#...like do you see how that is inherently dehumanizing to have your SUFFERING be sympathetic but not you as a HUMAN BEING | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ruby-whistler · 3 years

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(quicksandblock) hi! I just left you a giant wall-of-text response on your Dream post, and though I think it came across well enough, I just want to state my lack of hostile intent over here as well lol. I know stuff like this that people feel strongly about can get very tense so I just wanted to make doubly certain you know I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything. it kind of sucks that I feel like I need to clarify that but that's fandom culture for you sometimes :P

also, I would love to talk to you about Dream characterization. I think I disagree with you on a lot of different points and I love his character, so I'm very interested in understanding your perspective!

hey, hello! found a c!dream enthusiast/enjoyer, that’s cool, hi! :]

[copied part i put in front of each reply, hence different capitalization]

Alright, so first as a quick disclaimer, I’m going to put a summary of the original post’s points, just to ensure that we’re on the same page;

The post does say:

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because it continuously hurts people who relate to and/or sympathize with him, also dehumanization in general is an inherently wrong mindset

- don’t attack people who sympathize with him because he’s a victim of abuse besides other things

The post never says:

- you cannot hate c!Dream and not sympathizing with him is wrong

- the things c!Dream has done are to any degree excused

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because he’s a good person

- people who dehumanize c!Dream are real life abuse apologists

If you read the post and didn’t get these points from it, i advise you to reread it as I made pretty much all of these abundantly clear.

[end of disclaimer]

i never said anyone could infringe on his human rights! i… literally never said that! i said “they ignore” when characters do it, but that was a run-on sentence, i get how that might’ve been easily misunderstood. but yes, he’s a fictional character, i’d never said people could actually hurt him or anything in that sense.

the thing is, i still find them saying they enjoy it… wrong? the people yelling in tommy’s chat for c!dream to hurt him more were freaking victim blaming pricks, and if what they did was the widespread fandom opinion it would be hurting actual people with trauma. i ask people to look at the c!dream situation with the same severity, because it’s actually happening and it’s highly disturbing, not just from principle, but because of what it leads to within the community.

sorry for comparing his situation to c!tommy, but narratively i believe the prison arc is a deliberate parallel to exile, and comparing his situation to someone they’ve not dehumanized seems to be the only way to knock sense into some people.

i am happy you don’t seem to be one of the people who dehumanize him. you’re not the target audience of this post - neither are abuse victims who project onto him. i know people who c!tommy reminds of their abuser (because of personality traits), or even c!quackity, that’s fine. they’re totally free to hate their respective character, of course, without being,, actually right about them. that being said, majority of this fandom is dehumanizing c!dream and being mad at people sympathizing with him “on behalf of the abuse victims”, not actual victims themselves, and by doing this they are unknowingly hurting other people rather than helping anything, and spreading misinformation as well as making a lot of fans in general uncomfortable. i believe this is something that needs to change in the community.

hating him is fine, but group-based dehumanization in my mind is not. if you go on twitter and search “c!dream” and see 100 people saying they wish the abuse victim you project onto is hurt more (this is not a twitter thing, c!dream tag is the same thing, a majority of the crit is untagged but it,, doesn’t really matter because even tagged hate riles up more people) that freaking sucks and is something that the community needs to work on, not shoved under the rug and pretend it wasn’t there because some people tag it.

“the abuse victims who are hurt by people saying they should be sympathetic towards Dream are in fact just as hurt as the abuse victims who relate to Dream and are hurt by people saying his evil.”

this is not wrong. it’s right actually, but i’m not talking about this fandom calling him evil/unable to be sympathized with/irredeemable. i mean, that’s hurtful dehumanization as well, but this community doesn’t “say he’s evil” it “says he deserves to keep being horribly abused and/or die”.

and… i wasn’t talking about/saying abuse victims should sympathize with him either? i’ve said like five times that people can hate him as much as they want, but dehumanization is another thing. it’s the majority of this community (this post wasn’t targeting abuse victims in the slightest) taking away his positive human qualities, hence believing he doesn’t deserve human rights, and turning him into some sort of punching bag or personification of evil, which i find deeply disturbing since he’s being related to by abuse victims, and also blatantly incorrect to the character.

so, you’d be right, if the situation was what you described. it… really isn’t. the dream smp fanbase isn’t populated by abuse victims in any corner. it’s two small groups, one of them hurt (undeservingly) by a few and the other one hurt (no more or less undeservingly) by a majority of the fandom without anyone batting an eye.

and this post isn’t even about abuse victims in the first place; it’s about dehumanization. while its impact plays a big role in why i wrote this, things like these being widespread in the fandom makes so many people uncomfortable or pressured not to sympathize with a recently made sympathetic character that they might (but could not) relate to. relating to him myself, i might not have a say in this, but my compassion in general made me switch over to the c!dream sympathetic people, not anyone in the community or projection.

the results i relayed here weren’t the only results of the survery. people mentioned pandora’s vault as their reasons for being dream apologists,, over and over and over again. a lot of them mentioned the fandom response specifically.

it’s making the fandom not only unsafe to a small group of traumatized people, but also fans in general, who are equally as important to feel comfortable. hell, the reason dream apologists are such a tight-knit community that accepts little to no outside feedback is because of the hatred that is endlessly nurtured outside, that makes people feel anxious or not safe just for sympathizing with a victim of abuse.

i myself find this a problem that people should attempt to change beyond using crit tags more. feel free to not agree with that, but a lot of affected people do.

i agree the disc finale was actually cathartic! well, that’s a lie, i used to hate c!dream’s guts before that but that was the very instance where i saw a person behind the mask and went “oh, this is a whole mess isn’t it”, but it was,, cathartic to a lot of other people that didn’t use to have intense empathy to inanimate objects as children djskdjsk (i was a weird kid and still am, don’t mind that)

do you know what is cathartic? when a dog terribly bites a child, gets kicked away and gets put in a cage. do you know what isn’t cathartic? …that dog getting repeatedly beaten, starved and abused while trapped in said cage. even in fiction, and i say that as someone who was terribly bitten by a dog.

i don’t mind fictional characters suffering - frick, angst is my jam, i’ll write a character dying over and over again and have fun, but people justify that or make fun of people who don’t by saying openly that they enjoy it,, because he��s done bad things.

here comes the double standard. the exile arc wasn’t cathartic just because tommy burnt down a house, because hell, that wasn’t fair retribution. same goes for dream.

there is a difference between enjoying dark media (something i do frequently and is something i like doing) and open dehumanization and often normalized harassment of people who don’t do the same or condemn that. that is something that in my mind shouldn’t be a mainstream thing in the community.

to be fair, people saying an abuse victim no longer being hurt is “bad writing” or “insensitive” as i’ve seen people say would probably piss me off, but i’m,, not going to harass them. maybe a passive-aggressive vague-post if enough big accounts do it, but i think that’s justified. feel free to disagree - i still respect abuse victims who wouldn’t like that, but people who just don’t want the writers to humanize a character they’ve dehumanized will probably grind my gears.

this community,, isn’t working like this. i wrote this because people are repeatedly being hurt by the community or feel bad in it because of widespread opinions and dehumanization of a character that is as of late written to be sympathetic to the audience. that’s not a disagreement, the people who are actually sympathetic are a minority in the fandom, which would be fine with me, if they weren’t constantly invalidated, triggered and harassed as a direct result of the dehumanization discussed in this post.

besides the fact that the principle of dehumanization applied to c!dream is wrong - and if people find themselves doing that, it’s good for them to find a way to realize that, such as this post, because projection =/= dehumanization, and this post is targeting one, not the other - this is why i wrote this post. i still believe my points are valid and important for this fandom to consider.

you know, we could talk about the characterization right now - but after this i’m going onto a two month long hiatus for the sole purpose of studying the character. i’m not joking, this is what i’m dedicating my summer to. since i’m also closing my asks because of this, i can write this down and @ you when i’m done? :D i’d love to talk about him but i’m going to have so much more evidence after this, so maybe we can put this off for a while if you don’t mind! of course feel free to continue the dehumanization debate in a string of reblogs since it’s pretty much a different debate entirely.

( @zrenia @caketexturepack just tagging some people who responded to your response and might be interested in the continuation of the debate - also curious anon i saw your two asks i was just busy djsjdks please don’t spam about people who replied to me, i have a bad memory but i write this stuff down, actually )

#my asks #discourse #tw dehumanization #tw abuse #tw torture #tw animal abuse #long post

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eternalgirlscout · 4 years

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Hi! What can you tell me about funerary cannibalism?

[ID: four more asks requesting that I talk about funerary cannibalism, from @no-one-look, @itsthenovelteafactor, @beyhobi, and one anonymous user]

Well! I’m honored to have so many people who not only read my tags but are genuinely interested in this topic that I think is cool.

I should start with an important disclaimer. I am none of the following: a historian, an anthropologist, a member of any cultures that traditionally practice funerary cannibalism (as far as I know), nor anything close to an expert on the topic. I just... think both cannibalism and funerary practices are neat, so I’m fascinated by the intersection.

[TWs: cannibalism (obvs), colonialism, racism and racist language, illness, death]

Funerary traditions wherein parts of the body of the deceased are consumed are usually referred to as endocannibalism--that is, eating someone who belongs to your own cultural or kinship group. There are a lot of different forms this can take, from straight up preparing and eating most parts of the body among a large group of people, to scorching bone marrow or bone and mixing the ash into a beverage, to any number of forms of consumption. There are as many symbolic meanings to this consumption as there are cultures that have practiced it, but broadly speaking it’s a form of veneration for the dead, or a way of keeping them alive within their loved ones.

That’s part of what I find so fascinating about funerary practices in general. The question, “what do we do with our dead?” has always been vital, both for pragmatic reasons (ie. what do we do with this corpse we have lying around, because it can’t stay here) and for personal and spiritual ones: how do we show respect for our dead? How do we signify what they meant to us in life? What meaning to we ascribe to what of them is left behind?

It’s hugely important to note that the narratives of endocannibalism that I, as a White, (mostly) monolingual, English-speaking American have access to are influenced if not outright determined by colonialism and racism. Most commonly-used examples of funerary cannibalism come from Indigenous and colonized cultural groups, and these practices are highly stigmatized in many accounts from European colonizers (including anthropologists). In fact (and warning for blatantly racist language), the English word “cannibal” itself comes from

Spanish canibal, caribal "a savage, cannibal," from Caniba, Christopher Columbus' rendition of the [Indigenous Caribbeans] name for themselves. [x]

Therefore, any discussion of anthropophagic practices must reckon with the history of violence and misrepresentation inherent in even the words we use to speak about them.

One fairly well-known example of endocannibalism existed, until the practice largely ended around the 1950′s, among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. There’s a good chance you’ve heard about kuru, a degenerative prion disease that can be transmitted by consumption of the brain matter of an infected person. The story was sensationalized, and the popular Western imagination painted this epidemic as mysterious and horrifying: people from some far off land who eat other humans and develop a deadly, shaking, trembling condition that slowly kills the victim. Its symptoms and its association with cannibalism, an act painted as an inhuman taboo, survive in popular culture, which is rarely sympathetic to the sufferer of the disease. The image of kuru calls to mind racist caricatures of violent, “uncivilized” people (a term arguably more loaded with malice than “cannibalism”).

In our media and our common thought, to this day, we dehumanize the cannibal and make them other. We perpetuate the legacy of Columbus’ derogatory canibal.

The truth is... both less sensationally frightening and much more tragic. It’s a horrific disease that mostly killed women and children. It’s a slow and agonizing death. And it came not from ~inhuman cannibals clambering to eat the bodies of unfortunate innocents they slew in ritual murder,~ but from a tradition of community mourning. That’s it. People got sick at funerals, and the more people died, the more dead there were to take care of, in the manner dictated by a given culture. If we have learned and can internalize anything in These Unprecedented Times™, let it be that illness is not a punishment nor an indicator of wrongdoing. Sometimes it just is. It’s a thing that happens, and blaming the sick for living their lives with whatever discrepancies, however big or small, from that of the healthy person on their high horse does no one any favors.

That tangent probably wasn’t what you all came to see, but I think it was an important one. There’s nothing wrong with a fascination with the macabre. However, it can be extremely easy (and I have certainly been guilty of this myself, lo these many years since being a goth teen) to, no pun intended, consume the stories of people who live in ways unfamiliar to us out of a desire for entertainment over a desire to understand others as fellow human beings.

TL;DR: I think funerary cannibalism is interesting because I think the questions at the core of funerary practices in general are interesting and worth thinking about, as well as the many different forms and significances there are to be found in what we incorrectly call the “ultimate taboo.” Like anything else when we look from the outside into the lives of people whose issues and triumphs, beliefs and doubts, worries and cares are unfamiliar to us, we should do it with empathy and humility.

Addendum: while this post is specifically about anthropophagy in funerary practices, I would be remiss if I didn’t link this fascinating article (which includes a mention of a couple books I am meaning to read) about medical cannibalism in Europe from the early modern to Victorian era.

Extra TL;DR: Humans have always been eating each other in many different ways and for many different reasons. Pretty cool, huh?

#cannibalism #endocannibalism #the past is never dead; it's not even past #and I'll tell you no lies #colonialism cw #racism cw #racist language cw #death cw #illness cw #ask to tag #gallifreanpotterhead #itsthenovelteafactor #beyhobi #no-one-look #long post

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fallenpkmntrainer · 4 years

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Honestly, the answer is a hard "no." But this question actually got me thinking a lot about why I started this blog in the first place, and I feel like I should answer the question "Why not?"

Please excuse me, because it is an extremely long answer.

It is hard to watch Leaf suffer, but that's the entire point. For me to give her a happy ending, you'd first have to think about how I would do that, and what that would imply.

The clear answer is that Red needs to give up his spot as the definitive hero, and Leaf would need to be coded back into the games in his place.

But if Red was erased from Leaf's world forever, what would happen to this blog? To this story? It wouldn't be FallenPKMNTrainer anymore. It wouldn’t be Fallen Leaf. It would become just a normal "Ask Leaf" blog.

But this isn't supposed to be the usual Leaf ask blog. This isn't supposed to be the typical, easy-to-digest, fandom-wide fantasy where I can pretend Leaf exists as the hero of her world, or alongside Red as his equal.

I wouldn’t even consider this my own alternate universe.

It is just my interpretation of what really happened. Not just about what happened to Leaf, but what happened in real life.

I can't lie to myself and create a world where she's the hero. To run away to my own self-indulgent world where she gets her happy ending would feel disingenuous. I would be actively ignoring her erasure. I would become complacent, and wouldn't feel the need to speak out. But this blog, and Fallen Leaf's story as a whole, is my way of speaking out.

This is my form of closure after realizing how badly Game Freak hurt me, and thousands of others, by saying that a girl will never be the hero, no matter how much love and hope she puts into the world of Pokémon.

It has always just been Red. And so she will always be met with a boy named Red, and only Red.

And that leads into the reason why, despite him being sentient during the Magic Anon event, I still portrayed Red as inhuman and heartless. He has no love in him to make him real. He lacks a soul, free will, and the human experience. He is the epitome of Game Freak’s intentions, their nostalgic bias, their corporate apathy, their misogyny.

When Red was given the opportunity to speak, he refused to say a single word directly to Leaf, only speaking to dehumanize her. He treats her like companies do with their products: like a replaceable object.

He did not care about the sentimentality players have towards Leaf, and considered it acceptable for her to be erased because Lyra would take her place as the next hero. Essentially, considering the girl player characters as expendable and interchangeable, rather than an important representation of a young girl’s gaming experience.

The meta reason why Red took Leaf’s voice during the event is because when you allow heartless people to justify themselves, when you attempt to see their side, you silence their victims.

You choose not to hear or believe the victims, in favor of those who have hurt them.

Despite this, some people might have hoped that, upon gaining sentience, Red would have shown a sympathetic side in this story. Maybe some were rooting for this event to give Red not just self-awareness, but a soul and compassion towards Leaf, allowing him to somehow make peace with her, despite being the living embodiment of her death. Even after the event is over, there may be some disappointed people who still feel this way.

I feel like this comes from predefined expectations and sentimentality towards Red as a character, and I want to do everything within my ability to subvert and abolish this.

If I have somehow given any hope for humanity within this version of Red in my writing, I have failed in expressing my beliefs.

I cannot give him a conscience or heart, because the nature of his creation inherently conflicts with it.

But I cannot erase him, either.

Even if this Leaf was "saved,” there are hundreds of thousands of other Leafs still gone, and millions more soulless Reds where this one came from.

And if you were somehow able to hack and "fix" every copy in the world of HGSS, BW2, SUMO and USUM to include Leaf as the girl boss option, even that would never undo Game Freak's intentions. It will not undo the pain that was caused. It already happened, and it will happen again.

As long as that heartless intention exists, so will the idea of “a boy named Red.”

But Red is not the problem. He is not a villain you can defeat. He is the decision, and your anger should not go to him, but to those that made that decision.

We are not responsible for fixing the mistakes The Pokémon Company has made. These are the choices that have been made, and they have committed to their decision.

And this story is my means to condemn that decision, just as imprisoning Red is Leaf's way.

Thank you for reading.

#ooc posts #long post #munday

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