#you’re not only complicit you are actively evil

[dragons-library]

Daddy Aetos is truly fucking evil.

He could’ve had them executed, he could’ve send Xaden to a mission and Kill him, he could’ve interrogated all of them and kill them in the process, he could’ve send them anywhere else to get them killed in a mission. But he chose Athebyne because that’s the place he knows Xaden has been trying to help, he puts the civilians he knows Xaden has been trying to help in the line of fire and makes them fight Venin, is all a big “fuck you, you wanna fight for them? Die for them” it’s not just him punishing Xaden and the marked ones for stealing weapons or arming the enemy, he is very very aware that it’s to save civilian lives, and purposefully using that to hurt and then kill them.

It’s not just him getting rid of the “traitors” it goes beyond just killing them, it’s very intentional, it’s psychological torture before he kills them.

[thepeopleinpower]

Neutrality is not an option, if you’re not actively against genocide you’re supporting it. So please normalize asking dumb questions and seeking out as much information as possible. Please educate yourself. Stay informed. Don’t spread misinformation. Consult multiple sources. Primary sources whenever possible. Be mindful of credibility. Cross-check important information. Free Palestine but not just because it seems to be the stance all your left-leaning friends are taking. Free Palestine because that is what’s right. Because its genocide and no amount of nuance will ever change or justify that. Because you know good from evil even when it might seem complicated at first. Because you understand that…

…there is a lot of dangerous intermeshing of politics and religion.

…there is a lot of unfathomable hatred prejudice and fear.

…there is a lot of manipulation of, and omission of, vital information.

…there are lots of (often incongruous & self-contradictory) combinations of religious values & political ideologies.

…there are lots of pieces in play that are so often mistaken for each other, lumped together, generalized, referred to interchangeably, etc, when they absolutely should not be.

Don’t be complicit in the ongoing genocide, but don’t be a sheep either. Your voice is so often your only weapon and it carries a lot more weight when its your own and not an echo of someone else’s.

[the-owl-tree]

augh… the rampant abuse in this series did no favors for me as a developing kid. my own mother was physically and emotionally abusive to me and I thought it was normal. all parents berate and hit their kids because all kids do something to deserve it, and their parents have a right to take out their frustrations. I’m faking my tears simply to get out of trouble and I’m just being evil and manipulative to the poor woman who had to give up her life and happiness to raise me. shit I saw reflected by media that was supposed to be an escape. it’s normal. it’s normalized. I don’t much like breezepelt for being such a consistent dick, and I also don’t believe he’d be any friendlier if his life wasn’t the way it was, but I do know that not acknowledging crowfeather canonically abusing his son and simply finding every excuse to justify it contributed to me only realizing I myself was being abused (and kind of still am. can’t move out due to health and finances so I have to just accept it until I can safely leave one day. working with someone on that) only into my early 20s. which. how to deal with that? this series is certainly impactful, but I’m not sure how. obviously there’s nothing that can be done in series about this unless it’s plot relevant. but what exactly could happen to abusive cats in warriors? clan life is set up to keep abusers’ power over their victims (clan leaders power dynamics with other cats, the treatment of she-cats who don’t want kits but have no choice, tallstar’s revenge and crookedstar’s promise in general, squirrelflight’s hope and so on) and no one questions it. it’s almost a sad acceptance. like “oh no :< you’re just unlucky that no one loves you.” oh well. boarder skirmish.

I'm sorry to hear you went through that, Anon, I'm wishing you all the best on getting out of there!

I think it really is such an unfortunate step that the authors prioritization in handling canonical abusers such as Rainflower and Lizardstripe (setting aside how heinously misogynistic her writing is, the books do see her as an abuser), is that they focus on making sure the victims are subjected to abuse constantly to ensure the reader understands these cats are bad. But then...never really have anyone step in to help them. Their focus on mean wicked mothers and making sure the reader is seeing that actively harms their stories of abuse, because they then refuse to acknowledge those who stand by and watch (oftentimes the father figure or other "sympathetic" side characters) are complicit.

I don't think it's to talk about it as an in-universe problem, but instead we should examine who the authors see as abusers and who they don't (Lizardstripe vs. Crowfeather, Rainflower vs. Bramblestar), and how they handle these narratives.

[devilsskettle]

oh man i have a Lot of thoughts about the autopsy of jane doe, both positive and critical For Sure, i'd be SO excited to see your analysis of it! definitely keeping an eye out for that 👀

thanks! i'm working on something article-like to talk about the film and i don't know what i want to do with it yet lol but if i don't post it on here i'll definitely link it. it's mainly a discussion of gender in possession/occult films in the same way that carol clover describes in men, women, and chainsaws - that there are dual plot lines in occult films, usually gendered masculine and feminine respectively, where the "main" feminine plot (the actual possession) is actually a way to explore the "real" masculine plot (the emotional conflict of the "man in crisis" protagonist). typically the man in crisis is too masculine, or "closed" emotionally, where the woman is too "open," which is why she acts as the vehicle for the supernatural occurrence as well as the core emotions of the film. the man has to learn how to become more open (though if he becomes too open, like father karras in the exorcist, he has to die by the end - he has to find a happy medium, where he doesn't actually transgress gender expectations too much. clover calls this state the "new masculine," and we might apply the term "toxic masculinity" to the "closed" emotional state). part of the "opening up" feature of the story is that it allows men to be highly emotionally expressive in situations where they otherwise might not be allowed to, which is cathartic for the assumed primary audience of these films (young men). another feature of the genre is white science vs black magic (once you exhaust the scientific "rational" explanations, you have to accept that something magic is happening). the autopsy of jane doe does this even more than the films she discusses when she published the book in 1992 (the exorcist, poltergeist, christine, etc) because the supernaturally influenced young woman who becomes this kind of vehicle is more of an object than a character. she doesn't have a single line of dialogue or even blink for the entire runtime of the movie. the camerawork often pans to her as if to show her reactions to the events of the movie, which seems kind of pointless because it's the same reaction the whole time (none) but it allows the viewer to project anything they want onto her - from personal suffering to cunning and spite. 

compare again to the exorcist: is the story actually about regan mcneil? no. but do we care about her? sure (clover says no, but i think we at least feel for her situation lol). and do we get an idea of what she's like as a person? yes. even though her pain and her body are used narratively as a framework for karras' emotional/religious crisis, we at least see her as a person. both she and her mother are expendable to the "real" plot but they're very active in their roles in the "main" plot - our "jane doe" isn't afforded even that level of agency or identity. so. is that inherently sexist? well, no - if there were other women in the film who were part of the "real" plot, i would say that the presence of women with agency and identity demonstrate enough regard for the personhood of women to make the gender of the subject of the autopsy irrelevant. but there are none. of the three important women in the film, we have 1) an almost corpse, 2) an absent (dead) mother, and 3) a one dimensional girlfriend who is killed off for a man's character development/cathartic expression of emotions. all three are just platforms for the men in crisis of this narrative. 

and, to my surprise, much of the reception to the film is to embrace it as a feminist story because the witch is misconstrued as a badass, powerful, Strong Female Character girl boss type for getting revenge on the men who wronged her, with absolutely no consideration given to what the movie actually ends up saying about women. and the director has said that he embraces this interpretation, but never intended it. so like. of course you're going to embrace the interpretation that gives you critical acclaim and the moral high ground. but it's so fucking clear that it was never his intention to say anything about feminism, or women in general, or gender at all. so i find it very frustrating that people read the film that way because it's just. objectively wrong.

there's also things i want to say about this idea that clover talks about in a different chapter of the book when she discusses the country/city divide in a lot of horror (especially rape-revenge films) in which the writer intends the audience to identify with the city characters and be against the country characters (think of, like, house of 1000 corpses - there's pretty explicit socioeconomic regional tension between the evil country residents and the travelers from the city) but first, they have to address the real harm that the City (as a whole) has inflicted upon the Country (usually in the forms of environmental and economic destruction) so in order to justify the antagonization the country people are characterized by, their "retaliation" for these wrongs has to be so extreme and misdirected that we identify with the city people by default (if country men feel victimized by the City and react by attacking a city woman who isn't complicit in the crimes of the City in any of the violent, heinous ways horror movies employ, of course we won't sympathize with them). why am i bringing this up? well, clover says this idea is actually borrowed from the western genre, where native americans are the Villains even as white settlers commit genocide - so they characterize them as extremely savage and violent in order to justify violence against them (in fiction and in real life). the idea is to address the suffering of the Other and delegitimize it through extreme negative characterization (often, with both the people from the country and native americans, through negative stereotyping as well as their actions). so i think that shows how this idea is transferred between different genres and whatever group of people the writers want the viewers to be against, and in this movie it’s happening on the axis of gender instead of race, region, or class. obviously the victims of the salem witch trials suffered extreme injustice and physical violence (especially in the film as victim of the ritual the body clearly underwent) BUT by retaliating for the wrongs done to her, apparently (according to the main characters) at random, she's characterized as monstrous and dangerous and spiteful. her revenge is unjustified because it’s not targeted at the people who actually committed violence against her. they say that the ritual created the very thing it was trying to destroy - i.e. an evil witch. she becomes the thing we're supposed to be afraid of, not someone we’re supposed to sympathize with. she’s othered by this framework, not supported by it, so even if she’s afforded some power through her posthumous magical abilities, we the viewer are not supposed to root for her. if the viewer does sympathize with her, it’s in spite of the writing, not because of it. the main characters who we are intended to identify with feel only shallow sympathy for her, if any - even when they realize they’ve been cutting open a living person, they express shock and revulsion, but not regret. in fact, they go back and scalp her and take out her brain. after realizing that she’s alive! we’re intended to see this as an acceptable retaliation against the witch, not an act of extreme cruelty or at the very least a stupid idea lol. 

(also - i hate how much of a buzzword salem is in movies like this lol, nothing about her injuries or the story they “read” on her is even remotely similar to what happened in salem, except for the time period. i know they don’t explicitly say oh yeah, she was definitely from salem, but her injuries really aren’t characteristic of american executions of witches at all so i wish they hadn’t muddied the water by trying to point to an actual historical event. especially since i think the connotation of “witch” and the victims of witch trials has taken on a modern projection of feminism that doesn’t really make sense under any scrutiny. anyway)

not to mention the ending: what was the writer intending the audience to get from the ending? that the cycle of violence continues, and the witch’s revenge will move on and repeat the same violence in the next place, wherever she ends up. we’re supposed to feel bad for whoever her next victims will be. but what about her? i think the movie figures her maybe as triumphant, but she’s going to keep being passed around from morgue to morgue, and she’s going to be vivisected again and again, with no way to communicate her pain or her story. the framework of the story doesn’t allow for this ending to be tragic for her, though - clearly the tragedy lies with the father and son, finally having opened up to one another, unfortunately too late, and dying early, unjust deaths at the hands of this unknowable malignant entity. it doesn’t do justice to her (or the girlfriend, who seems to be nothing but collateral damage in all of this - in the ending sequence, when the police finds the carnage, it only shows them finding the bodies of the men. the girlfriend is as irrelevant to the conclusion as she is to the rest of the plot). 

but does this mean the autopsy of jane doe is a “bad” movie? i guess it depends on your perspective. ultimately, it’s one of those questions that i find myself asking when faced with certain kinds of stories that inevitably crop up often in our media: how much can we excuse a story for upholding regressive social norms (even unintentionally) before we have to discount the whole work? i don’t think the autopsy of jane doe warrants complete rejection for being “problematic” but i think the critical acclaim based on the idea that it’s a feminist film should be rejected. i still consider it a very interesting concept with strong acting and a lot of visual appeal, and it’s a very good piece of atmospheric horror. it’s does get a bit boring at certain points, but the core of the film is solid. it’s also not trying to be sexist, arguably it’s not overtly sexist at all, it’s just very very androcentric at the expense of its female characters, and i’m genuinely shocked that anyone would call it feminist. so sure, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, but let’s also be critical about how it’s using women as the stage for men’s emotional conflict 

also re: my description of this little project as “a film isn’t feminist just because there’s a woman’s name in the title” - i actually don’t want to skim over the fact that “jane doe” isn’t a real name. of the three women in the film, only one has a real name; the other two are referred to by names given to them by men. i’ll conclude on this note because i want to emphasize the lack of even very basic ways of recognizing individual identity afforded to women in this film. so yeah! the end! thanks for your consideration if you read this far! 

[ms-demeanor]

if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. if someone supports white supremacy, I've got bad news for you.

Yeah, here’s the thing: people aren’t ducks.

And having spent some time with actually white supremacist white supremacists and actually kind of a lot of time with militia movement type folks (which I do not recommend, it’s awful) you don’t actually know what ducks look like.

Do you know the name Paul Welch? He’s the guy who got his ass kicked by leftist protesters in Portland because he brought an American flag to protest Patriot Prayer (a right wing extremist group).

The protesters looked at Paul Welch and his American flag (his statement about the flag - “the right doesn’t get to exclusively own this symbol”) and went “well that looks like a duck.”

Paul Welch, a Bernie supporter, getting his ass beat by the evil antifas, is the number one thing that people bring up to me when they talk about how AntiFa are the real fascists. “Look,” they say, “if you do anything at all against their beliefs they’ll shut you down. We can’t allow that” and you know what, in that one instance they’re KIND OF CORRECT.

You’re standing there looking at everyone who voted for trump and putting a Klan hood on them, they’re standing there looking at everybody even slightly to the left of Trump and putting them in a black mask with a baseball bat, and you’re both wrong.

And I’m not saying we have to come together on some imagined center on this, I very much believe that the right is wrong on pretty much everything and “the right” includes an awful lot of the democratic party in my opinion.

But the saying is “if ten people sit down to dinner with a nazi there are eleven nazis at the table” and you don’t know what a nazi looks like. There are plenty of trump voters who are absolute dipshits but who are much less virulently antisemitic or racist or transphobic than a lot of folks on the left. People seem happy to sit down at a table with wayfair conspiracists in spite of the deep antisemitism of that conspiracy. People are happy to recirculate photos of Obama’s Rational Whitehouse and none of those folks seem to care much about bombing wedding parties. How many nazis are at the table if you sit down with a war criminal?

So okay, Trump voters are off the table, those are clearly ducks. Democrats seem to only support cutting access to the social safety net in election years but they’re pretty big on killing brown people globally so let’s call those ducks too. Tankies, obviously, support mass murder and we can’t have that, that’s a webbed foot and a bill if ever I saw one. AntiFa are mostly outside white agitators using violence to speak over peaceful protesters - quack quack, Mr. Ducksworth.

So it looks like it’s just you and the other exactly correct people, pal. Good luck spreading your message to *checks notes* the entire DSA membership of 75k people. It sure feels good to sign petitions and effect meaningful change, amirite? Hashtag resist! Make sure to share the screencapped, unsourced twitter rant of a tankie with forty followers to spread the word about the peaceful march of black separatist antisemities that nobody’s talking about because the news is all white supremacists! Make sure you skip the Food Not Bombs meetup because it’s super sus that they gave the dude with an iron cross tattoo a sandwich last time!

There are a lot of people who are complicit with white supremacy either because they are not aware of the ways in which the system is white supremacist (which is HONESTLY SO MANY PEOPLE YOU GUYS YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW ACADEMIC A LOT OF THIS INFORMATION IS) or because they don’t believe that white supremacy IS white supremacy because they’ve bought the foundationally white supremacist lies of the white supremacist system (which describes WAY more than just Trump voters). Conflating these people with people who actively want a white ethnostate or who believe in the purposeful, intentional subjugation of people who are not white is dangerous and defeatist.

And yes, many Trump voters are actual white supremacists who want whites to actually be raised above other races. That’s a thing that is real and is happening in government and that people did specifically vote for. But a lot of the people who did vote for him are just kind of shitty and not particularly aware of it. And those people would be HORRIFIED to find out that people think of them as white supremacists, which is EXACTLY WHY THEY’RE THE ONES TO GO AND TALK TO.

[dinoburger]

thought in my head today.

the cycle of abuse isn’t just about abusers existing in a void but it’s also complicitness in victimhood

a mother tells her distraught daughter that she will love her father no matter what and that his way of loving her IS by harming her.

it’s laying thick sympathy for the perpetrator first, over the safety of others

it’s when someone decides that their life isn’t valuable, that logic doesn’t usually stay with just them, they will unintentionally devalue the lives of other victims in their situation

you have to make an active effort not to let being abused be one of your defining traits, seeking out those willing to inflict it on you and thereby fueling the cycle.

a lot of people entangled in the cycle of abuse will end up being both. it’s difficult.

when you decide your life is worthless, it’s hard to extend sympathy to others. it’s easier to punish them in the same way you were punished, cruelly and disproportionately. sometimes it feels like becoming the villain is the only way to save yourself from being the victim.

this terrible dichotomy where you can’t win, you will always feel defiled and corrupted, angry or scared, self destroying and self perpetuating

you trick yourself into thinking there is a complete detonation switch that will make it all go away

“everyone thinks I’m evil anyway, but they don’t know how evil I can really be. I know what evil looks like. if I scare them badly enough, maybe they will leave me alone.”

or

“if I give someone all the tools they need to destroy me, and encourage them to use it, maybe they’ll get it all out of their system, maybe if I’m torn apart hard enough and far enough I will be able to have some sort of peace.”

but neither of these are true.

you will hurt other people and yourself, but you will never get to that final point where you have peace in that way.

you’re telling yourself that because this cycle might be the only type of love you know, or the only type you’re really used to. because the struggle to balance values otherwise is messy, fraught, and often painfully unrewarding, so it’s easier to put down yourself and stop caring about other people when it suits you.

it feels better to sink into the familiar than to venture into the unknown

but you have to keep going, try to look forward and not back. all you can do is forgive yourself, hard as it may be.

[your-turn-to-role]

While Trent doesn't seem to want Caleb dead, that could mean horrible things are in store for Jester and Veth. Caleb is very protective of Veth, and thinks the world of Jester. So the bargain might be Caleb now works for Trent, or his friends suffer the consequences. They may be forced to explain the issue of the tombtakers, at which point Trent can profess confusion over why Caleb didn't just ask for help from his once mentor. Surely this unpleasantness could have been avoided? Tsk, tsk child.

okay, i was thinking of the bargain as a whole group decision but if it’s just caleb? yeah, for sure, he has a bunch of ways he could mess with him

and that’s definitely one of them! trent wants caleb back but he doesn’t give a fuck about the rest of the nein, they’re disposable

i will say, threatening the nein isn’t a sustainable plan? if he wants caleb back for good, he’s going to need to get caleb to a point where he believes in the cause again, otherwise he’s always going to be dealing with the possibility of caleb running away, and he’d definitely never be able to trust caleb to go out on missions. it’s also just making caleb distracted in thinking of ways to free his friends

it would be a good plan to find out exactly what dunamancy caleb knows, because that’s a major piece of information he has that trent doesn’t, and trent doesn’t like that. trent also trains torturers, interrogators, assassins, he knows how to leverage something like that to get exactly what he wants out of caleb, so in the short term, the direct threat may be very valuable

(also, you know, if they waste too long here lucien wins so who knows how that’s going to go, but for the sake of the rest of this post im assuming it gets dealt with relatively safely by someone)

but in the long term, trent’s more subtle than that. and he’s also got the title of exandria’s most prolific child abuser under his belt, like, he knows how this shit works, and thanks to 110 we know caleb’s not immune to his bullshit. caleb hates him, for sure, he’s never going to look up to trent again, but trent doesn’t need that, he just needs caleb to do what he wants him to. so you isolate him from his friends, not by killing them, that’s too direct, but rather, get caleb away from them, keep his friends from getting to him, and convince him they hate him now, it’s not like there’s no evidence, veth called him a murderer twice, look at the bloodbath he caused in here, he put everyone in danger, and for what? and what did you really do here, anyway, your dispel magics didn’t work, you killed all those people, did that really need to happen? or, better yet, use caleb’s hatred of trent, look how powerful you are, the guards here didn’t stand a chance, i knew you had the potential to be my best student, you’ve always been my favourite. your friends could learn a thing or two from you.

i can’t think of any way to get caleb feeling horrified over what he did quicker than that. and if worst comes to worst trent still has a modify memory to drive the point home. convince him that the nein can’t stand to see his face again, and you’ve gotten rid of one of his major supports. and without the nein, who does he have left? there’s essek, who’d understand, but do you really think you can get to essek without leading trent to him? trent who has plenty of reasons to want essek dead, and the means to kill him? going to essek will end with essek dead, and surely even you aren’t that despicable, right? yussa doesn’t want to get involved with the cerberus. allura would be horrified by what you’ve done, after she trusted you. all your other allies are friends and family of the rest of the nein, you lost those connections when you lost them. what family do you have, bren? you burned those bridges rather literally, i think.

so now you’ve got a caleb who won’t leave, because he has nowhere else to go, and he’s scared of what you’ll do to those he cares about if he escapes. but your only leverage right now is still just the nein as hostages, and that only works for so long. so your next chess pieces? astrid and wulf. they don’t even need to be willingly going along with it, trent’s proven he’s just as willing to manipulate them as caleb. but caleb still has hope for them, he’s not optimistic they can be saved, but he wants it, he cares for them a lot and knows they deserve better than this.

what happens if you punish astrid for helping them? if you’ve captured caleb, you certainly know by now she did. yet another thing that’s caleb’s fault, but this is an old familiar dynamic. you tell trent only what you have to, you keep each other safe, and look, she didn’t rat you out to him, she helped you, you know she’s done evil things but so have you and you got her hurt. she still cares about you, and god you still care about her, and wulf. trent may be keeping you prisoner here but they’re not complicit in it, they’re just as trapped. and they don’t trust you and you don’t trust them but it’s a light in the dark. people who are still on your side, after everything. you know they’ll never judge you because none of you have a leg to stand on in that argument so you put it aside and do your duty to the empire.

that duty’s changed, since caleb was a teenager, he knows it isn’t serving trent anymore. he wants to cut out everything corrupt from his nation and keep it safe. but how do you do that, on your own? how do you do that without the access to the cobalt soul you were hoping to rely on. you didn’t particularly want to change the system from the inside, because you’re terrified of that, but now you’re stuck in this situation so what else do you do? and astrid’s too ambitious, you’re scared she’ll turn into trent, but right now she’s at least a better option, she’s on your side, she’s a means to an end. you can go along with this some of the way, at least while you figure out your next step. and while i’m sure caleb in this situation would try and revert back to the time travel plan, his resources are limited and his activities are monitored. any progress caleb makes from out of the box thinking, trent can use. every step caleb takes to help his former friends breaks down another of his moral boundaries, and that trent can use. if he can keep putting those scenarios in front of the trio, where if they take the job he wins and if they don’t take the job he wins, then what do they do about that? every day that goes by caleb gets a bit less sure of his footing, gets more willing to take morally grey paths to an end, gets easier to push in a direction. you can’t break someone and rebuild them overnight, but you sure can slowly mold them into a shape of your choosing. transactional thinking, the darker it gets the more caleb can justify more of those deals, go with what trent says on this one because it’ll get him something he wants, keep working on an abstract goal of his own while he makes concrete steps towards trent’s

it’s a flawless plan, if not for the fact that the nein keep throwing spanners in the works. and all this relies on keeping them away. if they can fight their way back to caleb, there goes most of trent’s power, and he may lose more than expected, because i don’t see a scenario where the m9 forcibly break caleb away from that and astrid and wulf don’t go with him

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

Why the “reclaim bimbo” trend has taken off and why I fucking hate it so much

I think most people are familiar by now with the whole Bimbofication trend by now - the movement that says that it’s woke and feminist, actually, to completely lean into sexist and objectifying stereotypes - and now I’m going to try to articulate why I hate it so goddamn much. @classical-dyke already made a great post about how bimbo-ism can be seen as a mainstream cultural response to the VSCO trend, and we all know that corporations will jump on any trend that allows them to sell you stuff (I could argue that Hydroflask and performative environmentalist companies made a killing off of VSCO but whatever) so I’m not gonna talk about those.

What I am gonna attempt to articulate is the way that (white) feminism and performative activism have strayed so far that they’ve circled back to bite themselves in the asses.

Performative activism - emphasis on “perform”

The modern social media landscape has evolved such that it is more important to appear “woke” than to actually be involved in, or even know anything about, the issues you discuss. We all know this. It’s why giant corporations bust out the rainbows every June and why I have to suffer through endless MCU #Girlboss edits.

On an individual level, it means that every single thing you do online has to be tied in to your personal politics, and god help you if those politics aren’t the right ones. Every musician you listen to has to be a shining star of social responsibility. Every show you watch either needs to be completely unproblematic, or you have to prepare a fully sourced essay with MLA-format citations about Why It’s Okay For You To Like This Thing Because It Helps You Process Your Personal Trauma Or Whatever to whip out every time you make a post. The whole CARRD/putting your life story in your bio thing.

And in the case of bimbos, insisting that liking crop tops and glittery eyeshadow means you’re a communist, actually.

I think capitalism sucks and pushing back against the endless waves of advertising and monetizing is great. Every time I see someone selling t-shirts of a current event that happened 5 minutes ago I vomit in my mouth a little. But people have taken it to such extremes now that if you profess to like material goods or anything mainstream, you’re an evil dirty capitalist and also complicit in everything wrong in society.

Nobody is allowed to just like stuff anymore. You either have to loudly and constantly proclaim how horrible it is or loudly and constantly explain why you like your pink lip gloss and why it’s okay and doesn’t conflict with your infallible wokeness. So what we end up with is this group saying that not only is having your tits out on social media leftist, the two are actually intrinsically tied.

Not Like Other Girls, pink flavor

When I was in high school, I wore baggy t-shirts and sneakers instead of makeup and high heels and dresses. I read books and had smart people thoughts instead of listening to pop or having crushes on boys. I was Not Like Other Girls (the unspoken implication here being that I was better than other girls) because I didn’t rely on shallow physical beauty and sex appeal for a sense of self-worth. 

(What I actually was, was fucking gay, but I didn’t realize that until halfway through college. Also, pop music is catchy and fun.)

Bimbos wear lots of makeup and glitter. They like the color pink and tight skirts and mesh tops. They act ditzy and suck at math. They are Not Like Other Girls because they can lean into their femininity and sexuality, even going so far as embracing an insulting stereotype created by the men they profess to hate, without compromising their sense of self-worth. In fact, it’s the source of their empowerment!

Do you see a common thread here?

Targeting impressionable young girls

What we get here is a perfect storm of factors that lead to young girls sexualizing themselves and calling it empowerment.

Being a teen or pre-teen is hard. You’re trying to figure out who you are as a person, how to navigate into adulthood, and all you want is to have some goddamn agency in your decisions. And that’s why the bimbo movement fucking sucks, because it takes attractive social and political ideologies (human rights! gender equality! lgbt inclusivity! making personal choices apart from societal expectations!) and then ties it to a full face of expensive makeup and a Victoria’s Secret push-up bra, and now you have 14-year-olds with their tits on TikTok thinking that they’re participating in some sort of radical self-liberation movement. And they can get away with it because they know the proper buzzwords to say to get the Purity Police off their backs.

In some ways, it feels like a betrayal. One of the big draws of feminist/leftist circles for many women was this idea that you don’t have to look Like That to get respect as a human being. You don’t have to be hot and sexy and flawless to have worth. It was a space where you could learn to divorce yourself from mainstream media expectations, to figure out which choices you made because they actually made you happy vs. the choices you made because you liked the rewards society gave you for conformation. But now here come the bimbos with their flawless contour and their surface-level communist rhetoric, and it just completely muddies those waters.

Tl;dr

You are allowed to like things without having to give a full moral justification for it, and that includes liking mainstream things.

Adhering to modern beauty standards while saying you’re doing it for yourself, actually, isn’t the radical move you think it is.

Encouraging minors to hypersexualize themselves is bad.

[bao3bei4]

i have basically covered the material in this post several times on my twitter. but this is, in my opinion, the only s*xy t*mes with w*ngxian take you need. 

(cw transphobia, transphobic slurs, antiblack racism, mentions of csa and bestiality in fiction)

edit 6/10/21: hi! i’m realizing people are still reading this! this was written in response to aja romano’s vox article on the fic that was published in late february of this year. i had been frustrated with how their article seemed to miss the point in many ways, because they never talked about the substance of the fic. which, i mean, fair. i wouldn’t want to read a 1million word fic either.

but i already had, so i thought i’d write about some things that i believed needed to be part of the conversation. namely, that its author wasn’t a harmless troll, but a person i genuinely disliked who i believed should be deplatformed.

i think virtual1979 is a bad person. 

i think a lot of people mainly know about sexy times the phenomenon more than they do sexy times the fic itself. i have the dubious honor of being one of the few people who has actually read large portions of the million word fic, and that’s why i wanted to write this meanspirited hit piece. 

the fic is down right now and the author’s notes and comments have both been deleted, which is why i cannot provide screenshots. however, these are all quotes i have saved from when the fic was online, and i’m happy to talk with anyone if you feel any of these quotes are mischaracterizations of the fic. 

i also want to be clear this is not a “callout post” and i’m not trying to “cancel” them or whatever. i am just explaining why i don’t like them, why i don’t feel bad they’re being harassed, and why i do not find them sympathetic at all, and perhaps why you should also adopt these stances. 

let’s start with transphobia. 

sexy times with wangxian is transphobic. this much is apparent from the tags. virtual1979 tagged the following: F*tanari, d*ckgirl, Sh*male. they use this language in the chapters that include a character with both a vagina and a penis. 

they refer to this character (wei wuxian) with the pronouns “he-she.” the following excerpt is a fair representation of how this wei wuxian is referred to in the chapters where wei wuxian has a vagina and a penis. 

[Lan Zhan] would never be turned on by a female, and he would actually be turned off by a drag queen - but this… this Wei Ying, it’s Wei Ying, and he-she looks [...]

i know these words are common in porn categories, but they are also slurs. virtual1979 also uses hermaphrodite to refer to this set of anatomy, which is not strictly a slur, but definitely a stigmatizing choice of language. 

they have repeatedly made clear they are not open to criticism. they have also since removed the comment section. making an intersex character for the express purpose of using transmisogynistic language towards them in your million word porn fic isn’t annoying the way their tags are, it’s actively fucked up. 

fanfiction has a transphobia problem, and if we’re talking about sexy times with wangxian in any capacity, we must be clear: sexy times with wangxian is part of that problem too. 

secondly, virtual1979 is also complicit in ao3’s racism problem.

i think the way they write about chinese characters and settings is annoying and racist, but they are a malaysian chinese person, so i do have some sympathy for them. i am committed to having some patience for people who are annoying if they themselves are working through the prejudice they have faced. 

they’ve commented as much: 

Not gonna lie, this fic has been a steep learning curve for me despite my roots being Chinese as well, but I have absolutely zero knowledge in some of these aspects!

and i’m happy on some level they can get in touch with their roots. who among us has not been cringe and diaspora. any criticisms i have of their portrayal of chinese people will stay private and be made to other people of color.

i’m going to be clear here i don’t think the actual comment they made makes them super evil or anything. but this essay IS clearly in response to That Article, which did mention racism in fandom. so.

i think we have all seen the infamous karen comment they made, in which they compared people who criticized their tagging with “Karens,” equating antiblack state violence to... mean comments on ao3? and “SJWs,” which, eye roll. no ageism but you’re 41 why the hell are you complaining about sjws

anyway. i am deeply frustrated by the co-option of the word karen. a stand-in for a particular type of racist violence white women specifically can and do inflict has become fused with that reddit-type mommy issue “can i speak to the manager” internecine white resentment. 

so their trivialization of antiblack racism is another reason i don’t like them. again i KNOW it’s petty to point this out here, but this to me shows that virtual is afflicted with the same kind of fandom brainrot that aja is, where everything comes back to that same sort of self-centered bullshit. 

sorry for that jab. julian told me that aja thought that cql was about callout culture and all i could think was “wow! just like virtual thinking that--” because i also have spent too much time on twitter this week. 

this is just like. part of this ongoing pattern i’ve noticed with virtual, where they’re aware enough of real problems to acknowledge they exist (police violence, accessibility issues caused by their tagging) but are determined to double down on their minor relative persecution as king, shittily drawing parallels between like... real problems and fandom problems. equating the two or allowing the second to take priority over the former is like... par for the course for this type of person! 

third, this is just another clarification on more parallels between ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on by That Article. 

i would rather DIE than get into discourse. but why did they write this sentence: 

Lan Zhan’s rational mind finally broke with a tsunami of pedophilic lusts [...]

by the way that is the start of a 430 word sentence. and yes this fic does contain hundreds of thousands of words of aged down wei wuxian. make of that what you will. 

also why would you make wei wuxian teach baby chickens how to sexually pleasure him. do you hate these characters. what’s going on. i think mxtx should be able to sue virtual for that one. 

there’s a very obvious connection between mainstream ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on in That Article. sexy times contains multitudes and some of those multitudes are bestiality and explicit childfucking. 

this is not unrelated to fannish culture, they are not unfamiliar with fannish norms, blah blah blah. this is just normal fandom. they’re not subverting shit, they’re just a normal fan who unlike 99% of fanfiction writers on twitter, spends more time writing than posting. this has taken their fannish tendencies to cartoonish heights. 

finally, they don’t care about mdzs or wangxian. they’re literally just horny and spiteful that’s it. this isn’t a question of like... “ohh they were a good faith participant in fandom until they went joker mode” and the REAL villain is society/ao3. like no they wanted to write shitty porn, and when they found out they were annoying people, they decided to double down because they could be the main character of the mdzs ao3 tag every time they found a spare hour to write. 

here are some select receipts on that topic:

they do not care about canon: 

MDZS has quite a complicated and expansive plot and history, and enough content that one can choose to tune out certain parts and still get to the end of the story in one piece. Also, because of its source, some fans may not fully realize the nuances, cultural aspects (ooh, cultural appropriation is another triggering topic) or the full breadth and depth of the source material, such as a person like me, who is half-baked in terms of knowing what the canon universe is all about. So I end up playing with characters and settings technically borrowed from the story, and make them do things that would otherwise run counter to the original source material - and that draws quite some flak from those opinionated people I mentioned just now. It's part of what makes the fandom toxic. It's like they're the self-appointed guardians of the source material and they act like they own the rights to question such questionble fanworks, and dare I say, try to take down those that cross certain lines too.

they are just horny: 

After that giddines of extra drunken Lan Wang Ji scenes at the beginning, I'm blessed with Lan Wang Ji (Wang Yibo's, actually) fuzzy nips! Bless Bless Bless, and Amen! muahs the nips on the screen

anyway they did get nuked over wishing covid on people. 

so yeah. i want to be really clear. this is my thesis: i do not feel bad for them. you should not either. i do not like them. you should not either. that’s ALL!!!! 

[dominicvail]

on a slightly serious note on that episode, and the uh... Fact that frank military has probably watched/read the silence of the lambs recently, i’d like 2 point out the reason people, and women in particular, like the whole hannibal lecter vs clarice starling thing is because it Negates the tropes that episode walked into face first, Lecter is the only man in sotl that Doesn’t demean her because she’s a woman, he’s not the active villain of that story, he’s an antagonist. He doesn’t get creepy towards her in a sexual harassment way. It’s why she doesn’t like... hate him. It’s why they have a cordial relationship despite every reason they shouldn’t. 

If you try and do the whole classic sotl story where a lady cop goes to get information out of the terrible awful man in a glass cage because he’s so awful, you have to also realise that in sotl... They get on pretty well. Lecter is indisputably a right dick, to use a turn of phrase, but she can take him toe to toe and he Never treats her as anything but an actual person, where everybody else treats her like a piece of meat (hence, the irony... the cannibal is the only one Not doing that). 

In which case, sotl is an inversion of tropes in itself, so if you invert it you’re just... Walking smack into bad tropes. Starling is underestimated and gets one over on lecter because of it! Somebody Else deliberately ruins it for her afterwards! She actually legitimately has the upper hand on him, and somebody who is after his own egotistical glory sells her out. Unlike in this episode where they never let Kensi get the upper hand Once. 

They used a story device of Kensi being sold out by the other woman instead, which Isn’t the same because that was a desperate plea Anyway. Kensi never had any power. 

And that is the problem. 

In trying to invert something which in itself was an inversion of tropes, they’ve just managed to glorify some absolute Monster stereotype of a white man evil genius character and basically just victimize Kensi the whole episode through. And to top it off, she never even gets a moment to defend herself or voice her own feelings on the matter, because they gave that riff to Deeks instead. 

Kensi was basically just a walking victim in that episode, every moment of victory she had was stolen from her, she was psychologically tortured, threatened, was never allowed to have a moment to actually even Have feelings on the proceedings because a man got to do That as well. 

In sotl, Lecter escapes as well, but it wasn’t in any way Starling’s fault... She Had Him, not the other way around. The man who was in charge of Lecter sold Starlin out and set about the string of events that allowed Lecter to get out. In This episode, Kensi is forced to roll over to all his demands and it leads to him getting out, she is complicit in it because she was never allowed any agency by the plot.   

Character centric episodes are supposed to be About that character, this episode was basically things being Done to Kensi and other peoples opinions on those things, she was a passive role in her own episode, and that’s Not Good. 

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Hello! (Different anon here). So, re the recent discussions abt the MCU/Disney as imperialist propaganda, how do you think we as fans should approach the issue? Bc--I mean personally speaking I only engage w Disney properties via fandom, don't reblog (cont.)

(part 2) or promote the films/shows themselves, but still worry about the issues of fan complicity in corporate mythmaking. And I totally understand that the answer is "it's complicated", but I wanted to hear your thoughts?

Hi ^-^

It is a complicated matter and I think there’s two major perspective on which you can see the issue and I don’t think one is ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’, they’re both valid points and sadly coexist. (Not to be like ‘we live in a society’ but we cannot decide to exit capitalism, we can only move inside it.)

One is fandom as resistance: by engaging with the text in a manner that deconstructs it and that transforms it (transformative works that queer the text up, for instance), I am doing an exercise in resistance, and my act of putting queerness in a text that evades it is radical.

The other is fandom as advertising: we’re effectively giving visibility and attaching positive connotations to a product. How many people check out shows after seeing gifsets and fanart on tumblr? A lot. We should be consuming “good” media (say, indie content over megacorporation stuff) and giving visibility to that.

I don’t think that refusing to engage with the “problematic” text at all lest we dirty our hands by making ourselves complicit of the system is a particularly fruitful approach (obviously I’m talking about collective actions, individually one can just do whatever they want within the limits of manners, it’s fandom), it seems to me more like an act of purity. Transformative works have a long, long history and I do think there’s power in that history. Transformative works do help people. And “problematic” media attracts fandoms because there’s so much fertile ground for transformation.

Also, not less importantly imo, it’s not like you can trace a line between Evil Media and Good Media. The MCU is so blatant it’s not really difficult to see it, but how much media just incorporates values that are just mainstream in the culture that produced it and are not good? How do you trace a line? Is Drarry fanfiction advertising for Rowling? Should we stop it at all? What counts as propaganda? Must it have gone through the pencil of the American military or also not?

Maybe I’m just trying to justify my own actions, but I think that maybe we kind of overstate our own importance...? Disney spends billions on marketing, and unless it turns out half of you are Disney accounts swaying the population like the Russian blogs in 2016, I’m not even sure fandom is really that big a part of the marketing strategy. (Do we stop watching actors’ interviews? Is Anthony Mackie’s face problematic during a marketing tour? We end up in directions I’m not comfortable with.) I mean, I know that social media activity is still part of the marketing strategy, and an important one at that. But social media activity comes in many forms and some of those are transformative. Where do you trace the line? Edits are good but gifsets are bad? What about a gifset with different captions that make the scene gay? Slash fanart? Non-slash fanart? Fanart of a canon straight ship? (Hint: none of those are bad.)

Something else I want to point out: this kind of talk comes up when they (not just Disney) make content aimed at progressive audiences. It’s natural. An audience that will pay attention to this kind of issues will not really care about stuff that doesn’t really ping their radar. But the result is that it seems like we’re particularly vicious against “good” things: movies with a female lead, shows with a Black lead. You’ll see arguments like “oh, you weren’t saying this before, but you’re saying it for this product about a woman/Black person so you’re misogynist/racist!”. That’s in bad faith. Of course it stands out when the propaganda is done in something that markets itself as progressive. Nobody really goes to see Macho Batman With Biceps Feels Manly Angst #37 and expects intersectional feminism in it. But they make a movie with a female lead for the first time since 1926, and you’re like “oh? Maybe good? Maybe one good thing finally?” and then brown-skinned people with beards in sandy places want more bombs. Guess which one progressive-leaning people will talk about the most?

I have one Harry Potter fic on my ao3. It’s something I wrote as a teen and found a few years ago and, while it’s not really great, I decided to publish it. I recently debated with myself whether to delete it. I didn’t want to have something related to Rowling on my account. But then I thought, then what? Should everyone delete all Harry Potter fanart ever? Sure, no one will miss my old fic because it’s bad, but that’s not the point. Do I think that deleting HP fics is a “good” gesture? Then do I think everyone should do the same? No. The world of HP fanworks is vast and rich and has a lot of beauty in it. Same with the MCU fandom.

This said, individually one chooses. If you’re personally uncomfortable engaging with a text, you stop engaging with that text. If you want to make transformative works of the most problematic text ever, you make them. (And really, who decides what is too problematic for posting on tumblr about it? Fandom’s still having debates on that nazi manga with the big monsters.) Mega-popular texts are also good collective exercises in text analysis and further debates because they become a common language for many people. (There’s also the fact that the MCU didn’t create the characters, and they have actually a long and often powerful history, although that’s not a culture I’m familiar with.)

Tl,dr... don’t subscribe to the platform :p

[msfbgraves]

I see you, villain? The problem of Percival Graves

Thinking about the othering of villains, of course I thought of Percival Graves (because when do I not think of Percival Graves, aight) - and the problems he creates if you present him as a villain. Because in the world Rowling created he cannot have that function. In fact, Percival Graves a living, breathing indictment of JKR’s morals.

More under the cut because this is going to be long!

Simply put, a villain has to embody everything the narrative, and the audience, instinctively and collectively knows is wrong. In-story, a few characters can understandably choose their path, but for the most part - no. What they do is antithetical to the morality of the audience. Yetr what Graves does, for most of the movie, is not clearly villainous. In fact, hardly anything he does is.

Hang on, though! He wanted to kill Tina and Newt without so much as a trial! And we know she is good, right? She works at  MACUSA, she tries to protect the wizarding world, she likes our hero, her sister is a sweetheart...

Graves also works at MACUSA. Queenie works at MACUSA. So that cannot readily code them as evil. Graves also works to protect the wizarding world. He’s shown to be a kind man to Tina, at least - he is not an all out bully. He is also more openmindend than the leader of the supposed good guys, Seraphina Picquery.

Then, maybe, the point is that MACUSA is not good, and aligning yourself with them is an evil thing to do. Fair enough, but if that is the case - what does that make Tina and Queenie at the end of the film?

Getting back to the fact he wanted to kill Tina and Newt...

Yes, he wanted to execute Tina and Newt. And as such, was exercising powers that the institution they both represent, sanctions. Again, the institution our heroes support, and if not do not actively oppose, condones this. In that light, is Graves the only villain? Or is he supported by a greater evil our heroes also align themselves with? To the audience the execution order is a great big no-no, but in-story, Graves is completely within his moral rights to do what he does.

But Graves is manipulating Credence.

Yes. Graves is manipulating Credence. And in doing so, is doing more for him than anyone has ever done for him before, including Tina. There’s little Modesty, but even she turns away from him in the end, and, being ten, there’s not much she can do for him up until that point. Tina went after his Ma once, and that changed exactly nothing as he was made to forget the whole incident. (The script implies that he hasn’t but that wasn’t made clear other than in one look, so it’s hard to take that as fact.)The rest of the wizarding world has left him to rot for his whole life. Graves wants something from him, yes - but he also promises him something in return and does him smaller favours: he listens to him, more than once (”You’re upset. It’s your mother again. What did she say? Tell me.”) he heals his wounds, he puts a meal in him (in the Lego movie at least) and he gives him physical affection.  Conditional love is an abuse tactic, but in context, this can hardly be seen as a villanous action, not when our ‘good guys’ are worse than useless.

Graves wasn’t going to make good on his promises to Credence, though. He dropped Credence like a hot potato when he didn’t need him anymore.

Yes. Graves’ in-story, truly immoral flaw is that he is racist towards Squibs. But you know, so is almost the entire wizarding world. They also condone the subjugation of non-human magical creatures, as Newt is all too aware. Graves is certainly no hero, but this alone also can’t make him a villain in the context of the world he is in, because then everybody is.

He hit and verbally abused Credence.

He did (poor boy). It wasn’t a random moment - more of a ‘Snap out of it, we have no time for this’ we’ve seen people do in movies before, but that was inexcusable. That’s his society’s racism in full view.

He went after Newt.

Of course he did. Newt was a fugitive trying to tamper with a dangerous beast - it really was kind of his job.

He went after Tina.

Again, fugitive trying to tamper with a dangerous beast. Kind of his job.

He tried to manipulate Credence again

He tried to save his life. In order to use him later, perhaps, but he might have absolutely made good on his promise to get Credence a place in the wizarding world now he knew he was a wizard (and his racism thereby no longer a factor). (”You are a miracle. Come with me. Think of what we could achieve together.”)

The Graves we’re presented with is a manipulative, dangerous man, complicit in an evil system - but so are they all. In this system, human life, wizard or no, is extremely cheap. Yes, Graves can execute on a whim, but so can, and does, Picquery. She too takes life for some perceived greater good, just as we already know Grindelwald does.

The one who calls this all out? The one who refuses to be complicit? Is Graves!

If the wizarding status quo is as rotten as it is, being opposed to it cannot make a character villainous. And yes, when Graves is revealed to be Grindelwald - and as a visual shorthand is immediately othered more (he is made uglier and is spouting nonsense) this point still stands. Yes, he’s killed people to further his objectives. Well, so has MACUSA! They’ve killed Credence! They would have killed Newt and Tina. And is there any justice for the non-magical people that get killed due to MACUSA’s negligence? (Chastity Barebone? Shaw - he may be an asshole, but what of his Dad? All those other people Credence’s unchecked magic has injured or killed?)

JKR desperately wanted to write a good-vs-evil dichotomy, but what she has actually written is a chaos-vs-order dichotomy. True, a lot of what codes our heroes as good is their rejection of of the established, inhumane order, but so does Graves. Yes, he is ultimately a worse person than our heroes because he is a racist and abuser where Tina, Queenie and Newt are not. but that is not what the movie is about. Our heroes are not trying to fight for magical and non-magical integration - that is supposedly what Grindelwald (and so too, Graves) is doing. They are trying to restore order. That’s what the whole conflict is about. Order vs chaos. In the beginning, Newt’s creatures cause chaos that needs to be stopped. Credence causes chaos that needs to be stopped. Well, they succeed - in the end, Newt’s creatures are caught, the non magical people neutralised, Credence is killed, and Graves - who has declared his opposition to order openly - is defeated.

That is also what technically makes Graves the villain of this story - he is very much trying to further chaos by using an Obscurial. But when order is inhumane, trying to disrupt it cannot be seen as evil.

That’s why Grindelwald, as a villain, really doesn’t work. The audience isn’t convinced the current order should survive. After all, what good does it do? Why perpetuate an institutional evil?

In the second film, they have to ramp up the otherness of Grindelwald - he is uglier and very much more chaotic and he kills more people than the established order does - at least, so we’re told. He goes on causing massive chaos, and this actually, is coded as one of the Crimes of Grindelwald - but the audience doesn’t buy it. Going back to the first film, what we’re presented with as the villain is a handsome, extremely competent, eloquent, manipulative and abusive (granted), but at times merely friendly influential man who is the sole source of comfort for a suffering teen, whose life he tries to save. (For his own ends, ok, but Credence himself is also not entirely pure - he does cause multiple deaths.) Graves then goes on to rebel, magnificently, against a morally corrupt world order, because he could not save Credence’s life. 

I kind of stan that last bit, too.

Now, I’m not surprised that JKR’s subconscious believes that order should be protected against chaos - she is a middle aged white billonaire trans exclusionary radical feminist. But the rest of the world really isn’t that on board with her “The world is fucked but let’s  keep it that way” worldview. The end of the first film still kind of works because both Newt and Tina are rebels at heart who are falling in love and Queenie is also saying “Kindly fuck off” to the established order. But it is a bittersweet ending, because a young troubled man could not be saved and a handsome, badass rebel turned into a bleached pineapple.

Or did he? Where is he?

Where is Percival Graves...?

[thedreadvampy]

like I am not trying to be unreasonable or excessively defensive when I say ‘oh my god shut up about Britishness’ or at least, not to talk the talk without walking the walk

I definitely have had a lot of unlearning to do from those heady far-off Bush administration days where we here in the UK all turbocharged our superiority complex about how America was a pit of fools led by an idiot and that made it not just ok but Noble and Politically Justified to rip the piss out of like. the McDonalds eating Walmart shopping mass media consuming oil chugging school shooting flagwaving white trailer park hyper-Christian anti-abortion racist ignorant American that lived in our heads and Spoke Weird and Thought They Were Real People and ate freedom fries and thought Iraq and Afghanistan were the same country and couldn’t do basic maths and barged around European cities in shorts and sunglasses yelling to each other about how cute it was and thought they were the only people in the world who mattered. and that’s not imo any different to the way American conceptions of Britishness tend to be framed 

(not to say that that image of Americans is a thing of the past At All and it’s something I often notice myself slipping into)

and this was viewed as a moral position, particularly among the hard left, for a lot of the reasons that ragging on Britain is also often seen as a moral stance. America was (and is) powerful and imperialistic, culturally hegemonic, politically far to the right of where Europe tended to see itself. America was the architect of the Iraq War, and a whole string of imperialist invasions before that, and the “special relationship” with America was seen as emblematic of how far right the Labour government had swung. I knew old communists of my dad’s generation who took as a point of deep pride that they wouldn’t interact with American exports and were actively hostile to Americans. America was seen through the lens of Bush (and is now often seen through the lens of Trump). It felt good to shit on America and, by extension, Americans. 

America represented imperialism and racist, exploitative global policy, filtered through a lens of glossy TV and film, stars-and-stripes-forever military glorification, Disney, loud tourists and a whole heap of shitty ideas about Things That Signified Americanness And Were Therefore Bad like

Talking funny

Simplified/differing spelling

Liking different sports

Being fat

Eating weird food

Using unfamiliar idioms

Seeing the world through a very culturally American lens

A lot of class signifiers that don’t exist to the same degree/don’t mean the same thing here (living in trailer parks, shopping at Walmart)

now you may have noticed that these aren’t.......super cool things to rag on? and also that there are a lot of parallels between that and the stuff I get pissy about when people make jokes about Britishness.

because the justification is that This Country Is Bad. It’s a Global Force For Evil. And that is, in both Britain and America’s case, definitely not wrong. Both Britain and America are violently imperial, culturally hegemonic, white supremacist world powers with a strong vested interest in considering themselves the Only Ones Who Are Really Normal People. It’s totally reasonable to hate Britain (I sure do!!!!!!). It’s also totally reasonable to hate America.

What I take issue with is the conflation of hating America with hating Americans. The conflation of hating Britain with hating the British. A country is not its people. A government is not its people. As I’m sure most of us have noticed, governments that fuck over the world are often simultaneously fucking over the poor, marginalised and vulnerable within their own borders (this is something as well that a lot of North Korean, Russian and Chinese people have brought up - that they’re held personally responsible for the shitty things their governments do even though they’re the people those things are targetted at)

That isn’t to say that people in both these countries (and indeed Canada, France, etc) shouldn’t think critically about the ways in which they benefit from their countries’ hegemonic power, or the ways in which they’re complicit in the imperialistic attitudes. But a lot of this mocking, both ways, boils down to

a) your government/country is bad and you should feel ashamed (like ‘you suck because the British Empire was a genocidal monolith’ or ‘Donald Trump just goes to show what America’s really like’) b) your country sucks to live in, haha, more fool you for living in it!!!!!! (Brexit! School shootings!) c) you are Foreign and that’s Weird (often coupled with ‘haha can you believe people in that stupid country do [thing that is generally associated with poverty]? GROSS’) d) you look/sound funny (British people all have bad teeth and are ugly, Americans are all fat and/or have had 20000 tons of plastic surgery and dental work)

and idk I just think perhaps that’s not...productive or good #praxis. like. not everything has to be Good Praxis it can just be a lazy joke about national stereotypes. but it’s not a Strong Moral Stance to hate (white) Brits or (white) Americans (and another thing is: these types of stereotypes very rarely include the racial diversity and multiculturalism of both Britain and America, choosing instead to only bring up non-white Brits/Americans as faceless Victims Of Bigotry). it’s not Good Leftist Praxis and people are, in fact, justified in getting annoyed about it even if they ARE white people from an imperialist country. because it is personal. it’s made personal.

and of course everything I and others have said in the past about classism holds true. in both the American and the British cases, a lot of the most commonly raised stereotypes other than language differences are about class (in that the things framed as gross/weird are overwhelmingly things which are looked down on within the culture because they’re associated with poverty - the Gross British Food, the People of Walmart, the lack of education, the slang, fatness, etc). 

(also don’t get it twisted. a lot of people thought the last time I mentioned how class affects British stereotypes people thought I was making some class reductionist Working Class People Are Exempt From Racism And Benefitting From Imperialism argument which. no. but you’re not criticising racism or imperialism you’re criticising Poverty Food, just like you’re not criticising lack of global political awareness or a culture of rampant neoliberal capitalism when you laugh at Americans for being fat. you’re just shitting on people for things they’re already being shat on for.)

this is obfuscated by the fact that these stereotypes slap together high and low class signifiers at random, but the high class signifiers that get mocked, at least in the American stereotype, are mocked because in a British  context they are low class signifiers. like a lot of what gets mocked in Britain about Americans is the high-capitalist Conspicuous Consumption of the Trump and McMansion types, and the plastic surgery and glow-in-the-dark Hollywood smile. but it’s mocked because it’s, at its heart, seen as gauche and tasteless and Not Classy, whereas the British rich know how to be Tastefully Rich (boke)

like I’m not saying people outside a country shouldn’t criticise that country. both Britain and America deserve to be criticised roundly, not just on a political level but on a societal level. yeah man I do benefit from power and I am very able to slip into cultural supremacist ways of thinking. but ‘har har they talk funny’ isn’t criticism, it’s bigotry. To Be Clear: it may be bigotry but it’s not oppression. It’s not a matter of ‘oh woe the Americans are Bullying Us From A Position Of Power.’ Neither side of this holds hegemonic power over the other, realistically (Americans are not oppressed by Britons for being American; Britons are not oppressed by Americans for being British) But what it is is round after round of the same sneering cultural supremacist oneupmanship that’s characterised the relationships between powerful imperial nations (and particularly between Britain and America) for centuries. we’re both, nationally speaking, desperately pitching the argument that We’re The Good And Civilised Ones and They’re The Stupid Weird Embarrassing Ones.

we’re BOTH weird embarrassing countries with sordid, racist, imperialist political structures. we’re both horrendously shitty nations it’s not a competition about which country is shittier because the answer is always Who Cares They’re Both A Nexus Of Awful Global Consequences.

also nations are not real. we should criticise nations as they exist but people? bully people about something real you cowards. “britishness” or “americanness” is only as real as you make it

[michaelbranch]

A Brief Summary of Ideas: Lives of the Stoics

*These summaries are kept intentionally very brief, just hitting what I consider some of the important/interesting takeaways, most word-for-word or paraphrased. My goal is also to stick to ideas/principals that might guide others (or my future self) in deciding the value of a read (or re-reading). T = takeaway, Q = Question

Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Author(s): Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

The only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person.

Stoics were most concerned with how one lived. The choices you made, the causes you served, the principles you adhered to in the face of adversity.

4 virtues:

Courage: the knowledge of what is terrible and what isn’t and what is neither.

Justice: knowledge of apportioning each person and situation what is due.

Wisdom: knowledge of what things must be done and what must not be done and what is neither.

Temperance/self-control: knowledge of what things are worth choosing and what are worth avoiding and what is neither.

Philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper and by deeds put it into practice.-Musonius Rufus

Books are a way to gain wisdom from those separated by time/space.

Man was given two ears and one mouth.-Zeno

Well-being is realized by small steps but is truly no small thing.-Zeno

Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble.

T=freedom of the humble life vs. the slavery of extravagance.

Fate guides the man who’s willing, drags the unwilling.-Cleanthes

Virtue is the path to happiness and from virtue comes a better flow of life.

Preferred indifferents: It’s not morally better to have these things, but probably nicer to have.

You can lean towards virtue and still desire tools to employ in the building of an even more virtuous life.

It is not wrong to seek after the things useful in life; but to do so while depriving someone else is not just.-Chrysippus

To have but not want. To enjoy without needing.

Let no one think that ideas that change the world do so on their own. They must be shoved down peoples throats. Or at least defended and fought for.

Steel manning: Don’t “cheat” in arguments by assuming the worst about the ideas you’re arguing against. Engage with them seriously and earnestly.

Sympatheia: We all belong to one common community. Interconnectedness of all persons.

It is your duty to consider the interests of your fellow men and to serve society.

History is cyclical.

If you don’t choose whom to marry wisely, your wisdom-and your happiness-will surely be tested.

A good marriage is one where a couple strives to outdo each other in devotion.

Ethical behavior itself is a kind of craft. One that requires work and effort.

Learn. Apply. That is the stoic way.

To live an ethical life and choose appropriate actions we must find a way to balance:

—The roles and duties common to us all as human beings; The roles and duties unique to our individual calling; The roles and duties assigned to us by the chance of our social station; The roles and duties that arise from decisions and commitments we have made. -Panaetius

Philosophizing doesn’t exist in a silo, it is interconnected with other important things.

Doing the right thing can cost a person everything.

In an unpredictable world, the only thing we can really manage is ourselves- and the space between our ears is the only territory we can conquer in any kind of certain and enduring way.

The more you experience, the more you learn, the more humbled you are by the endless amounts of knowledge that remains in front of you.

Excellence in the areas that you control: your thoughts, your actions, your choices.

At the core of stoicism is the acceptance of what we cannot change.

The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself.-Seneca

He who indulges empty fears earns himself real fears.-Seneca

It’s not things that upset us, it’s our judgement of things.-Epictetus

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.-Epictetus

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep on going back to it.-Marcus Aurelius

The good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil we do lives on and on.-Shakespeare

When we are angry, it’s almost always better to wait and do nothing.

We should ask of all self-preserving compromises: At what cost?

I’ll begin to speak only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.-Cato

Soon enough we forget about the hard labor. The results of doing well, though, will not disappear as long as you live. Even though taking a shortcut or doing something bad may bring a few seconds of relief the pleasure will quickly disappear, but the wicked thing will stay with you forever.-Cato

In order to support more easily and cheerfully those hardships which we may expect to suffer in behalf of virtue and goodness it is useful to recall what hardships people will endure for unworthy ends.-Musonius Rufus

Suffer and endure TOWARDS virtue.

A stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.

Sometimes mercy to the undeserving is a grave injustice to everyone else.

Stoics must always keep their head. You must be in charge-no excuses.

(On grief/death)…to despair, to tear ourselves apart in bereavement is not only an affront to the memory of the person we loved, but a betrayal of the living who still need us.

Cherish them while we have them, but accept that they belong to us only in trust, that they can depart at any moment. Because they can. And so can we.

This is our big mistake, to think we look forward to death. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.-Seneca

Stoics feel that engaging with society is a duty.

The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow men. If possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbors, and, failing them, to himself for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind. -Seneca

You owe it to yourself and the world to actively engage with the brief moment you have on this planet.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.-Jackie Robinson

It’s hard to get someone to see what their salary depends on them not seeing.

What is the proper limit to wealth? It is first to have what is necessary, and second, to have what is enough.-Seneca

Moral luck: how the time we were born and the situations we find ourselves in determine how heroic we’ll turn out to be.

One who by living is of use to many has not the right to choose to die unless by dying he may be of use to more.-Musonius Rufus

Find opportunities to do good. They are always there, even in the worst of circumstances.

Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.-Epictetus

If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.-Epictetus

It’s impossible to begin to learn that which one things they already know.-Epictetus

Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.-Marcus Aurelius

You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible-and no one can keep you from this. But there will be some external obstacle! Perhaps, but no obstacle to acting with justice, self-control, and wisdom. But what if some other area of my action is thwarted? Well, gladly accept the obstacle for what it is and shift your attention to what is given, and another action will immediately take its place, one that better fits the life you are building.-Marcus Aurelius

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.-Marcus Aurelius

Too many of us die before our time, living the kind of life hardly being different than death.

Is it possible to be free from error? Not by any means, but it is possible to be a person stretching to avoid error.-Epictetus

[forerussake]

“Might as well”: Lan Xichen’s approach to Lan sect leadership

I love this scene for many reasons (wwx&lxc interacting! all the information they’re conveying with what they’re not saying, wwx’s look of shocked surprise when lxc immediately pours and downs a second shot) but the best thing about it to me is how much it tells us about the way lxc has decided to lead his sect. And i wonder just how much of that was already decided and how much of it wwx indirectly helped him decide on.

Because the Lan are presented from the beginning as this stuck up bunch of rule-fetishists. These are people who grow up learning discipline in the way of 3000+ rules they are expected to follow down to every last character. Especially lxc as Lan Sect Leader is expected to live and breathe these rules. And that is not something he can disregard so easily. But in this scene we see lxc taking one look at all of that and going ‘naahhh we’re not doing that today’, even if he came to Yiling specifically to talk to wwx (which he denies in this scene, but i’m not sure if that is really true, if not that is yet another rule broken) he probably wasn’t counting on showing him this particular trick of his (and whenever did he have the chance to learn this anyway). And I think this tells us a lot about lxc’s approach to the Gusu-Lan rules and to leadership in general.

Lxc shows himself perfectly willing to bend the rules, to re-interpret them, to operate using the loopholes the specific wording of any rule allows for and use that to his advantage. Drinking with wwx here might make him more inclined to listen to the things lxc has to say and is thus worth the rule infringement. Lxc knows that the rules exist for a reason, and that being mindlessly obeyed isn’t it. He knows that the point of the rule against alcohol is not making sure no Lan ever drinks at all, it is to protect them from the loosening of inhibitions and the inevitable shame drinking alcohol brings. So lxc is perfectly willing to take a shot (or two) with wwx bc not drinking isn’t the point, not getting affected is, and he can burn the alcohol off to reach the same effect as following the rule would, so he can really drink as much as the occasion requires. He won’t under most circumstances, bc there is also his image of the disciplined Lan to think of, and what is the point in drinking alcohol if you’re just going to burn it off anyway.

Lxc finds a way to compromise on the rules. He gives the Lan way of living new meaning by living not just for and by the rules themselves but rather for and by what they represent.

Lxc���s loose approach to the Lan rules might explain why ljy, who seems so out of place in the Lan sect, can thrive there. Because lxc makes a point of not just teaching his students the rules, but teaching them why those rules exist, teaching them the things he had to figure out on his own. I think lxc might recognize a bit of himself in ljy. I think he thinks back to how lwj and he grew up, to the mindless repetition of the rules his uncle drilled him with, the beatings he got when he just couldn’t sit still in class, the disappointment on his uncle’s face when lxc dared to ask him for the reasons behind some of the rules, some of which he still struggles to make sense of to this day, and he actively tries to create an environment in which critical thinking is rewarded, an environment that doesn’t preach mindless obedience, because he has seen firsthand after the sunshot campaign the kind of evil mindless obedience can bring.

After the Nightless City bloodbath and wwx’s death he struggles to understand the choices lwj made. He struggles to understand how his little brother, who is now not so little anymore, who has always followed the rules so much more closely, was always so much more obedient than lxc himself, suddenly became the rule-breaker of the family. They have always disagreed on just how much room for interpretation the rules leave, and now they are in disagreement again but the roles are reversed. Lxc has seen firsthand what evil blind obedience can do, but in lwj he has also seen what blatant disregard of the Lan rules can do, or so he thinks. He later comes to understand that lwj’s choices come not from disregard, but from re-interpretation of the rules.

“What is black and what is white, what is right and what is wrong?”

He has taught lwj that, but only wwx could make him understand.

And so lxc compromises. Because that is what he knows best, what he has taught himself to do. He works to understand the rules, to re-interpret them, to live by what they stand for, not just what they say. He and lwj still disagree on some points, but they are the twin jades and they understand each other.

I think the scene in which lxc drinks with wwx prefectly illustrates what will later become lxc’s default approach to sect leadership. I like to think lxc remembers this meeting with wwx occasionally, that he thinks of this moment whenever he struggles to make sense of a rule, when he doesn’t know what to do. In a way, wwx might’ve helped him to understand the world a little better too, in the same way the yiling patriarch has shaped his brother’s understanding of the world.

Wwx jokingly asked him to drink with him that day, knowing that lxc should logically decline.

“You Lan can’t drink.”

In a way, lxc’s two-syllabled response serves as a kind of motto for his leadership, something he will carry with him through and beyond the horrible things that have yet to happen, the horrible things he will be complicit in, the painful choices that will come to stand between him and his brother:

“无妨” he says,

“Might as well.”

[supremeprince-bensolo]

I love Ben and your post about what could have been but why do you all ignore the fact that him living would mean he would be tried for war crimes. He might get a lesser sentence because of him helping stop Palps but he was supreme leader. Also ya don’t want a guy who murdered children and innocent villagers teaching them

You’re right, he would need to face the consequences of the war crimes he’s committed. 

So, lets go over his biggest crimes:

Murdered Lor San Tekka

Ordered the Jakku villagers to be slaughtered

Murdered Han Solo, his father

He was a part of battles where he killed many nameless Resistance fighters who were his enemies on the opposing side of the war

He was a member of the First Order, an organisation which did many horrific things, such as wiping out an entire solar system. He wasn’t actively a part of many of the things they did, but he didn’t try to do anything to stop them so I suppose you could say he was complicit

He didn’t murder any children. If you’re referring to the students at Luke’s academy, in The Rise of Kylo Ren #1 comic it’s revealed he didn’t kill them. A lightning strike burnt the temple down, most likely perpetrated by Snoke/Palpatine, but the surviving students believed he did it and turned against him. That pushed him to run off to Snoke because he felt he had nowhere else to go. When Luke woke up and saw the destruction he assumed it was Ben, but no one actually saw him do it. It was all one big misunderstanding.

No matter how you look at it, the fact is Ben Solo was a victim. He was manipulated since he was in his mothers womb by a dark force simply because of his bloodline. He was a vulnerable kid who was taken advantage of and corrupted. His family neglected and failed him, which gave Snoke the opportunity to sweep in. He groomed him, kept him isolated and caused him to become emotionally stunted (which explains his childlike temper tantrums). He abused him (look at the way he throws him around, belittles him for wearing the mask and calls him a failure). There were voices in his head that he believed he could trust (one of them being Vader, his grandfather, who he wanted to make proud) who were telling him to do unforgivable acts of evil. He was being torn apart, pulled in every which way and manipulated into believing he was doing the right thing. I’m not saying that should excuse his actions, of course not, he still did chose to do those things and needs to take responsibility for his actions.

Ben Solo is coded as being mentally ill, so surely they’ll take that into account when he’s put on trial. And surely all the good he’s done, helping defeat Palpatine, saving Rey etc, will be taken into account too.

Also, what counts in war? He was on the ‘wrong’ side, but he believed his side to be in the right, as did everyone in the First Order. But the lens we watch the movies through show the Resistance to the be the ‘good’ guys, even though they have also committed some horrible acts. Poe has killed as many, if not more, people than Kylo. He’s killed countless nameless Stormtroopers, who were groomed from birth to become killer soldiers. Should Poe, and everyone else in the Resistance who has killed an enemy Stormtrooper, be trialed for murder? The Stormtroopers didn’t have a choice, they were only doing their job. And not only did Poe kill enemies, he got members of the Resistance killed when he disobeyed Leia’s orders. Everyone has blood on their hands. Everyone is fighting for what they believe in. War makes people do horrible things, but they’re fighting for what they love so should that mean they simply get off with a slap on the wrist and be allowed to live the rest of their life in peace?

Keep in mind, Star Wars is not set in our world. It’s a fantasy space opera set in a galaxy far, far away in the middle of a war. If this was real life, then sure, Ben should be locked up in prison for the rest of his life. But I don’t think we can trial him as though he is a member of our world. Things work differently in their universe. This is fictionalised and these events have been greatly elevated for dramatic effect.

I highly doubt Ben will ever be accepted back into society. I think the best case scenario is he gets exiled to a planet far away. After maybe a few years of having the chance to prove that he has changed, he could be given back some privileges such as being allowed to open a new Jedi academy. He has so much knowledge that could greatly benefit the galaxy and after beginning to atone for his mistakes he should be allowed to pass it on. A lot of people probably wouldn’t want to send their kids off to train with the former Supreme Leader of the First Order, but I’m sure a lot of people would be more forgiving after he’s proven he’s not that same person anymore.

One of the themes of Star Wars is redemption. Realising your mistakes and being given the opportunity to change your ways and do better from now on. That is what Ben should have had the chance to do. Making one heroic sacrifice and then dying isn’t a satisfying end to his story. He should have had the chance to live with his past actions and show that even someone like him who lost his way and made bad choices can come out the other side and do good.