#as if religion is nothing more than an aesthetic as opposed to a whole philosophy/way of life w a lot of htought behind it

[lord-squiggletits]

Salty Ask List: 1, 5, 14, 22 ?

1.What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

Dr/atc/het 100000%... I just don't understand what their chemistry is supposed to be together. It's partially ruined for me by Drift in MTMTE being an absolute mess of a character who got most of his planned plotlines cut or changed, and partially ruined by the fact Drift spends most of MTMTE straight up absent from the story, and then he and Ratchet meet up in Empire of Stone and come back during Dying of the Light and are just...together romantically now? I don't understand how they have any chemistry at all much less romantic lskdjflkds

I know a big one people talk about is "Ratchet saved Drift's life and then told him he believed in him" but... the way their meeting was written didn't come off as particularly romantic to me? Ratchet saved Drift the same way he's saved countless other addicts in the Dead End and then his parting words to Drift were to tell him to go to the Functionists so they could get him a job. Very "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" kind of advice that clearly didn't work since Drift stayed impoverished, his friend got killed by police brutality, he went into the underworld to be a hitman, etc etc. Like yeah in theory it's very romantic for an OTP's first meeting to be one of them saving the other's life and treating the impoverished person kindly for possibly the first time in their life. It's just that that moment in canon doesn't have romantic vibes to me at all, it's just a doctor-patient encounter in which Ratchet is nice to Drift like he's nice to everyone, except it's also kind of condescending/ignorant bc Ratchet basically tells Drift "oh just get a job and get clean and you'll be fine" as if it's that easy to stop being a homeless/jobless drug addict?? If an ER doctor did that shit to me I'd be more likely to see him as an asshole than to admire or like him at all sdklfjsd.

Then Drift was a Decepticon for millions of years, then he joined the Autobots on Earth and like... he and Ratchet sure existed on the same team together dlkfjldsjlkds there were zero interactions of worth b/t them in phase 1, their ship dynamic came entirely from JRO's writing and even then I feel like it's an informed romance more than an organic and believable one.

5. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?

I actually used to like O/Pli/ta when I first came here, but as I stayed longer it became evident that the overwhelming majority of the fan content of it reeks of "we are very sorry for having a heterosexual ship, let us compensate for it by making the woman a Girlboss Xtreme and the man a weak simp so that you can be sure the woman isn't being Oppressed and Stereotyped by being in a heterosexual romantic relationship" which is one of my most detested types of fan content, so now I have the ship tag blocked sldkfjlsdkdskl. Literally it's just the same "the woman is a TOTALLY COMPETENT AND COOL ACTION HERO and her man is a TOTAL SIMP FOR HER" that's interchangeable with most het ships in other fandoms, where there's no actual personality or chemistry for them and instead it's just the same Fandom Approved Heterosexual Relationship Dynamic.

That and a significant amount of content I see for it is just like blatantly ripped off from Me/go/p dslkfjsdfsjl or like, taking the main MOP dynamic and just swapping OP and Elita's places so now Elita is the cool action hero who's rival to Megatron and OP just Exists as an emotional support husband I guess. Or like Elita is made into a daring action hero while Optimus is reduced to a meek little wallflower who's no one of any real importance and just follows in her wake. It reeks of insecurity and unoriginality, as if the fanbase is cripplingly aware that Elita was made to be the Token Girlfriend and instead of just making her a better character and making the romance she's a part of more equal and compelling for both characters, they have to violently overcompensate by having Elita steal OP's role and everything interesting about him. 😂Like I'm begging people to just be normal about hetero ships. You can ship a man and a woman together without having to diminish the man and girlbossify the woman to prove you're a Real Feminist.

14. Unpopular opinion about your fandom?

Continuity soup is boring and for the most parts creates purely fanon plots/ideas/characterizations that have tenuous relationships to actual canon. It's nice that people have the creativity to make their own AUs, but I also want to read about the actual continuity in question and not someone's mishmash of it.

Like UGH when I read a fic tagged IDW1 I want to see cop Orion not archivist or dockworker Orion. When I read a fic tagged IDW1 I want to read about the Senate led by Proteus and the reigns of Nova/Nominus/Sentinel/Zeta, not about the Council from TFP. When I read a fic tagged IDW1 MegOP I want Orion being a simp for Megatron after reading his stuff/meeting him one (1) time sdkflsdkf not yet another iteration of the tired "one day an archivist and a gladiator became great friends! then they broke up."

It's not hate for other continuities, I'm just tired of the fact that continuity soup is so prevalent that even when I'm specifically filtering for content of the one continuity I want to read about, the fics I find keep having random shit from other continuities interjected into it. I think each continuity has really interesting takes on lore that have potential to be wholly unique for each one, so it's really frustrating when the average fic I can find is just a random mishmash of continuity elements, or more often than not just an IDW knockoff taking place in a separate continuity. Like guys, I'm an IDW stan myself, but wouldn't it be cool if we got more fics that explored ideas that only happen in G1, or only happen in Animated, or Aligned, etc?

Doesn't help that when I AM looking specifically for IDW stuff, most of the content I look at (MOP) does continuity soup for the sake of replacing IDW OP with some sort of aligned/g1 lite OP which makes me salty as hell

22. Popular character you hate?

Drift for sure sdklfsdlk. I mean when I first read about him in the comics (the Drift miniseries) I was like, he's fine I guess he's an action hero whatever. But then literally the more of the comics I read the more his personality and story were just incredibly corny, stereotypical, or boring as hell no matter what writer was controlling him. And he got bounced around between writers a lot, and then even the "main author" people know Drift from (JRO) kept changing his plans for what Drift was supposed to be (and cutting plots related to him) so any hints towards a storyline went nowhere. And then Drift spent basically all of MTMTE gone elsewhere on some exile-adventure, and then during LL he just kind of. Is there, existing.

So like, honestly Drift is a victim of getting bounced back and forth and having his writing changed so often he doesn't reach his full potential, which isn't really "his fault" as a character. It just so happens that I also think the bits of his character that exist are either boring or overhyped or in one case (portrayal of his religion/religious worldbuilding in general) outright offensive. He's basically written like some hippie stereotype with vaguely Asian/Japanese flavoring (the extent of which is basically his name + fighting style) and then he barely like... does anything in the plot? I think he's supposed to be like, ~mysterious and shifty~ but then all of the plotlines that involved him being a secret traitor got cut, so Drift basically just became Weirdly Suspicious For No Reason and his genuine personality/motivations felt indistinguishable from what he was faking and what plots got cut from him. Absolute mess of a character that got almost no payoff for any of the things planned for him, and all that's left is some kooky hippie personality of "hee hoo I believe in auras and mystical vibes and magical colors, also I'm dating an atheist who's openly dismissive of most of my religious beliefs (that I do or don't actually believe in depending on what part of the story I'm in) and this somehow doesn't get in the way of our personal/romantic chemistry

But then the fanbase are basically making him some kind of Gary Stue, obsessed with making headcanons like "Deadlock wrote/edited Megatron's speeches for him too!" and "Drift defected from the Decepticons to try and make a point to Megatron!" and generally trying to make him the Decepticons' Specialest Boy Ever and it's just. Ugh I get that he was under-written in canon, but every bit of fanon I've encountered doesn't make him interesting either. They just kind of make Drift the center of the world where he's actually the coolest, most talented and interesting person ever where other characters owe their accomplishments partially to his influence and I'm just. I don't get it, I don't understand the appeal of fanon and I don't even understand the appeal of canon either. I think part of it is for representation reasons (e.g. Asian, lower class, former drug addict) and it's nice that people can pull something meaningful out of the mess that is canon. It's just for me, canon Drift is so mediocre I don't get why anyone would even WANT him as representation sdlkfjsdlkf. I guess fixing what the writers failed to explore the potential of is an understandable motivation though.

#squiggle answers #long post #as far as asian coded tf characters go cyc and WB have mountains more character and meaningful plot imo #plus their depictions of religiousness are way less offensive and actually play more importantly into their characters #like idk am i the only one who thinks most of JRO's worldbuilding re: religion is an absolute joke #it's a combination of multiple antagonists who are religious zealots (not offensive on its own though) #plus very shallowly explored religious beliefs that mainly come up for plot reasons #plus a lot of the religious beliefs that DO come up are like incredibly unimaginative and boring and stereotypical #plus the plot basically being a deconstruction of the entire religion like. sike all of the ppl you worshipped and myths you believed in #were lies. they're all assholes and also cyberutopia doesn't exist #it's just one of those things where in isolation/in theory none of these religion related things are offensive in and of themselves #but when they're all stacked together it comes off as a kind of Reddit Atheist view of religion #where the more religious a character is the more likely they are to be evil or literally insane/mentally ill #and what religion IS represented is portrayed as nothing more than like. paint colors and a few holidays #as if religion is nothing more than an aesthetic as opposed to a whole philosophy/way of life w a lot of htought behind it

[random-thought-depository]

Re: my last post: I started thinking along those lines when I read this section of Charles Mann’s 1491:

“Who today would want to live in the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitlan and the other cities in the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.

The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally "he who knows things") meant something akin to "thinker-teacher" - a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who "himself was writing and wisdom," was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. "He puts a mirror before others," the Mexica said. In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.

Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. ... But the tlamatinime shared the religion's sense of the evanescence of existence. "Truly do we live on Earth?" asked a poem or song attributed to Nezahualcoyotl (1402-72), a founding figure in Mesoamerica thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:

Not forever on earth; only a little while here. Be it jade, it shatters. Be it gold, it breaks. Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart. Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

In another verse assigned to Nezahualcoyotl this theme emerged even more baldly:

Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.

Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. "Do flowers go to the region of the dead?" Nezahualcoyotl asked. "In the Beyond are we still dead or do we live?" Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements - a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to "my hand, my foot" (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention "the crown" are actually talking about the entire monarch, and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet's speech would be "his word, his breath" (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for "truth" is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like "fundamental truth, true basic principle." In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.

Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote Leon-Portilla, the Mexican historian, "nothing is 'true' in the Nahuatl sense of the word." Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.

According to Leon-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:

He goes his way singing, offering flowers. And his words rain down Like jade and quetzal plumes. Is this what pleases the Giver of Life? Is that the only truth on earth?

Ayocuan's remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, Leon-Portilla argued. "Flowers and song" was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; "jade and quetzal feathers" was a synecdoche for great value, in the way Europeans might refer to "gold and silver." The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, Leon-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. "From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?" asks the poet. "The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?" And he answers: "Only from His [that is, Omoteotl's] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven." Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.

Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in the intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica's own. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence - and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!” - Charles Mann, 1491.

The obvious subtext, of course, is that this is completely erased from the pop culture memory of the Aztecs, and we mostly only remember the ugliest parts of Aztec culture. I feel this section of 1491 is very poignant.

And it makes me imagine something like... the Worldwar books, but the Race won and completely conquered Earth in the 1940s, and a historian in that world writing centuries later, writing about Martin Luther and Kant and Nietzsche and German Romanticism and German Expressionism and the Institute of Sexology so on, in a world where nobody but specialist historians remembers these things, and writing about them in this sort of tone of “Did you know there was more to German culture than Nazism? Did you know that Nazi ideology was only one particularly nasty part of a much bigger, older, richer culture, and that bigger culture included very cool, interesting, beautiful things that were only very tenuously connected to Nazism or were even opposed to it? Wild, huh? Really makes you think!”

#history thoughts

[theunofficialchurchofsatan]

“On the Internet, There’s a Sucker Born Every Millisecond” (Essay by Reverend Joel Ethan)

Most people today know this—the feeling evoked when watching someone make a fool out of themselves while just sitting back to watch the whole thing play out as it’s so amusing. We the audience know there's a trap, but the fall guy walks right into it. That’s why shows like Candid Camera were so popular in their day, and why clips from similar Japanese prank shows rack up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. It’s harmless fun and everyone laughs at the end about how silly the whole thing was—and are thankful the joke wasn’t on them.

Recently we were contacted by a local publication in Boulder, CO called The Rooster and asked for our perspective on a few issues. We responded, as we always do, pointing them to our website where we’ve taken the time and effort to detail our positions and answer many frequently asked questions. They assured us (twice, in fact) that they’d read the articles to which we’d supplied links and asked to speak with someone to get a few specific quotes which we happily coordinated. In our conversations, they told us they’d already been in contact with The Satanic Temple, so we knew the game was afoot! And in the tradition of those unlucky folks on Candid Camera, walking right into a trap for everyone else’s amusement, The Rooster did not disappoint. You too can join in the fun by reading their piece Membership in satanic churches soars in Trump's America. Unfortunately for our red feathered friends, we’re not sure they’ve been let in on the joke yet. Hopefully this isn’t too embarrassing.

And as with most pranks, the more people in on the punchline the better. That, and we thought it would be even funnier next time this happens if we’ve already let you all in on the fun. Of course this is all easily googlable but we’ll save you the trouble. For those that don’t already know The Satanic Temple is a practical joke being played on the media à la The Yes Men. One need look no further than this 2014 Village Voice piece [1] for this to become obvious, and early collaborator Shane Bugbee (who’d already publicly left the organization)[2] has been kind enough to post the full transcripts from his interview [3] which make it all the more clear. In 2013 Vice Magazine published this puff piece [4] which, given the hindsight provided by the later pieces, makes the relationship and set up obvious. In fact earlier that same year Tin Foil Hat Time had already put the pieces together [5] - highlighting the hired actors and models pretending to be "true believers." And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention their recent publicity work [6] promoting hollywood films [7] or this resignation video from their first High Priest Brian Werner [8] noting that people within the organization brag about never having read any of the existing literature on Satanism.

For history buffs, it’s especially fun to look at the official Satanic Temple website through the lens of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Launched in the beginning of 2013, it’s delightful to watch them claim to believe in God and Satan and then a few months later try to distance themselves from that. To see them claim to have been founded in 2006 by someone named Neil Bricke then a few days later change that to 2012 and then eventually scrap that whole origin story all together. (Neil Bricke is actually the founder of SMART, addressed in detail here. [9]) In a good prank usually this formative spitballing is hidden from the public, but thanks to everything on the internet lasting forever, there you have it. And when you look at how many goofball products they were selling on day one the later revelations that the whole thing started as marketing ploy begins to make perfect sense, and their actions since then become the obvious publicity stunts that they are. It’s so obviously a spoof that it’s almost amazing anyone believes it’s real at this point. But again, anyone interested in the facts would have to spend 5 or 10 minutes searching the web to find these, which, much to our amusement, many people don’t.

And, just like in the comics, Batman needs his Joker and Superman needs his Lex Luthor, The Satanic Temple has tried since the beginning to paint us as their adversary—a passive and lazy right wing to their activist left wing. This claim is readily gobbled-up by gullible and lazy writers and just as easily debunked by spending a few minutes on our website. We’re always happy to play the role of adversary, we are the Church of Satan after all, but we usually prefer more worthy opponents. So we put the writer in touch with one of our Reverends well versed in pushing buttons. The important concept is, as an individualist religion, what we’re opposing depends entirely on your perspective. It’s a sign of intentional coattail riding that, rather than create distinctive terminology and iconography, these pranksters decided to crib ours, and this creates a giant hole in their joke for anyone looking. Though these days they deny that it’s a joke (as any good jokester should) - but still, if they are trying to put their activism first they could be much more effective if they weren’t spending so much time aping and then trying to differentiate themselves from us. We know Satan is a powerful and potent symbol that attracts the curious, which is why our founder Anton LaVey created and defined the philosophy of Satanism over 50 years ago—the first time in history that Satanism was used as a positive term for a life enhancing philosophy. That legacy, along with our ongoing efforts, is why we’re stronger today than we’ve ever been. People who explore our literature find Satan to be an inspirational metaphor for their commitment to our individualist, atheist perspective.

Circling back to the piece in question, it’s one giant factual error after another stuffed in-between out-of-context quotes desperately trying to sculpt a fictional narrative. Of course, like the audience on Candid Camera, we expected nothing less and have this lovely mental image of the author sitting down on a chair with an inflated whoopee cushion in place. It’s especially rich seeing them sing the tune of the reported Satanic Temple membership growth because this means not only did they not look at our website, not search Google, but didn’t even look at their site to see that "membership" in The Satanic Temple is simply "click here to join our mailing list," hardly a sincere commitment to a philosophy. We take pride in being a little more discerning about who we let associate with us. While it would take more time than we care to spend pointing out each and every error in his piece, the suggestion that the Church of Satan is somehow aligned with Trump is especially laughable especially considering our Policy On Politics is linked directly in the main navigation on our site, and we have recently covered Presidential endorsements and our philosophy on our Twitter account. What the Rooster chose to leave out of Reverend Antony's comment was that since we support pluralism within our ranks and simple math of our sheer numbers means there's probably a lot of Trump voters within the Church of Satan, but also lots of members who voted for all of the other candidates, and some who might not have voted at all. We hope by this point The Rooster might be clued-in enough to be laughing along with us about the trap they walked right into. If not, we’re happy to keep laughing at their expense, just the same. Schadenfreude is a fine garnish for such "journalistic" pratfalls.

They used to teach fact checking to aspiring journalists as the starting point for any article. Expediency seems to reign and facts become scarce when pre-conceived click-bait rather than accurate reportage is the final goal. To future potential marks out there, we offer this: a little bit of homework goes a very long way.

Update: In an interview published on Nov 22, 2016, the Satanic Temple representatives said, when asked about their membership that “Anybody can go to the national site with a simple email address you can sign up for the newsletter and become a member… You don’t even have to be a Satanist, you can just be a strong ally who believes in the political and secular actions without being super stoked about all the aesthetic aspects” which makes it evidently clear that The Satanic Temple admits it’s members aren’t even Satanists, and should put to bed indefinitely the notion that they speak for or represent Satanism in anyway. It’s more obvious than ever that they are only using the symbology and terminology to get press attention.

#satanist #the church of satan #satanism #satan #lucifer #leviathan #belial #peter h gilmore #peggynadramia #antonlavey