do empathize

[queenie-blackthorn]

It’s nice to see you shedding light towards what is happening in Palestine, but do you mind also lightning the darkness of what so many muslim terrorists have been doing from decades and still don’t stop to, the amount of innocent lives lost for what? The bombings, manipulation, conversions, attacks, firings and so so much more, have you ever protested for them too? There were children in it too right, didn’t they deserve to live or is it just them? Honestly I’m genuinely interested in knowing if this is for actual humanity or just another propaganda, like have you ever cared for any terrorist victims other than the ones in Palestine ?

i am going to assume you dont know that i myself am muslim.

i am also going to assume youre ignorant of the fact that a lot of terror groups (like the kkk, aryan nation, army of god, aum shinrikyo, lashkar-e-balochistan, khalistan zindabad force, etc) are not muslim.

i will also further assume that you dont know that most perpetrators of terror attacks align themselves with right-wing orientations rather than religious orientations

(57% of attacks were by right-wing terrorists, 25% were left-wing terrorists, 15% were religious terrorists (as a whole, this includes terrorists of religions other than islam) and 3% were ethnonationalists)

and finally, i will also try and think that youre genuinely curious for an answer, rather than jus saying this because im a muslim and you think id get intimidated by the subject of so-called “muslim” terror groups and chicken out of answering—which i will never do.

ill keep all these things in mind when answering you.

first off, i personally dont consider those people muslims. they are not of my people. they go against everything god told us to do, as pious muslims. id be fine letting god deal with them and damning them to hell. me and everyone i know hates them—theyre the reason so many muslims are the victims of hate crime. but i dont think thats the answer you want. its all too amusing to you to think that a muslim would condemn al qaeda and the taliban. you expect me to avoid condemning them, just because we both call ourselves muslims.

i am 100% against terrorist attacks. if its a muslim or jew or christian or atheist who conducts it, that doesnt matter. crimes are still crimes.

and i do care about the victims. i know people who have lost friends and family in these types of attacks. my empathy is with them.

but do you know sets israel apart from terror organisations like the taliban? why i speak against one and not the other?

everyone hates the taliban. everyone hates isis. everyone hates al qaeda. everyone hates osama bin laden. no one is saying, “well they had a point”. no. just no. forced conversion is not okay. forced marriage is not okay. rape, whether marital or extramarital, is not okay. everyone knows this. everyone acknowledges this and agrees with it.

israel, on the other hand? people are not just turning a blind eye. people are literally encouraging them. people are calling for the death of palestinians. for the death of muslims as a whole.

i ask you anon, do you know what its like to try and get into politics, because youre passionate about it, and seeing people calling for the death of you and your people? that is what i have suffered. that is why i stand for palestine. zionists are not just calling for the deaths of my friends—by extension, they call for the deaths of me and my family. for both arabs and muslims as a whole. they say “may god destroy the arabs” when talking about palestine. no one supports al qaeda in that way at that large of a scale.

i dont spread the word about “muslim” terror organisations because everyone knows those groups are terrible.

i spread the word about palestine because people call for their deaths. (further because as a result of this, people call for the deaths of me and my people.)

why would i condemn terror groups who everyone knows is bad, and ignore the terror groups who everyone supports?

[johnskleats]

Posting on main so no one is confused on this issue:

actually no hold on. I have a degree in dramatic literature, as in script writing, adaptations, and narrative storytelling. What [bryke stans] are saying is just "if you don't like it get out", which is wild.

You know where folklore comes from? Where mythology comes from, which ultimately shapes culture and society? Stories! Does it matter who wrote down the Iliad? Not particularly. Homer is trivia.

The elements that make up what the Iliad is, what the Grimms fairytales are, what Star Wars and Harry Potter and ATLA are existed long, long before they were amalgamated into a “new” thing. Stories belong to everyone. ATLA, like everything else, is an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation going back thousands of years. There are NO original ideas.

A story or seed or idea of concept hangs around long enough, gets seen by enough people, impacts enough people, congratulations. It's folklore now and it belongs to the public. For reference, yes I believe copyright should run out around 20 years, or at MINIMUM when the author dies. It's the market, bestie. Products, like stories in this society, will never, ever improve if there's not competition, not criticism, no incentive for growth. And when someone else does a take on your story that the public likes more? That's what folks remember and what carries on. And your name, as the “creator” (such a generous term), is just trivia.

You don't like fandom? Get out :^)

[ozcarma]

Does anyone else feel like the incinerator gun chair room from Zero Time Dilemma would have better fit C Team instead of D Team

[mechieonu]

y'all i mean this w love but mha from the start has been a story examining how villains are also victims of the circumstances their world has imposed on them. why would afo be any different

[whitmore]

really actually kind of enjoy how the big lore moments are sort of quiet on a singular stream (or a small group!) instead of the events solely being the lore; i think there would be this hesitation to develop anything solo if the server reinforced this idea that Big Lore could only happen during scheduled events and days. instead the more narrative-progressing moments (take the baghera hybrid experiments revelation or the philza birdnapping for recent example) are very low-key and almost unhyped up— there’s no expectation for that kind of lore necessarily at the time which makes it more rewarding to experience as a viewer. big fan of how they do the events as player bonding time rather than serious narrative progression because it allows all the players (especially the ones who don’t engage in the rp side that much) to participate and get to know each another more; it’s very neat it’s really smart it’s nicely executed

[compacflt]

I just wanted to say as someone who has stumbled across your blog and has read your Wednesday wips and posts about anything topgun related that your thought process and consideration of mav and ice, specifically their political beliefs and relationships with their own identities, is honestly so impressive and cool. You have brought such realism and life to these characters which is just so refreshing to see. idk i just wanted to express how cool and awesome i think that is

Because of the thought into these characters does it make it difficult to like them or understand them if you have differing opinions from them? for me personally i feel like if i were to ever actually have a convo with ice or mav regarding identity politics i would actually start to lose my mind (like how one feels when your dad or fun uncle talks for too long at thanksgiving dinner). If it does make them difficult to like, does that make it difficult for you to write them sometimes?

oh yeah! i think, my ice i really empathize with & really love & really could get along with, once he grows out of the sexism of his teens & twenties, but my maverick drives me crazy. someone sent in an ask a while ago that was like “WHY is cyclone simpson your one true love??” And it’s because i too would absolutely hate maverick & hate working with him lol. people who are overly cocky & un-self-aware & a bit self-centered make me CRAZY. (narrator voice: compacflt is a hypocrite as all these things also apply to compacflt.)

Politically… It’s difficult to say. no one really wants to hear the intricacies of one person’s political journey, which is why i won’t give you mine, but suffice to say—since the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and my semi-concerted effort to learn more about the political landscape of modern warfare, my own personal beliefs have shifted a whole bunch. definitely aided in that shift by my top gun fic project that specifically aims to understand the conservative straight-passing male mindset as it relates to military matters… there are many end goals to a project like mine, but one end product is a filter you can take away and hold up in front of your eyes and see the world through it. When writing from the eyes of a conservative straight (passing) white man, your priorities totally shift. I had to write from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about identity politics. Because they don’t! A core tenet of conservatism is very proudly not caring about that stuff, and being very annoyed when people (usually left-of-centers) make that stuff very visible and want you to care about it! “Don’t shove it in my face,” etc., etc. Don’t force me to care about this taboo, private thing I really don’t care about. It violates my freedoms, or whatever, to be forced to care—or even bear witness to—stuff that i don’t care about. Etc. And then, to be nominally a part of that community that you really, really don’t care about, and then to be told that you have to care about it because of your publicity… people asking you to be proud of something that has had a negative connotation for much of your entire life… that’s not a transformation that happens easily.

Jesus, I could write an essay about this. I have, several times by now in responses to asks over my blog. But there is so much that I could talk about. I think… I really worry that some of my writing falls into the first of the below categories:

I really try not to romanticize conservatism in my writing—I tried to show that ice and mav’s happiness is the price they pay for their conservatism. They’re actively choosing to be unhappy—but because they prioritize their honor over everything, due to EXTERNAL PRESSURES they cannot control, and which I think are often ignored in the fandom space for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, in 99% of IPs, characters prioritize something other than their sexualities. It’s never Maverick’s personal identity that is at stake in either Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick, because he has built himself so impermeably masculine that there are no grounds upon which to question his personal identity. He just isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about how to get into Charlie’s pants, how to win the Top Gun trophy, how to uphold his promise to Goose, et cetera. If he’s fucking guys on the side, it’s because he wants to and because hes maverick and he does what he wants without thinking about it—that’s the whole point of his character, from a story-construction standpoint. That’s his archetype. He’s a renegade maverick superstar who is both thoughtlessly brilliant and thoughtlessly dangerous. He’s thoughtless. His priorities are to survive and to look cool doing it, and that’s it. He is a savant in the Naval Air Force, where honor is your lifeblood, who feels he has been dishonored by his own family name, and who willingly joined the conservative post-Vietnam Navy right when/after Ronald Reagan was elected President, and who wears cowboy boots and who disrespects women to their faces, and who is eager to get into altercations with Soviet-Chinese-DPRK-X-second-world-country-coded-but-EXPLICITLY-Soviet-manufactured-Mikoyan-Gurevich-MiG-28s(-F-5s-painted-black)… I’m sorry. In my opinion, the conservatism is baked into him as a character. I find it extremely difficult to separate him from his conservatism, because in some ways his patriotic conservatism is his raison d’etre. IMO if you take that away from him, he ceases to exist.

Same thing with Ice and his unwillingness to openly rebel or go against the grain. That is his whole reason to exist in the story at all. I know that I’m saying this in a fandom space where the whole point is to change characters & put them in different situations (fanfic) but… in kind of a perverse self aware way, as in I know I sound ridiculous and pretentious, i guess i don’t really understand an impulse to change the core tenets of a character irreparably in fanworks. We are shown that ice always goes by the books in TG. Then we are shown that he achieves the fruits of that labor (four stars) in TGM. So he is rewarded for never rebelling, whereas Maverick, who always rebels (but NEVER in a way that challenges his personal identity), has stagnated in the ranks at full-bird O-6. And that’s Ice’s character. That’s what he’s there for in the story—he’s a tool to show us the value system of rank and prestige you earn by following the rules of the Navy. Why take that away from him? That’s his priority! Canonically, that’s his priority and reason for existence! And historically the way to achieve that priority is through conservatism.

And you ask me if it’s hard to like my ice and mav. Yes, but that’s not my choice. The movie already did that for me. They are not, I’m sorry, likable people. I am not a straight white conservative male writing about straight white conservative men to validate my own beliefs—I’m a queer AFAB person of color writing about straight white conservative men because I want to understand the limits of their conservatism. What they do and do not care about, and what it takes to make them care. And from what we are shown in TG… ice and mav would not care about ME. At all. And they would not want to be forced to care about me. Ice’s casual careless dismissiveness… “the plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room…” mav following Charlie into the bathroom… turning the key in the ignition and driving away while pretending not to hear her… “what?? i can’t hear you! 🙉” … they do not care. They have no desire to care.

Again. Maybe I subscribe to a very very old-school and labored and pretentious ideology when it comes to writing… I know a lot of people write just to have fun. I do not. I wish i could, but I don’t. And when you’re not writing to have fun, you don’t have to like the characters you’re writing about. They’re nothing more than tools at your disposal to get your point across more effectively. No, I don’t like them! Of course not! My ice is cruel and cowardly and careless and hypocritical and subservient and weak, and my mav is demanding and dangerous and dismissive and oblivious and so, so, so unbelievably bitter.

And that’s what my story needed, to get my point across. So, shrug. My point was my priority. I don’t care too much about the characters themselves.

Re: icemav & identity politics. Part of hopefully selling this story is the attempt at empathy for the conservative male, to bring this discussion back to the top. Why write fiction at all if you’re not going to write about people different from you, and why write about people different from you if you don’t want to understand them? So… part of trying to understand them was to understand and have empathy for this shift in priorities. Conservative guys do not want to care about labels, or sexual orientations, or, God forbid, discussion of their gender identities. I can kind of see Ice tolerating it by the end… but, there are limits. Again, it’s supposed to be private. I think he’d chafe against getting labeled gay—he wouldn’t want to be called the first gay compacflt, or SECNAV, etc. He can’t say, “i slept with like a hundred fifty women before I even MET the ONLY man ive ever slept with,” because that’s like intensely private personal information!! No one deserves that information, but people still want to call him gay, even though in his head he really is not!!!! Again—from the conservative perspective, it’s a public imposition of left-wing, overly sexualized, too-neat labels and politics onto an area of life that has typically been kept private and respectable—I don’t agree with the conservatism, but I can at least empathize with it. Pre-Maverick’s death (pre-coming to terms with it), it would’ve been shameful & embarrassing to him; but even after coming to terms with it, it’s still not something he “takes pride” in. I think he thinks of it like this—most people aren’t proud of being straight. Like, it’s weird if you are. Same thing with being proud of being white, etc. Why be excessively proud of things you have no control over? Why not take pride in your ACTIONS—for instance, his career that he has actively sacrificed so much of his pride for? I can really empathize with that thought. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get it, especially in his professional circumstances, where he has so much to be professionally proud of, and yet people keep wanting him to publicly care about this private part of him he has no control over and can’t change.

Maverick though. I think he’d be actively hostile about talking about it in public. He Does Not Care. he does not want to care. It’s all an insult. They call him the first openly gay Ace cause he’s married to another man— “okay, but, like, I’m not. Stop calling me that. Neither of us are. Oh my god we have slept with so many women. Stop calling us that.” Ok then what do you want us, the press corps, to call you? First openly bisexual Ace? “No that’s worse!! That’s a word some teenager made up and doesn’t mean anything!! I’m sixty years old stop asking me to talk about this stuff im too old.” What do you have to say to LGBT kids who want to go into the navy? “😎👍 there’s a place for you etc etc. Let’s go back to talking about all the planes I shot down.” Maverick does what he wants without thinking about it. That’s the core tenet of his character. Very conservative. Don’t ask him to care too much.

Idk. No I don’t like them. But I understand them, if that makes sense. Like their conservative anti-label logic does make emotional sense to me. So that’s part of what I took away from this project, for better or worse… probably worse: I understand why conservatives don’t like the modern over-publicity of sexuality. They don’t care and they don’t want to care. And because they are small-C conservative, my ice and mav still don’t care lol. So, yeah. It doesn’t make them hard to write, because thats why I wanted to write them in the first place.

[dissvicious]

If someone is creating harmless content for free on the internet and you decide to shit on it publicly just because you, personally, don't like it I just think you're a very pathetic person

[todayisafridaynight]

would it be okay if u told me why u like aoki😭/gen😭😭😭😭BEEN TRYNA LIKE HIM FOR SO LONG I JUST CANTT but i love ur art so much so i still consume it otherwise lol

i liked tohru adachi in high school and tbh i think that alone is enough of an explanation for why i ended up liking aoki

[zoekrystall]

Got to all the dragon tear memories and noooo whyyyy did my guess with zelda doing it had to be right. More than dragon tears were shed oh dear hylia. Idk if I am just more emotional lately or if that close up with her dragon form crying got to me. She looks absolutely radiant as a dragon but whyyyyyyyyy. Idk if I like or hate it. It is interesting but my emotions </3 Let me at least get close to her as a dragon. I will fail but I will absolutely try to speed after her now.

[memehayes]

i don’t dislike jag as much as everyone else seems to these days but he’s gonna have to keep meme’s name out of his mouth or i’m gonna get ugly >:(

[salemoleander]

Oh my g-d. Doc is going to fucking kill them, and it's entirely justified

Fuck around and find out, I guess

[daisy-johnson]

“as with any chronic condition, his survival was a matter of becoming more comfortable, not some elusive unreality of being wholly pain-free. the trick was managing it until it no longer bit so angrily or stung. ”

hey olivie blake what do you have there

A KNIFE

[asilosmagdalena]

Me if sexualizing and objectifying and fetishizing and wifey-ifying Asakura was illegal

[anthromimicry]

forever thinking about how, according to maslow's hierarchy of needs (or simply the self-actualization pyramid) that is basically this motivational theory in psychology that's made up of a five-tier model of human needs, that misao went from being on the third tier in her childhood to reverting back to the first tier currently which is food, water, warmth, and rest.

[ here's a picture of it for reference, y'all ]

so, in other words... she is just trying to survive SO badly right now at this point in her life, that she can not even worry about things like safety or security and especially not friends. and that is UHH... i might, or might not be sobbing right now

[forevercloudnine]

[badolmen]

“So, like, a local militia?” - sentences that make your conservative III%er don’t tread on me second amendment loving family member short circuit when discussing the existence of H*M*S and related armed resistance groups.