#at the same time I hate it deeply and I want to disavow it entirely as art

[starredforlife]

we need to have an intellectual movement we need to start educating ourselves as critically and urgently as possible and by we I need American youth teens adults. we have to cover as much of the breadth of knowledge we can that is granted to us freely in the form of books and podcasts and articles and essays and zines like we cannot spend so much time Consuming Content. I’m tired of it. I understand the desire i really do I have Chopped on in the background right now. But what is the point if we by position in such privilege, in such an age of individual potential of discovery, literally unlimited resource, refuse to read and learn and connect some dots and make conversation about it all. With personal education comes a fierce want for someone to discuss it with and so we get community and then probably a podcast or two but that’s good that’s for the better. Can we turn away from industries (mind, not the people) that have clearly and wholesale rejected the premise of art and storytelling that isn’t nostalgia bait and empty cash grabbing and can we start relying on ourselves to make it. Can someone less irritated than me make memes, or something, that’ll make people interested in the frankly obscene wealth of literature and history we have at our fingertips. We have always had a responsibility to keep learning, but that doesn’t mean we doomscroll and feel bad abt it and escape into a comfort show and call it a day it means we shape a way forward through relentless pursuit of knowledge, through creation of our own ideas, with community. It means we need to read these books into our souls because it’s possible for them to be taken away from us before we get the chance to

#DO YOU HEAR ME DOES THIS MAKE SENSE. #i too love art made by Hollywood I have CONTRIBUTED to this industry in minor ways #and by art I mean content I mean franchise I mean billion dollar productions #at the same time I hate it deeply and I want to disavow it entirely as art #it’s made by labor often with artistic intention it can be pretty it can make you feel good #but it is embalming. it is a seal around us #it all starts to feel like a bandaid. I am itching. #star’s thoughts #misc #i would love to go back to college but I can’t afford it and am not in a location I’m staying in for long enough

[damn-it-a-hogwarts-legacy-blog]

how would Ian feel and think if he finally got to the bottom of everything that happened to Ominis and Isabel? like, he got to know the truth, that they're actually Gaunts, but also the whole suffering thing with Ominis and his family.

and how would Ominis actually feel if he finds out that Ian is leaning towards the... "traditional" pureblood culture?

Hi anon, thank you for the ask!!

I’ve never been able to decide exactly what would happen, but it would go one of two ways:

In the first hypothetical, Ian learns that Ominis is technically the last living Gaunt, despite disavowing that identity over a hundred years ago, and that Isabel possesses ancient magic: something that’s been largely forgotten about. Worst-case scenario here, Ian runs his mouth either out of pride or just to spite his family for keeping all of this from him. In that case, the family faces scrutiny, ostracism and backlash for harboring Voldemort’s great uncle. I always imagine that, in the wake of the second wizarding war, feelings of hatred against the Gaunts and anybody else claiming to be descendants of Slytherin would be at an all time high. I also HC that the MoM is ridiculously corrupt; there would likely be little to no repercussions for anybody wanting to take their anger or grief out on the family and anybody closely associated with them. It could possibly trickle down as far as Ian losing his job as a cursebreaker and facing harassment by individuals and the media. Isabel and all of her descendants could be accused of cheating or otherwise having an unfair advantage over others due to her extremely potent magic. There could be jealousy, or ever fears of what might happen with an ancient magic user being married to an alleged dark wizard. That could possibly end in her and anybody else related to her being hunted down and killed—including Ian. At the very least, there would be extensive violent harassment. Help from the Ministry would definitely not be available a second time around.

In the second hypothetical, Ian learns the truth about Isabel and Ominis but keeps quiet about it, realizing the potentially deadly outcome if he says anything to anyone. He now realizes the full extent of the same position as every other direct descendant: he’s been lied to by omission, but it’s his duty to carry the secret and protect his entire family—including his own wife, Cassandra, and any kids they might have in the future. He would feel a LOT of resentment. Who knows why he’s the one who’s different; Ian is just that perfect storm of a turbulent personality, some defiance and too much obsessive curiosity. But he would deeply resent his entire family—especially Ominis and Isabel. Ominis is very hard on Ian for dabbling in dark magic, sometimes unfairly so, and Ian would have a lot of resentment for him after learning the truth. In a worst case scenario here, Ian could go full dark wizard and kill them both himself. But that is *mostly* unlikely. More likely is that Ian would just continue distancing his own growing family from the Greymoores.

Ominis is already acutely aware of the fact that Ian occasionally practices dark magic, actually! Ominis just has a kind of spidey sense about it. He deeply dislikes it, and he’s sometimes unfairly hard on Ian for it. Isabel has to remind Ominis to take it easy, or the two will build way too much resentment for one another. Ominis just hates that he’s reminded of how much he’s lost to dark magic (his own family ties when he was a kid, being cursed with crucio, Anne’s curse, Sebastian), and suddenly this kid who wasn’t even alive to experience the terror of living in the same era as Voldemort starts thinking it’s ok to play with dark magic. The entire extent of their fear during Voldemort’s reign is another post for another day, but the Greymoores were especially frightened back then. Ofc Isabel is also understanding that she used to use dark magic behind Ominis’ back and is trying to be forgiving. She hopes Ian will eventually understand that what he’s doing is wrong and grow out of it the same way she did. How correct she is in that assessment has yet to be seen as of 2024…

#Jesus these posts are getting long. I gotta cut back lol sorry #hogwarts legacy #ominis gaunt #Isabel greymoore #ominis gaunt x mc #ian greymoore #headcanons #I love my weird lil wizarding family so much 💚

[tacitwhisky]

About Defending Dany

There’s a lot of anger on my dash being dished out against people defending Dany’s actions and her massacre of civilians (can we stop calling it a genocide though? Kingslandingers are not an ethnic group). And I get that that’s frustrating because what was shown on screen is clearly a war crime. And I get that it’s frustrating to argue with people who start edging into using real world excuses for mass murder to defend her actions.

But here’s the thing. Stories are not real life, and people are only willing to engage with them as such insofar as they’re internally consistent and logical. And this last season of GOT was anything but.

It was a mess. We all know this. The show has always had a problem with object permanence and remaining internally consistent. This is a good post breaking down just a few of the horrific inconsistencies and times D&D played fast and loose with the rules of the universe throughout the show. But season 8 was especially bad: character arcs were fucked with for no reason, the logistics make no sense, and we all feel like it was hurried and sloppy.

When a story’s world stops making sense the audience can sense it. We can sense that what’s happening is just author fiat (a ballista can snipe Rhaegal multiple times without missing? Really? That was Loony Tunes level of physics at play and clearly only happened because D&D wanted Rhaegal dead). This is a really basic suspension of disbelief thing. And once that suspension is shattered the audience stops engaging with the story as a coherent world, and start engaging with it as an argument with the creator. And that’s what’s happening with Dany.

Growing up as a Hispanic kid most of the representation I could find on screen or books were drug dealers and gangbangers. And you know what? I knew on some level that was bullshit. I knew on some level it was the author’s prejudice seeping into the story. And so I rejected the “facts” of their worlds, and minimized or ridiculed the bad things they did on screen. Or sometimes just embraced them as a way of spiting the creators.

This is the exact reason a lot of villains in fairy tales, mythologies, or folk tales become loved despite the bad things they do. And it’s why when these stories are rewritten ( The Shape of Water is actually a really good example of this, with the monster clearly being based off The Creature From The Black Lagoon) the bad things the villain did are softened, recontextualized, or just written out entirely. We know murdering people is bad, we really do, we just don’t believe the author was fair to the character. When a story’s world loses coherence we instinctively understand that a character’s actions are no longer authentic to the character but are being dictated by the storyteller. Fundamentally we understand the cause and effect are reversed.

And we need to remember just how much Dany and her story meant to a lot of people. A lot. She was a survivor of abuse who was sold into marriage and raped who then went on to birth dragons and free slaves. Her story was one of agency, and it spoke deeply and keenly to a lot of women. And to see it reversed in a single sloppy season by creators who clearly hadn’t thought too much about it is painful.

Now, really what Dany stans should do is just completely reject the show. But not everyone is at a point where they’re ready to cut the cord or even really understand that’s an option. And for someone like Emilia Clarke who if she ever wants to work again can’t disavow the show, it makes sense she would instead hedge and minimize and reject the impact of what Dany did on screen. I saw dark!Dany coming, don’t defend her actions, but also view what happened in this last season as complete character assassination. This is the stance people should have, but some don’t, and it’s ok if they’re not there yet.

Stories aren’t real. That isn’t to say they don’t have meaning or impact on the world, they do, but we don’t engage with them the same way we do the real world. It’s why I can mow down thousands of pedestrians in GTA and not actually want to murder anyone with my car in real life.

There’s a longer discussion to be had about the impact stories can have on how we view the world and how what I’m talking about here is less true when it comes to talking about excusing the actions of characters who aren’t from marginalized communities and whose actions mirror real world atrocities, but this post has already gone long (there’s also a difference between characters who have always been bad and once who just fell off a cliff into villainy, but again, long).

I know this is not going to be a popular opinion among most of the jonsa fam that follow me, but I think it needs to be said. And for the record, I’m sure not all Dany stans are doing this. Some aren’t defending her actions, and I’m sure others are genuinely defending her war crimes because they think it’s ok. We live in a world with Nazis again for fuck’s sake, and I’m sure some of them like Game of Thrones. But I think the majority of stans defending her are doing it because they hate what they see as character assassination and have stopped treating the show’s world as entirely real.

TLDR: When a story’s world loses coherence the audience instinctively understands that a character’s actions are no longer authentic to the character but dictated by the storyteller. Fundamentally we understand the cause and effect of a story are reversed and thus stop treating the actions of characters in the world as having real world weight and impact. 

#thoughts #anti-got #got s8 #D&D are the real villains in all this #i hate getting in the middle of drama like this #i genuinely don't know why i am #but whatevs #that's the tea #dany #dark!dany #meta #my meta

[schizo-spoon-blog]

Stefan Molyneux is a Pussy-Ass Bitch: That Hippy Voltaire Would Kick His Ass

Stefan is such a disingenuous grifter with this "naming no names" disavowal of Nick Fuentes , evidenced by blocking Nick around the time of this tweet.

Even I with my iron stomach for fascist propaganda, I had to stop listening to his podcast in 2017 because his racial takes became increasingly one note and devolved into Diet White Nationalism. The guy was a huge element of the "libertarian to alt right pipeline" through his show over the course of 2016-2017, which he's tried to distance himself from since the fiasco at Charlottesville, along with his opportunistic colleagues Mike Cernovic and Paul Joseph Watson, and his alleged sugar baby Lauren Southern. He himself promulgated many arguments which were identical to the ones pushed by the likes of The Right Stuff and other alt right outlets active at the time, with slightly less edginess - I was present to witness this, and it's all matter of public record in the archives of Freedomain Radio.

Look Stef, I get it. You want to cozy up with mainstream conservative elements now that Trumpmania dust has settled and you want to avoid alienating your potential normiecon audience.

But this statement isn't good optics for you. How can you in the same breath disavow "making light of the holocaust" and say you stand for free speech? The principle of Free Speech, as conceived among libertarians such as yourself, DEMANDS that you must permit AND DEFEND the right to not only JOKE about the holocaust, but to outright DENY its occurrence. The ACLU's defense (by Jewish attorneys no less) of the rights of Neo-Nazi demonstrators in Skokie , Illinois, and the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment concurs with me on this matter.

The underpinnings of Constitutional Free Speech is the protection of unpopular speech specifically, especially unpopular political speech, so long as it isn't an outright seditious incitement to overthrow the US government, or a specific call for violence -- "making light of the holocaust" falls into neither category. So which is it Stefan? Do you stand opposed to making light of the holocaust, or do you stand with free speech? Only one of those is a libertarian position. Or do jokes about the holocaust constitute a violation of the NAP? If such jokes violate the non-aggression principle you hold sacrosanct, if the analogy of Cookie Monster baking an improbable number of cookies and the improbable logistics of the mass murder of Jews in world war 2 is too offensive to be seen as anything other than an impermissible aggression, then how about your own statements about non-white people's negative impact on quality of life, and about single mothers apparently creating every problem in contemporary America ? To many, your opinions are hate speech and fighting words -- how are you at all substantively different from Nick Fuentes? If he must be subject to censure for making light of things too serious to laugh about, so are you. Let me go out on a limb here, since you’re too much of a bitch-made pussy to do it.  I give my full moral support to joking about every single genocide that has occurred, and about those which did not. I give my full support to joking about anything and everything. One of my favorite bits when I performed stand-up used to make light of the mass-killings performed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia -- and guess what, like the Khmer Rouge itself, my bit killed. If you're offended by the notion of the Holocaust being made light of - get over it. You're not actually a victim of the genocide, and someone joking about it does not actually harm you in any way, nor cause harm upon others. If I joke about the Holodomor, no Ukrainians will starve, and if I joke about the Holocaust, no Jews will be gassed or shot. Just because there is continued antipathy toward the group, and terrorist crimes such as synagogue shootings still occasionally occur, does not mean there's a causal connection between making light of an event from a century ago, and murders occurring today. If you truly believed such speech created violent acts, you'd not only want to stop the joking about the holocaust -- but you'd also want to censor gangster rap which glamorizes gang violence, objectification and abuse of women, and illicit drug trafficking; you'd want to censor death-metal which revels in violent imagery and gore. You'd be a lot more serious about the effects of porn on sexual relatonships. If jokes about the holocaust encourage anti-semitism and constitute an act of violence -- how is it that songs about pimping hoes do not encourage and constitute misogynistic violence, and how can the prevalence of incest porn on every hub of internet pornography not encourage and constitute child abuse by its mere performance? If the lewdness and obscenity of scat-pornography and coprophagia are Free Speech under American law, are we seriously going to pretend we're too good to permit joking about some topic in this country? Get real, hypocrite. We live in a country whose National Foundation for the Arts gave money to an art-project called "Piss Christ," which was a Crucifix encased in the "artist's" urine. If this country, whose heritage is, despite all claims to the contrary, deeply rooted in Christian faith (the governments of several of the 13 colonies which would become states, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution were Puritan Theocracies, complete with established churches which would not be disestablished until the adoption of the 14th amendment) can permit and subsidize such flagrant blasphemy -- it can, and must, permit the blasphemy against good taste and politeness that is encapsulated in the phrases "Hitler did nothing wrong," and "The Holocaust didn't happen." You either believe in free speech, or you don't -- and, contrary to the oft-repeated slogan "hate speech is not free speech," the law of the land has the exact opposite stance on the matter. I don't have to believe the Holocaust didn't happen to defend your right to say it didn't. If that's wrong in your eyes, that makes me more American than you. Denying the truth does not make what's true less true, it just makes you wrong. Whether you like it or not, we do have an Inalienable Right to be Wrong. To most people's Wrongness, we give tacit approval -- but on some topics, we clutch our pearls and act shocked. But you know, there have been dozens of times where I've had to deal with people denying acts of mass-murder by Communists, or giving revisionist spin on such acts as mass deportations of entire ethnic groups (textbook ethnic cleansing), and not a single person spoke a word in opposition, or expressed offense witnessing this -- and I'M the one who inevitably gets accused of being a pro-genocide fascist when I make a scene about it --nobody is offended by those acts of Genocide Denialism to the degree that Holocaust denialism brings out in people. Why? It's so fake, how selective people are by what they're offended -- there's no actual fucking principle at play. I'll accept deep offense of Holocaust jokes and denialism by Jews, but when it comes from gentiles, unless it's applied to the host of other genocides which are routinely white-washed, downplayed and denied with at least some degree of consistency, it's just laughable. Y'all just trying to be cool and scared of being accused of crimethink. I'mma keep bein myself, 'cuz I ain't bitch-made, I'm a psychic terrorist.