#i hate how no one can address racism in any of these games without being fucking dogpiled! get over yourselves!

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

wait are there people earnestly defending genshin by saying that dark skin just doesn't work in anime style?

oh that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Other stuff I’ve seen (on my own damn, very neutrally worded post even) are

-but but there’s light skinned people in the Middle East too they’re just representing them! (Ok and where are the dark skinned people? MENA/SWANA isn’t 98% lily white WHERE ARE YOUR BRONE AND BLACK PEOPLE?)

-no one cares lol (hm well there’s 1k+ notes on this and 25+ comments all agreeing this was a wasted opportunity, so clearly by statistical alone you’re…wrong. Quite a few people care actually!)

-china doesn’t care about dark skinned people so they won’t put dark skinned people in! (Holy xenophobia. Uh. Ok so china DOES have a serious issue w colorism+racism BUT it’s also not a racial monolith AND it also has some pretty diverse gatcha games already? For starters there’s arknights and dislyte, and there’s absolutely more. Don’t use an entire country to shield one company’s shitty racist decisions bc that’s ALSO racist)

- his skin is white bc he’s based off a fennec fox which has white fur (literally when has any kemonomimi design based the skin color off the fur and not the hair. Even yae miko FROM GENSHIN has pink fur and pink hair, her skin is independent of that)

-I personally am from that region and am pale so I do not see the problem (ok good for you? But tons of people who ARENT pale (or who are but wanted more diversity) are rightly frustrated that the first region where they had an honest reason to make more people dark skinned refuses to go darker that a cafe au lait. they aren’t doing this to rep light skinned south Asians or North Africans or whoever they’re doing it bc they don’t think it’s worth it to represent darker skin tones and YOU KNOW THIS. Don’t be stupid at me)

on that note, I’ve seen very similar trains of dumbasses run on other people who have brought up legitimate complaints on the outfits that the sumeru cast has been put in. It doesn’t matter how well they researched actual Persian dancer outfits or the effect western oreintalism and movies like Aladdin has had in it and the perception of their dance and culture, or their personal relation to it, or how they word it, a bunch of idiots will inevitably be like ‘well I think that the outdated inaccurate racist outfits that they referenced off of other gatcha games and jrpgs from the 90s is sexy and I don’t care about this so shut the fuck yo and stop asking them to do better’ and it pisses me off, honestly

Like really? Why is this so hard for people to understand? If you’re going to use real life cultures you have to try and be respectful of them-and the real life ones are often WAY prettier and more creative than anything a lazy sterotypes from the 1800s could’ve come up with. We can do better now and it looks better feels better and is more interesting and engaging so why are people so resistant to it? Why does it hurt their brains so much to think about the fact they aren’t the center of the world for once? Idk

And for the record, before anyone gets any ideas, fgo is NOT better just bc arjuna and ashwatthama are actually dark skinned. You can’t say shit about how racist Scheherazade’s design is on twitter without a bunch of people who think masturbating to porn filtered with racial tags applied makes them culturally sensitive screaming at you about how you’re too easily offended and need to get over yourself; bc as we all know the hypersexualization and fetishization of dark skinned women isn’t a serious irl issue that is perpetuated by stupid shit like a gatcha game having its horny h*rem girl design tell you that you should just station her in your bedroom bc that’s all she’s useful for when you summon her! (THIS IS SARCASM)

Like ffs one side here is obviously more easily offended than the other and it’s not the one you think…

#neg post #my asks #SORRY THIS SEEMS OUT OF NOWHERE BUT IT BOTHERS ME SO MUCH #for the record I am white but like #i hate how no one can address racism in any of these games without being fucking dogpiled! get over yourselves! #read some books in this shit bc it DOES effect the real world even if you scream it doesn’t #just the most annoying thing ever bc you’ll be having a normal decent discussion and some asshole will smash in and start howling about how #everyone is so easily offended no one can say anything like my good bitch you are the offended one here

[stobinesque]

The last post I reblogged has me thinking about how Lucas is treated by his friends/the wider UD gang in-universe/from a more Watsonian perspective. Because here are the facts:

Lucas has spent most of his childhood being explicitly/overtly bullied for his race [being called "Midnight" by their season 1 bullies]¹

At the beginning of Season 2, Mike clearly assumes that Lucas agreed to go as Winston for no other reason than both of them being black. But when called on this, Mike cannot bring himself to admit that's what he was thinking. (He also does not apologize to Lucas.)

Until Billy attacks him, Lucas doesn't really know why Max is trying to avoid being seen with him when Billy picks her up/at her house, but having been on the receiving end of "my family is racist so I can't be seen with you," whether or not you actively know the reason someone is trying to hide you from another person, it feels alienating. Also, he absolutely figures it out in hindsight.

But since at first he doesn't know that Billy inexplicably and aggressively hates him/doesn't want him interacting with Max, from Lucas' perspective he gets attacked by a white boy 4-5 years his senior and almost twice his size out of literally nowhere. Said boy explicitly declares to him "You're dead, Sinclair."²

Lucas, upon entering high school, decides that he wants to acquire enough social pressure to protect him and his friends from the bullying they had to deal with throughout middle school. Neither Mike nor Dustin seem willing/able to understand why he might be interested in that protection.

There are a couple different ways to interpret Lucas (and Patrick)³ choosing to stay with Jason and Andy, but I think it's reasonable to assume that Lucas would be able to recognize a mob/witch hunt forming, and I also think it is reasonable to assume that Lucas knows that mobs tend to target the most vulnerable members of a population, and that he himself both as a black kid and a member of Hellfire is at risk.

Nancy knows for a fact that Jason was at the army surplus store in search of a gun, and while it is implied that she informs the group of this, they seem not to take that into any consideration when planning because

Taken altogether, this paints a picture that in-universe, all of Lucas' friends should be intimately aware that he has experienced overt racism for his entire life. But, the Halloween costume argument also suggests that even though they're all aware of said racism, none of the white members of the group really feel comfortable talking about it. Lucas does explicitly call Mike out on thinking that he would be Winston (or that Mike can't be) "because he's black," and Mike flat out lies to his face. If this is one of the first times Lucas has confronted one of the Party members about their own implicit racism, I think it would be reasonable for him to walk away from that exchange deciding that race isn't something he can have honest conversations with his friends about.

We also never see Billy attacking Lucas addressed on-screen after it happens. Which means we never get to see anyone check-in with Lucas about what happened, or see him process what happened.

So come season 4 Lucas has great reason both to want more social capital/protection and to feel uncomfortable explicitly talking to his friends about why that might be. (Especially with the added baggage of Billy having just been killed, which assuredly inspired a lot of complicated feelings for Lucas, especially because of how much his death impacted Max.) Instead, he makes one simple request of his friends (who he both wants at his game and still wants to play D&D with them): get Eddie to reschedule the game. And, sure, it's Eddie's fault that the game doesn't get rescheduled. But it is absolutely on Mike and Dustin that they didn't choose to skip (which honestly probably would have forced Eddie to reschedule anyway??).

So for the most important game of the season, Lucas winds up without his friends or his sister there to watch him make the winning shot, and he misses out on the D&D game that he wanted to play with his friends. It's entirely possible that Lucas still would have decided to go to the afterparty even if Mike and Dustin had come to the game. But I think it's reasonably likely that he'd have gone to celebrate separately with them! Or at least would have left the party early, rather than getting so drunk he pukes the next morning. So when Jason riles the whole team into becoming a mob out for blood, Lucas ends up stuck between a rock and a hard place. He can't really say or do anything to stop Jason that doesn't also put a target on his back. Sticking with him is the best way to 1) ensure his own physical safety and 2) have any hope of protecting Eddie/his friends.

And then Lucas risks his life to lead Jason & co. off Eddie's scent and bikes eight miles to come warn Dustin that he's in danger. He actually explicitly says that Dustin is in terrible danger. Lucas (and, honestly, all of the Party--except arguably Will) at this point is intimately aware of the fact that a white boy fueled by rage can been homicidally dangerous. So the fact that even after knowing for a fact that Jason has acquired a gun, the whole team send Lucas, Erica and Max to the Creel house without weapons, protection, or any sort of plan as to how to deal with Jason & co. if they turn up is not only baffling, but honestly feels downright callous.

From a purely Watsonian perspective, Lucas has every right and reason to be absolutely livid with his friends. Their consistent inability to recognize or acknowledge the racism Lucas experiences directly results in Lucas and his sister being attacked and nearly killed--and not even by the supernatural bad guy.

¹The show never returns to this, but to me it is broadly illustrative of the racial climate in Hawkins

²Please do not waste your breath trying to argue with me that Billy "wasn't really trying to kill him." I honestly don't care either way. He threatened to kill a 13-year-old boy whose only "crime" was being black. There is no other explanation for Billy's treatment of Lucas that makes sense, since he explicitly targets him, and not Dustin or Mike. Regardless of whether or not Billy had genuine homicidal intent, Lucas had no reason to think otherwise in that moment. I have no interest in arguing this point with anyone.

³Patrick is another excellent example of the show being unable to meaningfully reckon with with its racial implications, but that's its own post.

#lucas sinclair #stranger things meta #meta #read.txt #...not gonna main tag this #cw antiblackness

[lingering-nomad]

Vent post

Went through a traumatic experience online in November. I've seen friends endure it, but I honestly didn't fully understand how much damage online bigotry could cause until I was the subject of it. I was targeted in an organized smear campaign, orchestrated by a popular member and former mod of a video game discord. Why? For befriending a gay man and shipping our ocs.

That's. It.

That was enough to get me (and him) singled out for surveillance and hate campaigns across multiple platforms.

Yes. I have receipts, but no one wants to read all that. And this is just a vent post anyway.

It got to the point of open, unprovoked hostility, which we reported. The mods would assure us they would act, but they're busy, they have lives, they can't get a call scheduled. Turns out, the delay was to allow them time to investigate the victims, because if they could find a reason, any reason, to shut up the whiny [insert slurs] their job would be so much easier.

Of course bigotry thrives in clusters, so you can't have h0mophobia without white supr3macy. I made the mistake of supporting a Native lesbian for calling out a damn egregious example of the white saviour trope seasoned with forced assimilation. Aaand that was all the mod team needed. They told them if they disclosed the DM, if they showed them what I said, they'd address the issue, they'd use it to better understand and deal with the racism.

I got the ban notice a week later.

But LN, why do you care if this place was such a shithole?

Because it turns out, I was not the only person banned that day. Turns out the mods posted a whole group chat where their bff was making UTTERLY FLASE accusations of criminality and planning a full-on mass reporting campaign against me and my friend. Why? For shipping our "evil ocs" with their "pixel vampire bf" and talking about being gay in the server's LGBTQ+ channel.

They posted the GC in the server for all to see, full of homophobia and bigotry and frothing, senseless hate, but they didn't post my message offering support to someone enduring racism in public. They did post my name, though. Along with the names of vocal bullies and bigots, but only after I was banned and couldn't voice my side. They didn't even do me the courtesy of giving me a heads-up that I was the target of a smear campaign they planned to publish. They didn't warn me they'd be posting my name to be judged for the words of racists and homophobes -- words aimed at me.

When this master plan was discovered, they allowed their good (white) friends a chance to respond. They were given chance after chance -- until they grew bold enough to include the mod team in their ridicule and that was the last straw. "We can excuse white supr3macy and h0mophobia, but we draw the line mocking the mods."

So I was ostracized and silenced and humiliated by so-called "allies" in retaliation for being the victim of harassment, which is nothing new. But what drove me to make this post, is one of them coming into my inbox 2 days before Christmas to "wish me well" and express their hope that I "don't feel resentful that they did what they had to."

I don't know which part they thought was necessary.

Deliberately failing to disclose why I was banned, so they can carry on ignoring their white supr3macy issue with impunity?

Breaking their own rules on ban procedure without so much as a parting flip of the bird?

Allowing their friend to have a final say, to defend the indefensible without showing me the same regard?

I don't know.

I never will, and I know these people will go on patting themselves on the back for their "allyship" while addressing prejudice by silencing the victims.

All I can say is, with allies like this we don't need enemies. And if you've read this far, maybe watch this video

https://youtu.be/w1vuhrFfEkE

#ln vents #plz don't reblog

[ashleywgss]

Ten Ways an Intro to WGSS Course Will Change Your Thinking

Differences should be embraced, not erased

Some white liberals oftentimes use the expression “I don’t see color” in an attempt to seem progressive regarding racial discrimination. What these people don’t realize is that this viewpoint is actually quite damaging, for it ignores the discrimination marginalized people experience in their daily lives. Oftentimes, people with privilage whether they are white, cis, straight, wealthy, etc, ignore our differences out of guilt, because they do not want to be associated with the oppressor. However, liberation movements like the feminist movement will never be successful until we acknowledge and tackle the ways in which each marginalized identity experiences different issues. For example, though white women and black women are both women, a black woman experiences racism alongside sexism (also known as misogynoir). So a white woman may think rallying for equal pay in the workplace is an important feminist issue, they fail to acknowledge the racial pay gap between them and black women, or the racial discrimination that black women experienced in the workplace. White feminism alienates women of color by not addressing these issues, or expecting women of color to deal with them on their own instead of uniting to fight with them. I recommend Audre Lordes “Age, Race, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” for further reading on this subject

Obesity is a lie

American society has a weight problem. And its not peoples weight that is the problem, it is the obsession society has over peoples weight. Contrary to popular belief, being overweight is not a sign of bad health. In fact, studies find very little evidence to suggest that being overweight increases the risk of developing diseases. And weight is actually determined more by genetics than a persons lifestyle. The stigma against fatness is about aesthetics, not health, as many people would like to claim. For proof of that, look no further than social media, where thin influencers can brag and receive praise for their ability to stay thin and eat junk food, whereas those who are overweight and do the same are looked down upon. Unfortunately, the 60 billion dollar weight-loss industry cannot profit off of the facts, and so this misconception continues to be pushed by ads and public figures without question. Thankfully, I no longer fall for this rhetoric after taking my WGSS class, where we read the article “Sized Up” by Anna Mollow that exposed this issue.

Dunking on men isn't actually feminist

To be a feminist is not to be anti-male. The purpose of feminism is not to hate men or put the sole blame of the existence of patriarchy onto men. This line of thinking is individualistic in nature and does not confront the root of the issue of sexism. The Patriarchy is the way in which society is structured, on a foundational level, and not merely the result of a popular idea among men. This is why women can also sometimes participate in anti-feminist behavior. For example, Allan G Johnson outlines this concept more thoroughly in the second chapter of his book “The Gender Knot”. "The crucial thing to understand about patriarchy or any other kind of social system is that it’s something people participate in. It’s an arrangement of shared understandings and relationships that connect people to one another and something larger than themselves. In some ways, we’re like players who participate in a game."

Gender is literally made up

I never realized just HOW much of a construct gender really was until I took this class. We read an article titled “The Medical Construction of Gender” by Suzanne Kessler that really opened my eyes. The article details a study that was done where six pediatricians were interviewed about their attitudes and procedures regarding intersex children. Essentially, the researchers wanted to know what went into the process of identifying the baby’s gender. Their answers were a far cry from the purely biological and scientific methodology often spouted by TERFs and right wing fanatics. The doctors decisions were incredibly arbitrary and mostly boiled down to aesthetics. For instance, one of the doctors claimed that if a baby’s penis was considered a “micro-penis”, they would be gendered as a girl in order to avoid stigmatization. And though these babies born intersex were perfectly healthy, they had to undergo an array of tests and surgical procedures to satisfy the status quo (one doctor literally said “corrections’ must be done ASAP to prevent upsetting the parents). Gender did not exist naturally, gender was created by society.

Until black women are free, none of us will be free

Black women are likely the most marginalized identity in western society. In 1977 the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist political group, highlighted this fact in their Collective Statement. We read the statement in its entirety in class and I highly recommend it. It details how black women face both racial and sexual oppression, and how that makes their struggle unique. Black women are also positioned at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. If the systems of class, race, and patriarchy are all interconnected, then they all must be destroyed in order to achieve true liberation. And if black women, who experience all of these forms of oppression, feel alienated from all of the movements fighting against these systems, then they failed to untangle themselves from the interconnections of oppression and will ultimately fail. The Combahee Collective said it best: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”.

Feminist history is so much more expansive than Susan B. Anthony

As mentioned earlier, the womens rights movement has had an issue with the centuring of white women. This has resulted in the retelling of the history of this movement to also be centered around white women. I remember my history class in 7th grade touching on this history, and only mentioning Susan B Anthony and the suffragettes before moving onto another topic. If this is what most people’s experience is, then a WGSS is incredibly necessary to really understand the history of feminism and know the influential women who fought for it. The class itself is an introduction into black feminist thought, and much of the source material is black feminists like Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and bell hooks. And their work will detail the efforts and organizations of even more feminists. In Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis, I learned about the activists Ida B Wells and Mary Church Terrell.

Girl boss feminism actually perpetuates inequality

Capitalism is very good at co-opting social justice movements and feminism is not exception. At some point between the second wave and today, feminism is not about liberation, but about equality. It is not about the destruction of the patriarchy but about overcoming it. “Equality” and “overcoming patriarchy” might seem like admirable goals, but they actually serve as a way to deradicalize feminism and embrace capitalism. Now, the goal is to become a “girl boss”, to beat the odds and amass wealth and power just like men do. But more women CEO’s and millionaires wont fix anything. Most of the women who even reach these heights are privileged themselves (usually white and upperclass) and they exploit poor women, women of color, and women in the global south just as their male counterparts do.

The imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy cannot be fixed

One thing about oppression cannot be understated and that is: oppression is systematic. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, no matter what it is, it is not the result of just bigoted thoughts and ideas spread from person to person, generation to generation. It is not something that can be stopped only through changes in behavior. Oppression is enforced by the foundation of society. That means the schools, the financial institutions, the media, and most importantly, the government. The government puts discrimination into law. Laws are created that are used to target marginalized people. For instance, stop and frisk inplemented in New York City, which gave cops and excuse to target black people for no reason. The crime bill, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the list goes on. Oppression is the foundation of the United States of America. The country was built upon genocide and slavery. And not amount of voting can fix that. In the book “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” I learned the ways that these systems should be dealth with, and that is through collective action and mututal aid, and avoiding relying on the system responsible for creating it.

Feminism needs to be trans-inclusive

If the goal of feminism is to end sexist oppression, then that means feminists seek unity of the marginalized, and an end to patriarchal oppression and biological essentialism. Women come in all shapes and sizes, have different attributes and traits and desires. Women are not innately anything or defined by her reproductive abilities. If a woman gets a total hysterectomy, she is not suddenly not a woman because she no longer has the reproductive parts. If feminists can agree this is true, then there is no reason to push back against the notion that transwomen are women. Just like cis women, transwomen should not be defined by their bodies or personalities. They also do not receive the privillages in society that men do, and experience high rates of physical and sexual violence. To reject transwomen from the feminist movement is to reject the core principles of feminism.

[emonaculate]

Streamer!Eren headcanons

❥ AU: Modern!AU

❥ Genre: Fluff

❥ Rating: Anyone can read

❥ Pairings: Streamer!Eren x Black!Reader

❥ Author Note: Ive been having the biggest brain rot about streamer!eren cause i just feel in my bones, it would be perfect for him so here are some head canons.

inspired by @sleepysnk

Eren would play any game that peaks his interest, but gets the most views when he plays any horror game, minecraft, or among us.

Its mainly due to how serious he gets when he rages over losing/dying or getting a jump scare.

"SON OF A BITCH! WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT ZOMBIE EVEN COME FROM?"

"Eren babe, not so loud."

"Sorry beautiful."

There are tons of video compilations dedicated to you walking in to shush him

His fans ADORE you

Most of them are baffled that Eren is in an interracial relationship but quickly grow used it after seeing your interactions

He often answers questions surrounding your relationship without invading what you want to keep private.

He would 100% let you sit in his lap whilst streaming

His views always rise when you are there, people just like seeing the adorable banter and romance

Everyone can tell how much he loves you

Literally he will visibly soften whenever you enter his line of view

Demands kisses whenever you enter or leave his "office"

If you ever miss a kiss, he will take a break from his stream and track you down

Plays with Jean, Connie, and Armin often

Plays with you too and gets super overprotective if anyone kills you in a game.

Once the entire gang played Among Us together and Eren went completely batshit after finding out Reiner and Bertholdt were the imposters that killed you.

The next round he is the imposter.

"And I took that personally."

He's oddly the scariest imposter.

For some reason, he becomes rational but manages to hide it well behind his usual hotheadness.

Still would never kill you tho <3

He would completely obliterate you in minecraft however

"eren stop I only have one heart left. you play too much."

"you didnt seem to mind playing when you hit me into lava... I lost all my fucking diamonds so you know what they say... hasta la vista baby"

Sucks at building but sucks at mining as well

usually fights mobs all night to stack up xp

says he's training to fight the dragon

swears he'll slay all creepers

deathly afraid of endermans

when they pop up, his screams are girly and loud

"HOLY SHIT. NO NO NO RUN YOU DAMN MIDGET! FUCKING MOVE!"

when he isn't fighting, he'll gather flowers for you and constantly leave them in places for you to find around your house

"Thanks for the flowers baby, yellow is still my favorite."

"I know princess."

he also puts gifts in your chests even though he sucks at mining, because you deserve the best.

Eren is pretty perverted and though he doesnt look at his stream chat often, whenever he sees any comments about your body or how lucky he is, all he does is grin knowingly and mumble "all mine."

HATES whenever people make it a big deal that you're black

addresses it once and swears if shit starts up again, he'll leave forever and never come back despite streaming being something he loves

will never tolerate racism or hearing stereotypes toward you EVER, even if its unintentional, pops off ever mfing time.

"Whether or not that's her real hair, it doesn't fucking concern you. Stop asking when you clearly look like you have uneven extensions, Brittany. Mind your fucking business."

"Baby chill, maybe she was just asking a honest questions."

"Nah fuck that. I don't give a damn, don't worry about whats in my baby's head."

You know those social media stars, who turn the cheek and allow people to say rude and hateful shit?

Yeah thats not Eren, he will always clap back harder and its beyond disrespectful.

"How are you gonna tell me to kill myself, when your bio literally says fly high mom? You must want me to pay her a visit or something."

"I'm too short? Well I think my height is just fine compared to your brother who seems to be just below six feet."

He has been cancelled TOO many times

its always for stupid shit

for being able to speak Japanese despite being a white man

for thinking pineapple on pizza is good

for liking Pepsi over coke

for pouring his milk in before his cereal

His COD lobby trash talk; while he doesn't say slurs or racist remarks, its too damn vulgar. He was built for that lobby 😭😭

His trash talking is elite and most times you can hear the person he is shit talking on the verge of crying. Its so fucking brutal.

In the same breath, he turn around and ask for kisses from you, as if he didn't make someone rethink being born.

That side only pops out when he is extremely pissed and he tries to avoid ever getting that mad because he knows words can hurt.

AN ADVOCATE FOR THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

Gets super confused whenever someone asks what his thoughts on the community are.

"Love who you want, why the fuck should I worry about what some else gets off to?"

"If dicks makes you hard, cool. If pussy get you off, me too, lets be friends. Sexuality shouldn't matter people, grow tf up."

Donates a huge sum of the money he earns to different causes such as: cleaning up the polluted ocean charities, Black lives matter, protect Asian lives, and feed the hungry.

Basically he's caring and just wants to help despite his impulsive personality.

Once a month, he visits orphanages to talk to the kids, no camera no video nothing just to hang with the kids.

The only way his followers find out is because others posting about it.

Overall, Eren is in love with what he does and you, but if he had to pick, he'd choose you every single day over and over again <3

#streamer!eren #eren x black reader #eren yeager x black reader #tw: mentions of stereotyping #among us #attack on titan #eren jaeger #black reader #fem black reader #brain rot #eren is so cute #eren headcanons

[leonardhoee]

A Rant About Ikesen’s Treatment of Motonari

I’ve been away from tumblr for a while but I had to come back for this.

So something I’ve noticed throughout playing Ikesen is the way that the game is very biased agains Motonari and I think it needs to be addressed because he is the only brown character and his portrayal is full of harmful stereotypes against brown men. I love this game but I haven't seen a single person acknowledge how badly Motonari is treated by the creators and the fandom as a result of that.

Also any racist comments will be blocked.

Possible route spoilers under the cut…

So lets start with the obvious, he is the only dark skinned character in Ikesen and when I first started playing I was so happy about that because finally (regardless of his ethnicity which honestly in this portrayal of him can be up for debate, I HC him as south East Asian) we are getting some representation. Throughout the game though I started noticing a lot of harmful stereotypes being thrown onto him that none of the other characters face.

Both him and Nobunaga are relatively misogynistic, I’m not denying that at all. However the way it is portrayed in their routes is very different. Nobunaga should in fact have sexual harassment charges, yet its romanticized repeatedly throughout his route. Motonari on the other hand treated MC as a possession the same way Nobunaga did, however he is shown as aggressive and scary as opposed to Nobunaga being shown as sexy and romantic.

There is also a difference in their respective CG’s 

Motonari’s CG is shown much more threatening and aggressive than Nobunaga’s

That brings me to my next point. Every other antagonist so far is shown to have a gentle and redeemable side. Kenshin threatened to wage war on the whole country while keeping MC locked in a cell yet he is still shown to be gentle and romantic. Kennyo repeatedly kidnaps and threatens MC’s life in other routes yet he is shown as a gentle monk who just wants revenge for his fallen brethren. Why doesn't Motonari get that level of consideration and empathy? Why is he, the only brown man, shown as an aggressive two-dimensional brute in every single route that isn’t his own? And this is a harmful stereotype that shows itself in all kinds of media. Brown men are depicted as predatory and aggressive both in fiction and real life.

This leads me to his ethnicity (I’m only talking about Ikesen’s portrayal of Motonari, I am well aware he was a Japanese warlord irl). In his route there is a part where he is talking about slavery and colonialism. As a South Asian woman I completely understand his perspective and its what got me thinking about this subject in the first place.

This subject is clearly personal to him. These lines, the way he looks as opposed to the other characters, and the fact that he speaks Spanish (around this time period the Philippines were being colonized by Spain), leads me to head cannon him as South East Asian, specifically Filipino. However, historically, Motonari comes from a region of Southern Japan, which is known as Hiroshima today. Cybird meant to market him as Okinawan. A large part of the reason Motonari is being treated this way by Cybird stems from the fact that people from Okinawa face racism from mainland Japan. Considering the fact that this game was made in Japan, and knowing what we know about their history of colonization, racism, and east asian beauty standards revolving around colorism, I am honestly not surprised that Motonari is being portrayed like this.

Until now they just showed his reason for fighting the Oda to be “oh I just want to watch the world burn for no reason”. But no that’s not the reason. These lines. That’s the reason. A lot of the context behind those lines comes from the fact that comes from because people from mainland Japan treated Okinawan people as slaves. He doesn’t want to see another colonizer come into power. Sure he’s a bit of an extremist but historically people who have this ideology have always been portrayed as savage and barbaric and “against the betterment of society” (think Jet from atla or even Malcom x). It’s no different in ikesen. The devs are clearly villainizing this ideology. Let’s not forget the fact that irl Hideyoshi invaded Korea. And the fact that anime and otome games are part of Japan’s way of erasing their war crimes and rebranding themselves to the rest of the world. It’s blatantly obvious here with the way they’re villainizing Motonari for having a perfectly valid reason to fight the Oda. If Japan stays divided they can’t invade and colonize other countries like the Philippines can they? Anti-colonialism = bad. 

Lastly I want to talk about how they downplayed his abilities as a leader and a warlord in his own right. In all the other routes he is depicted as less educated and frankly “dumb”, and it shows itself in his speech patterns too. Compared to Nobunaga and Mitsuhide, Motonari’s speech is stereotypically “less educated” and “lower class”. Yet he is just as much of a leader as any of the other warlords. However instead of acknowledging that, the game chooses to focus on his crimes and behavior as a pirate, instead of his role as the head of the Mouri clan.

At one point Kicho even compares his intelligence to a fifth grader which just rubs me the wrong way because lets take a moment to actually look at Motonari’s abilities. He is multilingual, has knowledge of global politics and economics, is an amazing businessman, and extremely analytical. He is literally known as the God of Decit, yet I did not hear that name once until his route came out. His strategies are good enough to be called a god, yet that is completely buried in the other routes in order to simplify his character into a trigger happy psychopath and a violent brute. He is just as smart as Nobunaga yet he is not given the credit he deserves.

Both Motonari and Nobunaga are extremely similar yet because of the horribly biased portrayals, Motonari is one of the least popular characters whereas Nobunaga is the second most popular. It makes me angry to see people in the fandom choosing to blindly hate Motonari without recognizing the fact that this stems from a frankly racist portrayal of an extremely intelligent and powerful character. Although truthfully, I blame the devs because if they had given his character even half the consideration and depth the others got, this would not be the case. 

You can disagree with me if you want. I am simply bringing attention to something I haven’t seen being addressed.

I hope in future routes, events, and sequels he is treated better by the devs and and the fandom. Please stop projecting racist stereotypes onto brown men.

#Ikesen #Ikemen sengoku #ikesen motonari #ikemen sengoku motonari #motonari mouri #ikesen nobunga #ikesen mitsuhide #ikesen kenshin #ikesen kennyo #ikesen masamune #ikesen Shingen #ikesen kicho #ikesen keiji #ikesen ieyasu #ikesen mitsunari #ikesen MOTONARI x reader #ikesen yukimura #ikesen sasuke #ikesen mc #ikesen x reader #motonari x reader #otome boys #cybird #ikesen kanetsugu #ikesen yoshimoto #ikesen ranmaru #ikesen kyubei #ikemen sengoku nobunaga #ikesen hideyoshi #motonari's route

[shewhotellsstories]

i really dont wanna annoy you but you post about racism in fandom sometimes so i thought you'd be the right person to ask. i hope this doesnt come off as expecting u to be my teacher. yesterday someone said they didnt trust white zk shippers and i thought it was mean but then people started sending the them all these nasty messages and i started to worry maybe op was right. honestly a lot of this stuff is pretty new for me. i think our fandom is inclusive & unlike the rest of the atla fandom we actually like katara. but i'm trying to learn.

why would it be a problem that a lot of zk fics have katara looking after zuko? i always just felt like he needed it more bc he was abused and kataras better at dealing with feelings and she's good at taking care of people. is fire lady katara still ok? is there racism in our fandom? there are a lot of woc zks and i've seen them get hate for it. but the messages op got were pretty bad too. i know i'm asking a lot of questions i just hate the thinking that we might be as bad as the z*kka stans have been saying all year.

This is gonna get long so I’m just gonna jump right in. When I listened to fansplaining’s episode on fandom racism one of the guests said white fans who can acknowledge that fandom racism exists tend to frame it as “just a few bad apples” and get caught up in worrying about not looking like a “bad apple” instead of making fandoms spaces that aren’t hostile for BIPOC. Jag offs hiding behind anon to tell women of color who ship zutara that we have a creepy fetish for imperialism and colonialism suck, but your biggest concern really shouldn’t be the optics or if you can claim superiority over zukka stans.

Yeah the “katara’s a homophobe” nonsense didn’t come from our end of the fandom, but it feels naive at best or dishonest at worst to act like the zutara fandom is uniquely immune to fandom racism. A creator I follow made the excellent point that allyship conditional upon if a poc talks "nicely" about racism is still white supremacy. I believe poc need to be allowed to vent and be salty or angry without being tone-policed. I definitely have my days where I’m like “ugh white people,” or "why must white fans be like this," so I get where the OP was coming from. Ironically the folks that sent them anon hate proved their point. You can always count on hit dogs to hollar.

Fandom is only escapist for some people. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum so you’ll find racism in fandom because there’s racism in the world. Navigating that gets exhausting. There are certain things I enjoy, but for the sake of my sanity I'll only talk about it with friends in real life or only follow fans of color. Before I follow white fans I need to see first that they’re not the kind of person who inspires posts about fandom racism. A good friend of mine loves Star Wars, Kpop, and gaming but after years of attempts at calling in she decided that she’d only interact with woc in those spaces. Again, you get tired.

ATLA wasn’t on my radar until last year so I definitely haven’t read every zutara fic out there but I have noticed a lot of fics do tend to have Katara being the one comforting and supporting Zuko. It’s not inherently wrong of course, it’s just in the grand scheme of things in fiction woc are often cast as eternal caretakers and confidants in fiction:

“How characters of color are portrayed in fanworks, especially fanfiction, is worse than the actual films. They are portrayed as supportive, almost invisible understudies. Any characteristics which they possess in the [MCU] films are stripped and given to other white characters. It is not only erasure. It’s a theft of identity.

Characters of color are positioned within storylines to support the main, white characters. Even within the slash biracial pairings, the character of color is underdeveloped and in a position of servitude within the relationship.”

TheNavyLanguage, Fansplaining

As the quote above points out this honestly happens in a lot of fandoms. I’ve read fanfic for books, movies, tv shows, and comics and I can’t help but notice that in fics the writers often have the non-white character or-- if neither character is white--the darker skinned character being the care-taker, the bodyguard, or the person who is performing all the emotional labor. It’s not inherently wrong to have a character of color have a nurturing personality, you just have to remember that since Black and brown folks have been saddled with narrative after narrative where we exist to serve leaning into dynamics where the non-white or darker skinned character is providing all the emotional support and getting very little in return has some unfortunate implications.

It’s not better if instead of being defined as the avatar’s girl, Katara’s the fire lord’s girl. Part of the appeal of zutara for me is the idea that Katara could lay down some of her burdens and get some much needed support. I always imagine she’d have some major issues after the war.

"i always just felt like he needed it more bc he was abused and kataras better at dealing with feelings and she's good at taking care of people."

I’m going to push back against that statement. Yes, Katara didn't grow up in an abusive household but she has pain and trauma of her own. In fact I’d argue that her believing it’s her job to take care of everyone is rooted in her trauma. Katara needs support and care just as much as anyone else does.

Having read a lot of fics revolving around abuse victims in different fandoms I’ve observed that if fans feel a character’s trauma wasn’t properly addressed in canon, they’ll give them a lot of TLC in fics. But again, reducing the non-white or darker-skinned character to a glorified therapist has some implications.

I feel like the Fire Lady Katara headcanon's been talked to death so long-story short, it’s not inherently racist but it can problematic if it's not clear that Katara is Katara of the Water Tribe wherever she lives. Fics and art where her crown has a crescent moon, she wears blue, or Zuko wears blue when she's in red are the executions I'm fondest of.

When in doubt just listen when poc talk about uncomfortable trends in the fandom. Give fansplaining’s episodes on fandom racism a listen here, here, and here. And very loosely quoting my favorite professor just remember that if a marginalized person says they’re distrustful of a group of people or institution it usually happens after a lot of bad experiences. Don’t center your own comfort and hurt feelings.

“If we truly believe in fandom’s progressive credentials, then perhaps it is necessary for us to listen to critiques that make us uncomfortable rather than those that keep arguing that the status quo is perfectly acceptable—even as there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps then we will be able to come at these, yes, these very complex and nuanced discussions with the type of openness and good faith that is required for them to succeed, rather than approaching them with hostility.”

-Rukmini Pande, Fansplaining

#asked and answered #zutara #katara #atla fandom crit #fandom racism

[viscountessevie]

Why would you reblog that ask saying S2 should be colorblind? Wtf

[Related to This Post]

I think I know who you are anon, if it is you, feel free to come off anon in my DMs and we can have a more open discussion about this if you'd like.

If this is not one of my followers who left a really bizarre essay on the post you're talking about (linked above), I would still like to address the comments on that post:A

[More aka fully essay under the cut cos as always it got long 😂]

I am begging you to look up what colourblind casting is. We are not trying to erase their race or culture but it gives these white ass writers an out from writing about incredibly nuanced, complicated and mess history of oppression and colonisation. Because we know and have seen that these writers cannot handle the race conversation with any amount of tact. Why? Because they only have one token writer to represent each love interest every season and no sensitivity writers. Apparently white writers know best to write a poc's experience.

Colourblind casting allows the actors and characters to exist as their characters without being reduced to being their race. Hate to break it to you but being black (with Simon) and Indian (with the Sharmas) is a part of their identity but it is not a personality trait. Also just because they are colourblind cast doesn't mean the show would erase their culture and identity. Rather it allows the universe to ignore and not have a need to address why all these characters of colour are suddenly rich aristocrats in Regency London aka one of the whitest part of real history.

Now we have this limbo in the Bridgerton universe because these idiot writers wanted to talk about race but half-assed it and didn't follow through. In S1, we get a throwaway line with Lady D explaining why black people made it big in their times. I highly doubt the frivolous Queen Charlotte we got in S1 & 2 was powerful enough to eradicate all racism and slavery against black people in her 30-40 years of marriage but okay:

Honestly, Simon's father losing his mind over losing his title because his kid is not perfect - aka displaying trauma of having Model Minority Syndrome and wanting to uphold the perfect image of the Hastings name - did more for me discussing race on the show than Lady D's throwaway line.

Then during S2 promos (especially in articles), CVD and the team talked a BIG game about how India is SUPER relevant to the plot and it just ends up being a really silly and insignificant plot device to the raise the stakes of Kathony.

"I am leaving for India!"

"And that is not far enough!! Do you think there is a corner of the Earth that you can travel to far enough that could free me from this torment."

I guess these lines just don't have the same impact if she was from Somerset. They literally didn't need that but okay. The way they teased India, I fully expected to see the Sharmas to get off the ship and Lady D greeting them. Flashbacks to Kate growing up in India being doted on and loved by her parents and then completely having them ripped from her. But no where did all that screen time go?? TO COUSIN FUCKING JACK WHO WAS A ONE SEASON FLOP AND IS NEVER COMING BACK. That fucking nitwit had zero impact on the main plot like literally most of the side plots this season were SO FUCKING USELESS.

(Sidebar disclaimer: I adore Rupert Young!! And he did his best with the script he was given and was super slimy as Jack but if we cut out his scenes from S2, it literally affects nothing!! If yall wanna see him in a GOOD story where his character is utilised hella well, I recommend BBC's Merlin.

Also I didn't mind Eloise, Ben and Colin's arcs with Marina because the first two were developing the sibs for their respective seasons and the last one gave us some closure on Marina - a little shitty that in the end they made her a Pelican (alt ship name for P*lin) mouthpiece but whatever I'm at peace seeing my baby. Just too much Featheringtons and LW - the show is called Bridgerton after all not Featherington/Lady Whistledown 🙄)

All this to say, at the end of the day, all I wanted from Bridgerton was escapism. Just to watch pretty people who looked like me exist in a world where realistically it's not possible but it's fun to imagine. Just because it would have been blindcast doesn't mean we couldn't showcase some of our culture. It's like being in a diaspora and the Sharmas could have been Indians from a diaspora in the Somerset. It's that simple!!

I don't think that was unreasonable to ask or assume of the show the moment we watched the first S1 trailer. But whatever this is our problematic fave show we got and I love it even though I criticise it alot. Gotta be critical of the media you love.

Finally to directly answer that ask, babes it's my blog I can reblog whatever I want and if you don't like it feel free to unfollow or block me!

[That being said y'all if I didn't properly tag something as a trigger or squick, let me know. Same goes for ships or characters you don't like - I always do tag them so you can filter and block those tags! Just be open and polite with me about these things is all I ask].

As always if you aren't in my GC and read this far, thank you!!

#Got the GC's stamp of approval on this one #bridgerton #Colourblind casting #Bridgerton S2 thoughts #Kate Sharma #The Sharmas #Duke of Hastings #Lord Bassett #Kanthypants & Eldest Daughters GC #Asks

[cblgblog]

Sorry I’m advance but one of my other favorite accounts just reblogged a Tony scene and people are talking about Civil War and how it made them Stan Tony, and how when they watch that movie they hate team cap👀 Then someone was all about how he was sleep deprived and how much pressure he was under and couldn’t understand how people didn’t like Tony because. Someone literally said that when someone says they don’t like Tony in Civil War they say “did you watch the same movie as me.” I’m baffled. Oddly enough someone else said, “he just wants to help everyone.” Sorry for the rant but I think people forget about what the accords are and what it would mean for people. Side note, I hope you’re having a great day/night 😀

No sorry needed!

I feel you man, I do. Honestly, I’ve unfollowed people based on similar posts when I was in especially Done moods, so.

Look on the one hand, the movie would’ve been a narrative failure if everyone was in favor of one side or the other, right? The whole point of the damn thing—besides giving the Mouse overlords more money—was to spark discussion, debate. Which, yeah, we’ll call that the tame description for what actually happened. But just, the thing was meant to split the fanbase so in that regard…winning? Thanks, I guess?

Film is also very obviously subjective, different strokes for different folks, so yeah, ten people can watch a movie and none of them are gonna see the exact same film. Let’s try to remember that this is, in theory anyway, a good thing. I just read a professional film review yesterday where I had the same reaction. What film were you watching, dude? Incidentally his reviewing partner said the same thing.

So honestly, no, they weren’t watching the same film as you or I or anyone else, because everyone brings their own biases and experiences and knowledge and interests into a thing, and that’s always going to flavor how it’s viewed. Again, let’s try to remember that this is good. In theory. Heavy on the theory.

That out of the way? Let’s get into Tony specifically so his uber stans can find this and scream at me on anon as though I just shot RDJ with a nuke.

Oh yeah, he was stressed. Oh, he was sleep deprived. Yeah, I’ve heard that. And that it’s Pepper’s fault, if she hadn’t left the poor baby, if she was there to rein him in, he’d be fine dammit, leave the baby alone!

Here’s the thing. You know who gets a pass on their shit behavior when they’re upset or tired? Actual babies. Actual babies and toddlers, and children, up to a point. Because they actually cannot always help themselves. Their bodies and brains are different, they have not learned better.

When you’re a 50-year-old man who’s supposedly the world’s bestest superhero, who wants, wants to be in charge of protecting the whole world? You need a little more self-control than that. The sleep deprived excuse works if you snap at someone before you’ve had your coffee, not for this. Roseanne Barr didn’t get to blame Ambien for her racism, Tony doesn’t get to handwave CW away because oops, I was tired.

Really? You’re a superhero, dude. Most of your teammates are tired too, that’s part of the gig. If you crash and burn this badly without your afternoon nap, fucking hang up the armor and go back to your billionaire playboy lifestyle.

Speaking of that, sure, right. It’s Pepper’s fault because she left him. Put aside the argument on whether that was justified or not (cough, it was and she should’ve stayed away even though they are adorable together). It’s not Pepper’s job to keep Tony sane. It’s not any partner’s job to do that for anyone. If she wants out, she has a right to that, without Tony going off the rails and blaming it on her. Seriously, he says part of the reason he backed the Accords was to “split the difference” with Pepper.

Dude. You were an asshole and you lost your girl. You destroyed all your suits, turned an emotional and mental corner in IM 3…and then relapsed 4 minutes later I guess because Whedon. Either way, Tony admits himself that he does not want to stop. So instead of doing that, or finding another partner who can accept that, you back an unjust international law that pits you against your team, your supposed friends? Go to therapy, have a pint of ice cream, cry into your pillow, send her more of those strawberries you sent her in IM 2 that she’s allergic to. You don’t go trying to change international law in ways that could ultimately affect millions of people because your girl left you.

Honestly—and thank God they didn’t do this but—the only way the Pepper excuse works in excusing his behavior in any way is if she’d died. Or been severely injured like Happy in IM 3. Still wouldn’t be okay, but, like Quill messing up their chance to stop Thanos because Gamora died, it would’ve been more understandable. Understandable, not excusable, and the way the MCU treats their women as manpain fodder, we’re probably legit lucky we didn’t get this.

As for him wanting to help everyone. He does in fact want that, I think. The problem is that his need to feel like he’s doing that is stronger than his rational mind, or his want to actually help in a constructive way.

Tony is too smart. He’s dumb as hell in many instances, mostly involving people and relationships, but he’s also too smart, and he’s been told for too long that he’s smart, and he’s bought into it. Ultron. Suit of armor around the world, protects the world, no more alien threats. It’s a simple concept on paper that fails in execution. So there are people with dangerous powers. Okay, we’ll make a set of laws to keep them from being dangerous, problem solved. But again, it isn’t.

Tony is not used to problems he cannot solve. He’s a genius, right? He can fix anything. He should be able to fix anything. That’s how he feels. But not everything is zeros and ones and circuits, things that can be fixed mechanically like his armors can. The people he wants to protect are not built that way. But he needs to feel like he’s doing something, because he’s terrified of what happens to the world if he doesn’t. So he creates these simple solutions to complex problems. The suit of armor, the Accords. They sound good in theory, but the problems they’re trying to solve are bigger than they are. And Tony, way back in IM 1, he sat back for years, clueless that his weapons were being used for bad things. He says it to Cap in CW. When he found out what his weapons were being used for, he went in and stopped it. Whether or not he should’ve known that already is a separate issue here. The point here is that when he found out, too late or not, he went in and did something about it.

Tony needs to do something about it. Again, go back to Cap in AoU, Tony’s nightmare sequence. Steve asks Tony why he didn’t save them. Tony’s ultimate nightmare is that he sits back and does nothing, and his inaction causes everyone to die. Which is where you get Ultron. Something he came up with because of what he saw in space in Avengers 1, then doubled down on in AoU. It’s where you get the Accords. Oops, he caused someone to die, he killed Charles Spencer. Must do something about that right now so it doesn’t happen again, and he won’t have to feel this guilt. He should be collaborating with others to come up with solutions (no Bruce in AoU doesn’t count because Bruce was dumb there), or at the very least, taking more time to think through the repercussions of the things he puts out there. But he doesn’t, because he’s got his savior complex that tells him that he alone can and must fix this, and because he’s too dumb to realize how not-smart he is in certain areas.

“We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I’m game.”

Isn’t that what he says in CW, or something very close to it? Whatever form that takes. That’s the issue, right there, whatever form that takes. Realistically, yes, there should be laws regarding people with powers, the same way there are special laws pertaining to people who carry guns, or people who are licensed to fly planes. You have a thing/can do a thing that not everyone else does, so there are regulations pertaining to that thing. Laws change with the times, they always have. Some new technology comes up, eventually there will be laws that regulate it. As there should be, honestly. The issue with the Accords, Steve’s issue with the Accords, was not the basic idea. He says as much. He says that it could work, but there would have to be safeguards. Safeguards that are not in the Accords that Tony wants him to sign.

It's not a matter of oh, fuck the law, there should be no law governing these people, they’re above it. The problem is that the law as it’s presented here is unjust. There’s what, a month between Lagos and Ross coming by to tell them about the Accords? A month is not enough time to properly analyze such a big issue, Especially when you’re reacting out of fear, which is what happened with Lagos. People died because of an Enhanced person, an Avenger, in this case. Lawmakers don’t want that to happen again, they especially don’t want the political shit storm that comes with it. Damn, we look like we were asleep at the switch here, not having anything to throw at this problem earlier. Quick, let’s throw together this thing so no one can say we’re not addressing the problem.

Patriot Act of 2001, anyone? 9/11 happened, the public were rightfully terrified, the US said oh man, these are unprecedented circumstances, we’ve never had this before. Don’t worry though, we’re on this, we’re protecting you. The reality being that that bill simply gave the government too much power, most of it being used against people who were not actually threats, and it’s debatable, to say the very least, whether or not that law helped more than it hurt.

No law is perfect. No law ever will be. It’s not possible. We still have to strive for perfection though, have to aim there so that the laws we get are as close to fair as possible. Tony’s a big deal. If not for his “whatever form that takes” attitude, he might’ve been able to use his influence to pressure lawmakers into coming up with a fairer bill. Hey, I’m me, the public loves me, I will endorse this bill publicly and work on getting the rest of the team to sign, but you need to change this and this and this first, or no deal. Instead, he took the easy way out, the quickest, easiest way for him to feel like he’s atoned for his sins without actually doing anything. Whatever form that takes.

Tony’s not wrong because he backs the creation of a law that addresses these things. He’s wrong because he says himself that he does not care what that law does, specifically, so long as it exists. He’s wrong because he violates said law upteen times during the movie, while preaching to team Cap about what assholes they are for not backing it. He’s wrong because he cares more about feeling as though he’s tackled a problem than he does about taking the time to make sure that the thing he’s proposing is actually a good idea. He’s wrong because of what he does with Bucky, though that’s honestly a separate issue, for the purposes of this discussion.

Anyway, that was longer than I ever wanted it to be. Damn. Next time you see a comment about CW being the reason people stan Tony, just remember there are other people out there who stopped stanning Tony because of that movie. Everyone’s entitled to see a piece of media however they see it, and although the Tony stans are often the loudest, there are plenty of like-minded people out there who share your take on events. Block who you need to, unfollow who you need to, blacklist what you need to, and don’t let them get you down.

Hang in there, and have an awesome day :)

#pro steve rogers #pro team cap #anti tony stark #anti tony stans #anti iron man #anti team iron man

[normal-thoughts-official]

I would have loved to see more interactions with the seelies- people who can’t lie but are crafty and secretive sounds fascinating. Think of the dialog! Alec going to magnus for advice since he has centuries of experience talking to them, Alec playing mental chess while trying to maintain peace. Would have loved getting more- but let’s be real, Cassaundra and the show writers weren’t clever enough to actually make any conversations like that of value.

SAME!!!!! honestly i would have loved to see so much more of the seelies. like bro do you understand that their culture predates the VERY EXISTENCE OF HUMANITY??? they are the ONLY kind of downworlders whose culture is completely detached from any human culture, not only because of predating it, but also because of the relative isolationism - which means human culture barely had any influence on their culture and history AS it developed

so like you can literally go fucking bonkers??????????? you can make ANYTHING. they have a whole ass society that doesn't have to have ANY ties to mundane concepts or history AT ALL. complete creative freedom. you could do ANYTHING! and don't get me started on the potential this has, within storytelling, to contextualize a lot of stuff modern western culture sees as natural or timeless as actually pretty fucking specific - like monogamy, cisheteropatriarchy, the gender binary, racism. all immortals have that potential of course since they can come from an array of different cultural and historical backgrounds but seelies in particular have SO much potential that is NEVER! FUCKING! USED! it all goes to waste and they are just a generic vaguely monarchic society that behaves literally exactly as modern western cultural standards. WHY. i'll never stop being salty, especially within sh where all this potential was there and instead they just villainized the seelies like no tomorrow for nO FUCKING REASON, and included a whole plotline about their ruler being a terrible power-hungry person and then proceeded to act as if that would have no influence on the seelies under her rule? thanks for nothing

like i know the seelie queen was so badly written that her own motivations even as a power-hungry wacko didn't make sense or were consistent (like why give simon the mark of cain for example, and for god's sake what kind of power-hungry crazy bitch gives their main enemy the power to literally kill her and destroy everything she has at the blink of an eye, like??? she literally tried to assist in her own genocide, it makes no fucking sense, i fucking hate it here) but if they are going to make her Terrible the least they could do was show how that impacted the people under her rule, especially if they are going to have meliorn be fucking tortured and either forced to display the marks of said torture or choosing to display them themself, like? please give your plotlines one singular thought

but of course it's easier to villainize seelies and reduce them to their obviously tyrannical ruler so they can go back to focusing on the shadowhunters and their issues. nevermind the fact that seelies are obviously equivalent to native ppls/third world countries resisting colonialism/imperialism in sh's stupid ass racial metaphor, which makes making their ruler a big bad unequivocally evil villain that is ruining everything A Choice. and a particularly choicy Choice considering they cast a middle-eastern man to play the most important seelie character. but if they are going to do that they could at least address how the people under her rule suffer and how that's a direct consequence of shadowhunter colonialism and interference, but why would we fkcnig thdo that!!!! when we can have love triangle drama or whatever

and tHEN there is the whole aspect of being unable to lie which is bound to have such an impact on their culture and history since they have to rely on other forms of communication to protect themselves - and considering the whole "tyrannical rule" plotline, to further the queen's agenda in the first place. and how telling the truth without preamble would probably be considered a huge display of trust in a society that has culturally developed so many ways of talking around things. like again the potential of the cultural and historic background for that society! it makes me go insane!!!

anyway all of that to say #JusticeForSeelies and #SeeliePlotlinesNow 2021 and forever. and YES i would have loved to see more interactions between them and other characters, particularly magnus because 1- admittedly i'm a hoe; and 2- magnus was clearly the one that had the most experience talking to seelies and that others relied on for that communication. he also seemed to be the most comfortable with them, which indicates there is either some sort of history there, or magnus just happens to feel relatively at home with the workings of their culture. which makes sense, because magnus also had to develop pretty similar defense mechanisms due to his, A- work as a warlock representative who has to interact with shadowhunters on the regular; B- history with having to deal with asmodeus, which required him to be very smart about what he disclosed and how, especially considering that he had to have been planning banishing asmodeus for a long time before he got to do it; and C- just history with abuse in general. we've seen the way he closed his heart off to new people; but at the same time, magnus is obviously an extrovert and likes to be around people in general. this meant that, in order to be able to both be in the kind of environment where he thrives and protect himself/his heart/his feelings, he had to learn how to interact with people while putting on a convincing façade, which requires pretty much the same sorts of wordplay and defense mechanisms that seelies use

magnus is good at wordplay, he's good at using talking to his benefit; we've seen that. he is also good at hiding and deflecting. he is notably not good at directly lying - every time he directly said A Lie such as "i am perfectly fine and not bothered by this at all :)" it was way less convincing than it was a clear display that he wouldn't budge. even alec, who has difficulty with social cues, noticed the lying and seemed concerned about it. so like. clearly his defense mechanisms were less lying and more dancing around subjects, directing conversation to safe topics, and guiding people to making certain assumptions and seeing sides of his that were safer and he preferred

so in that way it makes sense that magnus is somewhat in his element when dealing with seelies. i think "comfortable" is a strong word because this whole song and dance takes a huge toll on anyone's mental health and energy (which i think is something that could be very interestingly explored in seelies, their collective psyche, and their culture, the way they build relationships, etc. let meliorn have partners they feel 100% comfortable talking without preamble with 2k21), but it's something he is used to and a dynamic he can fall into without as much effort as others who would be second guessing themselves more and going slower, which clearly gives the seelies, who are used to it, an advantage

and like i know that i'm implying a confrontation or sort of situation where they are on opposing sides to seelies here, which i kind of am because i am thinking mostly about magnus' interactions with the seelie queen specifically, since she was the seelie he had the most meaningful interactions with. his interactions with meliorn were very few and almost never relevant, i barely remember them happening outside of generic downworld cabinet interactions tbh. but i don't just mean that because again, stop villainizing seelies 2k21

i also mean just generally that magnus would be in a more comfortable position talking to seelie strangers and slowly working into building a relationship and mutual trust. and just generally understanding them and the workings of their culture because he can empathize with the way they have built their social defense mechanisms. no one is 100% truthful to strangers, but seelies always seem kind of- analytical. and the cultural difference + anti-seelie racism makes them seem untrustworthy to most people, but magnus Gets It, so the potential for friendships! and the mutual understanding and the relative comfort around each other! and both parts understanding the enormity that is letting their walls down gradually and being more direct as time goes by. like.... aaaaaa

and yes magnus becomes a sort of reference on talking to seelies, mostly because he is good at "playing their game", but also making it a point to humanize seelies and making the other parts understand where they are coming from and how they feel :) and just improving their relations, particularly with other downworlders

im not going to get into alec because 1- the relationship between shadowhunters and seelies is already filled with oppression and a lot of complications, and particularly now that the seelie realm is politically fragile due to the loss of their ruler (however terrible she might have been), it would play into either white savior narratives or just straight up colonialism, especially given how alec as a leader already has a history of trying to build tutelage over downworlders (i don't care what his intentions were, it's still true, and although he's learning... well. he's learning, continuous action); 2- that would be more a relationship of opposition and i'm not that interested in that. but i would love to see seelies rebuilding themselves and their relationships and alliances with other downworlders particularly, and all the better if magnus is playing a part in that :)

in short:

more seelies

more magnus with seelies, especially friendships

more focus on the politics of seelies now that the seelie queen is gone

more seelies

more seelies

more seelies

#sh #shadowhunters #lore #magnus bane #meliorn #seelies #the seelie queen #seelie culture #seelie history #meta #magnus bane meta #meliorn meta #in a way #ask #anonymous #long post #salt #a bit #ok maybe a lot but mostly to add flavor to my lore ramblings

[nightswithkookmin]

Hi! Goldy, do you know why are jikookers making such a big deal out of jk saying “I’m hyung ‘s copy cat”. I’m I missing something here , why is everyone acting like they just confessed their love , if anything vmin were more sus 😂

Lol shippers...

We are like a bunch of boohbahs on crack every day. We get excited over everything and anything- which I think is the point of shipping though. Lol.

Not sure what you are missing as I haven't seen the show in its entirety yet...

But off the top of my head, I'd say it's probably because of the blushing and the whole Kook's ear turning red bit when JM was addressing him about copying him.

He did the same thing in the Be.TS Vlive when Jimin put him on the spot about posting on his birthday. Jimin makes him shy

It's been several years and Jimin still has an effect on him. I think it's cute.

Also, the bit about them confessing...

You actually not wrong. Lol.

JM used to say JK copies him because JK liked him and so JK would deny that all the time. To accept that he was imitating JM would mean he was admitting he liked Jimin- that he thought Jimin was cool, had impeccable style yadda yadda.

Jimin might as well had asked JK to confess he liked him.

They both had a habit of trying to get the other to confess their feelings for them in the past.

JM: I am Army.

JK: Do you like me that much?

JM: I had blue eyes first.

JK: No. Mine is bluer

JM: Stop imitating me.

Do you like me that much?

Jk: No

It was their way of flirting. So I guess in effect, in admiting he imitates JM, Jimin sort of got JK to officially admit he likes him🤷🏽‍♀️

'Do you like me?'

'Do you?'

'Do you?'

And he acted so innocent about it too.

This man! Lol

That innocent pout afterwards my God. Lmho.

There's just a lot of history between those two. A lot, and it's nice to see them remind eachother of that.

And I think it's the history and memories, the nolstagia he evoked in JK with that comment that had JK blushing hard especially if he read double meaning in that request.

From, his reaction I'd say he did.

All these double entendres chilee.

Its intriguing JK had such a strong reaction to something seemingly less intense or even cringe. That comment was supposed to be a safe bet. The safest conversation JM could have with Kook in front of new audience to not make things awkward in the room and yet...

There's no hope for JK. Dude is gone. Bid him farewell to gay boulevard🤧

Jimin was like why are you blushing it's nothing heavy or something like that and that reminded me again of that whole, 'did I scold you" bit from New Jersey.

Jimin had a strong reaction to what JK deemed a trivial issue- Which I gotta smirk at. Smirk.

It's interesting that of all the things he could ask Jk, this is what he chose to ask him. I think he genuinely believed it was a safer conversation to have- Y'all think VMin was wilding, wait till you meet the Jikooknims.

Imagine if JK had said what V said to JM or if JM had said that to JM. Imagine that...

I mean I get it, if they are going to be regulars on traditional SK media now, they have to be able to interact 'normally' within the group without the members or eachother panicking and acting like Jikook be spelling the nuclear codes with their butts.

We've discussed the gradual shift in BigHit's marketing model but it seems with all the Asian hate crimes, racism, stigmatization of Asians and Asian Americans in the wake of the pandemic, it's become imperative that they redirect their focus and attention to SK to solidify their presence and hold in their home market.

I'm afraid we might be seeing a shift towards the company pandering to their roots and adhering to traditional media practices with mostly one foot in the international market, and one foot in their home market.

And if that's the case, Jikook would have to be able to tether the line of their closet without making things awkward for eachother and the members lest they risk exposing themselves to the gay hateration and criticism rampant in Korea.

Bang PD have made it perfectly clear, he is not about the risk taking life. That he prefers as a company to play things safe- I wonder if he's stance on that has changed in recent times.

But I don't think when it comes to it, he'd risk it for them. He's not gonna shove their alternative lifestyle in conservative spaces like that. Chilee.

Anywho, Jimin likes to rile JK up and watch him squirm sometimes but naa I don't think that was the agenda this time around...

Then there was this bit also

Which I think my guy spilled right there😏

I've been saying for the longest time BigHit staff take stock in the Jikook business. There you have it.

They style Jikook. They style BTS. So all the times they've appeared in couple outfits, matching shoes, complimentary hairstyles, all the time they deliberately cut from JK to Jimin or Jimin to JK, all the times they've paired Jikook up, isolated them from the group so Jikook can give them a moment-

When I say BigHit is intentional in the way they brand Jikook within the group and in the way they push those two not as friends but as a 'couple'

And because of this people scream Jikook is fan service blah blah nonsense.

But the question have always been, why does these two grown ass men go along with it. Do they not know what it means when of all seven they are the two that are constantly marketed as 'lovers?" They are not twins, neither are they twelve and so why the need to match their fits?

And how come none of them object to this?

Why don't they ask questions???

Bet. Bet there's a reason for that.

As for Vmin all I have to say is...

Tae Kook who? Tae Kook WHERE?!

Lmho. Vmin, TaeJin, (Tae kook) VHope, Taegi

In that particular order for Tae's ships. The last three are fluid with Tae Kook alternating anywhere from 3rd to the last position lol.

I saw their shippers bust out their go to, 'Tae was being sarcastic" he hates Jimin rhetoric - like

GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

Tae talks some strong Vmin agenda.

We been knew. We been said it

He flirts Jimin hard to gay proportions too.

'In love with my Soulmate- a memoir written by Kim Taehyung. Coming soon to a bookshop near you. Lmho.

If Jimin catches feelings for Tae one day it's game over for us all🤣🤣🤣🤣

'We need to stop. This game is dangerous.'

Then he proceeds to gulp on top of it 🤣🤣

Reminds me of when JK was asked if Jimin wasn't his style and JK was fumbling and Jimin said, cut the cameras. Deadass. Lol

'Jk don't answer that' 🤭

Why shouldn't he answer that?

Jimin is a funny guy. A funny gay guy🤭

And did y'all see how hard Yoongi screamed when Tae said that?

Lolololololololololololololololololololololololol

Tae doesn't need to convince me he has feelings for Jimin. I'm convinced all by myself 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

And is it me or did Tae look like he didn't believe Jimin when JM said he liked him too??🤔

I can't wait to watch the whole thing.

I love their relationship. I hate when people invalidate it. VMin does not invalidate Jikook nor does Jikook invalidate VMin or even Tae Kook. They all are, unique and they are beautiful me thinks.

They ought not be compared in this way but celebrated.

It's not a competition.

Talk of celebrating ships, did you see Tae and Kook too??? 🤭🤭🤭🤭

I love seeing them in a good place in their dynamic like this.

It's the look he shot JK when the envelope ended up infront of him for me😂

Tae is hilarious I swear! Lmho.

I kinda lowkey wished it was for him I won't lie.

It's the same energy as when JK grabbed his neck and said he wanted to ride in the car with Tae. (If those subs were correct. Can't trust any unofficial subs on any Tuktuk moment💀)

Tae was like 👀 waeyo? Lmho.

I'm off to ship Tae Kook and VMin.

Keep your eyes on the gays for me.

Bye🤣

💜💜💜💜

Signed,

GOLDY

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiracy fantasy

When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish — they’re also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.

If your mom is shouting about “Hollywood pedos,” it’s natural that you’ll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.

To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than “irrational people have irrational beliefs.” This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.

The messages it spells out don’t describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles

Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don’t capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.

http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players’ lives. They’re a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.

ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It’s a powerful way to galvanize collective action.

As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it’s the organizing principal behind Anonymous.

Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine

In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).

On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics — Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou — analyze “conspiracy fantasies” (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism’s anxieties.

As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people’s behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that’s often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.

Conspiracists aren’t just “irrational” nor are they just “racist.” They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.

A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron — the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity — dismissed the Hackney Riots as “criminality pure and simple,” and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But without that discussion, there’s no explanation. Even if you believe that “criminality” is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?

Likewise the “conspiracists are just racists” or “they’re just deranged.” Without looking at the material world, there’s no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.

We can’t talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players’ super-cool theories.

A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It’s a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna’s Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing “Q,” an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)

https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/

The plot of “Q” involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that “Q” is set during the Protestant Reformation.

In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.

The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write “La Q di Qomplotto” (“The Q in Qonspiracy”), a book that defines and analyzes “conspiracy fantasies.”

https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Ming 1’s interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criterial for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn’t go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).

I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism — the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail — they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.

Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.

Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.

He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy’s Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they’d faked the whole thing.

The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who’d been framed for imaginary Satanic “crimes.” Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.

The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ manuever in “The Magic of Reality,” his excellent children’s book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality

The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism’s anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.

Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies — the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work — that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.

I really like this approach because of its empathy — its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.

It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never AT their subjects.

https://ohnopodcast.com/

But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of “Q” to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.

The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden’s recent inaugural blog-post, “Conspiracy: Theory and Practice,” which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls “fantasies”).

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world’s most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.

Snowden’s perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse — the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.

These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about “online radicalization.”

As I wrote in my 2020 book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the “online radicalization” narrative requires that you accept Big Tech’s unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Claims to be able to control our minds — whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts — always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).

But there’s a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.

By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.

And by corrupting our political process, it creates “kernels of truth” for conspiratorial beliefs.

As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.

#pluralistic

[supercharmed-forever-mine]

Today I will be addressing SuperCorp and some of the issues that have been floating around about fandom. And I will be saying some stuff that both is for it and could be used against it even though I am ultimately a super big supercorp fan. Like it says in the tags you're free to express your opinion but they will not be changing mine but I am always open-minded to opinions that can actually be explained and eloquently expressed (receipt's needed) and aren't just basic. Also just so what is noted I have been a part of this fandom since the first episode I have literally shipped Kara with everyone from Lucy to Cat even James.But Lena has just stuck out the most for me but I'm Equal opportunity.

Number #1, Lena's character in no way shape or form has ever been xenophobic she has never once shown any hate towards aliens her problem with Kara in season 5 Wasn't because she was an alien it was because she was a "Super" like Kara could have been a flying purple fucking octopus from the planet of shzjxfdf and Lena wouldn't have gave two fucks but no she was a "Super"but let's dig deeper on that point if we really look at why she was mad it wasn't even the whole alien aspect it was because she wasn't told and no I don't think she's entitled to it but I do think it played into the fact of a trust issue she has with the fact that people would think she would be just like Lex if she had been told Sooner. Which is disproved in 5x13 (also personal note: I also think she wouldn't have reacted half as bad if Kara had just told her that night at game night or the next day when she wanted to probably still would have been pissed but not to the same extent). But okay with that being said I do disagree with the kryptonite entrapment torture scene and basically half the s*** she did in season 5 it was shown that she truly can tap into her Luthor side and be dark when wanted but fortunately she does always return to the light and in all fairness it has been shown several times that Kara has a dark side of her own that could rival the luthors.

Number #2, I do disagree with the abuse of actresses and actors just because of a ship and or character they play don't blame them it's just a job they have I think Melissa and Katie do a beautiful job of bringing Kara and Lena's characters to life couldn't imagine anybody else playing them.

Number #3, I also will say about the reason bombarding of comments on Nicole's social media at least I saw the video via tiktok in that video was fucking hilarious I love Nia, Dreamer,and Nicole in general she's funny and beautiful and is an advocate for everything good in life and well it is normal to even ask other actors if they have the scoop on anything it does not mean we need to be bombarding them in videos on something relating to their character or their love of something a simple comment or so maybe but what I saw NO.

Number #4, The William of it all well I think though his character seems like a nice gentleman he also seems to be bland as hell also I did not know he was a POC to be honest I thought he was a tan white man and we'll be doing further research on people in the future as I can learn from my ignorance also but unrelated I did not know that the woman who played Maggie was apparently just a tan white woman I thought she was of some sort of Hispanic descent but apparently not according to various things I've read on here tonight... But anyways back to William I feel like a lot of people might have perceived him as a white man therefore that might play into the whole scenario of people hate that they just want two white woman together when it proves if she was a man they wouldn't give two f**** about it whether that's true or not I don't know but mine two cents.

Number #5, I will never bash someone for being for or against a certain ship and or character and well I am allowed to certainly disagree with their opinion all opinions are valid because we all see the world a different way some see it bright and shiny and others like I'll admit myself see it through the glasses of trauma. And I think that's why we all have the opinions we do most of the time when you like a shipper character it's because you relate to them somehow even if it's the most minor thing to someone else it might be huge for you. You never know what the person on the other side of the screen is going through in those characters or ship or fanfiction might have literally saved their lives.

Sidenote: Like okay personal story I was been both mentally and sexually abused as a child so I relate to both Kara and Lena respective childhood trauma so that draws me to them. And I kind of see them both as the opposite attract trope (two side of the same coin) because well we never fully get over trauma Kara had a great support system with the Danvers whereas Lena didn't get that with the luthors I mean sure she had Lex at first but even that was only to a certain extent because of his psychopathy that was starting to manifest he couldn't perceive human emotions the same as Lena who in my opinion is just a big mushy nerd who can be a badass when needed as evident by the season 6 episodes after she's quit L-Corp she's constantly trying to help out inventing new stuff and she's wondering how Nia's suit works and it just shows that she just has a curious mind and also she looks happier even with the guilt she feels over Kara's phantom zone incident when Nia called her a part of the family that smile could lit up a city all she's ever wanted is to belong and I can relate to that therefore to her.

Number #6, I feel like this should have been addressed in earlier number but as far as sexuality goes I would want to believe Kara is pansexual because of everything I've ever read and saw I don't believe she perceived sexuality like humans do because of her Kryptonian upbringing for the first good chunk of the life. Like even though she says she's not gay in the first episode, A. It was the first episode so they didn't even know where the story was going in future seasons if they got them also that means maybe she just didn't perceive herself as the Earth's definition of gay. B. Even in the first season she made a comment about how she bought Lucy was gorgeous and hell she would date her. C. She made some comments about Irma and other woman that don't sound totally heterosexual and don't get me wrong women can admire the beauty and intelligence of other women without it being sexual but as a bisexual woman it just struck a cord in me you can tell the difference when it's coming from a straight woman mouth. Now on the subject of her and Lena strictly I do think there are instances of "queerbaiting"because just because you perceive they haven't been promised to us doesn't mean that some of us haven't picked up on things or the fact that they're simply queerbating because somehow they do hype up Kara and Lena to keep a nice chunk of the audience who ships them mainly those of the gay variety interested in the show which is also considered queerbaiting. Also the fact that they've been called sisters or family or my personal favorite "that's what friends are for"doesn't mean crap because honestly at this point the overuse of friends just sounds more like they're trying to convince themselves than us.*** Also I don't know about you but even on the basic level of things they've done I've never shown half those feelings towards my friends and the ones I have it's because I started to think of them as more than friends.

Now with Lena's sexuality no they have never shown her as anything besides straight canonically but don't get me wrong she totally sends off that college experimentation vibe especially with Andrea for some reason but that may just be me.

Number #7, my main point is let's just be kind to one another because guess what there is toxicity from every ship in a fandom there will always be shitty people on both sides and then there will be those of us who just want to see the characters together for one reason or another and yes I'm not afraid to admit that part of my reasons I want to see two gorgeous woman kiss sue me LOL.

Number #8, the conclusion of my rant is that how about we leave the hating to the ones who want to do that and the rest of us like adults or whatever your age is in the fandom that has any type of maturity behave because I truly do wish the best and in the end well I hope they end up together I'm realistic that they probably won't especially due to the CW Network motto of "homophobia and racism"because they've already broken up several good gay and interracial couples on that show. But at the end of the day my true wish is just that all of the characters end up happy and healthy.

Best of luck to all shippers out there anti and supercorp and or any other couple alike may we try to make it out of this with a modicum of sanity and even if they fail us we always have fanfiction thank you and good night.

#SuperCorp #anti supercorp #anti lena luthor #supercorp endgame #melissa benoist #katie mcgrath #william dey #supergirl #wlw ship

[devilbrew-69]

I made a post about this a while back, but persona 5 being labeled as a "rebellion" story is still incredibly annoying and pretentious. A lot of people advertise the game as being about anarchists/ social outcasts when its really not. Like, at all. The characters fin in almost perfectly well within societal norms and expectations; they just have personal issues. Having personal problems doesn't make someone an anarchist. Every teen drama in existence is about anarchism by that logic.

Th status quo at large is never questioned or attacked on any meaningful level. The closest the game got to that was the sexual predator Kamoshida but even then they don't address rape culture and or society enables it. The game just treats Kamoshida as a one off villain without acknowledging how society allows predators to thrive in the first place. P5 being written by a straight man who doesn't know the first thing about the patriarchy becomes aggressively obvious when you realize teen Joker can date adult women.

And what the hell was all that talk about social outcasts? Not in this homogenous heteronormative af game. It's very telling that the only gay characters here are grown men who hit on joker and ryuji. Atlus( or rather Katsura Hoshino) loves to put lgbt elements in their stories but only as the butt of the joke. A simple story about LGBT people living their lives would be more counterculture/ rebellious than anything P5 has done. American kids media can tackle topics like homophobia, racism, oppression, etc so it doesn't make any sense to give P5 a pat on the back for not even doing the bare minimum.

I don't hate the game I just wish people would try to make it something that's it not. It's clear that's the writers of the game never had to fight for anything in their lives because these characters do not feel like rebels on the slightest.

#persona #atlus #video game #jrpg #rant #anarchy #patriarchy

[serpenteve]

I don't know if this is a good hot take (or even a right one lol) but I always felt the difference in reception for the SAB trilogy and SOC duology was because of the intricacy of the plots. So, to explain myself the best I can since thoughts to screen is hard sometimes.

The SAB plot always felt ambitious to me. You have the Grisha persecution (which is a BIG problem since that's the whole reason the Darkling is even doing what he's doing), the Fold basically existing, the shitty monarchy of Ravka, and of course all of the underlying racism, etc (truly the list goes on). But the books never seem to actually move toward a conclusion where any of these issues are properly addressed and handled and then Alina is like: bye I'm a housewife in the country now uwu

Whereas SOC is simplistic (in comparison). Literally you just have a group of 6 criminals breaking into a prison to snitch snatch a chemist who's making a super bad drug. BADFORGRISHACOUGHCOUGH cause Grisha persecution is still a big thing no one has addressed but this is not the anon ask essay for that.

The thing is that the plot of SOC book one doesn't have 12 different grand scale things that need to be solved like in SAB. They literally just have the main quest and everyone is merely moving like chess pieces in one of those Escape Room games. If that makes sense. SOC isn't about this thick, heavy 'we need to change the world' plot. It's just 6 criminals being criminals.

The most complicated part of the story is the motivations of the characters evolving over time. The second book follows the same general flow of the first. Get Inej, get their money, destroy Pekka Rollins and Van Eck. Once again, everyone moves as chess pieces. Once again, the big part is character motivations.

The thing is it's just that simple. There is no 'all the countries hate this one particular subset of people and that needs to change!!! We need to make it change!!', and then having to piece together how to dismantle years of oppression and garbage ruling from a monarchy.

Then there's the writing for SOC which is just better in my opinion and even the characters felt more relatable. So now we have 6 endearing (for the most part. You're on thin ice Helvar) characters and the books are written in a way that seems like Leigh actually cared about the characters and the story unlike SAB.

This is getting long and I'm not sure if I made my point, but TLDR;

SAB being terrible is because Leigh put too many issues into her plot without thinking about how to actually fix them and paired it with sub par characters while SOC was the bare minimum and had no bearing on fixing the actual problems of the Grishaverse in general. They aren't the heroes of the world like Alina was made out to be. If anything it just further dug her story grave by adding more underlying issues to her universe in a duology with characters that don't have an active part in fixing those problems. They're just crows attracted to shiny gold coins to serve their own personal agenda.

To be fair, I am bias to SOC but I also know it's flaws and narrative fallouts I just thought Leigh did SAB dirty by setting the story up the way she did and then giving it such a garbage conclusion.

Sorry this got so long I just saw your asks and really loved all the meta conversations going on and wanted to see other opinions about this. Like I said though I don't know if this is really a hot take or right lol

You put it into words!!! 🙌🏽 Such a great point!

I also thing having a more simpler plot for SoC allowed her to focus more on her characters so they are a lot more likable and fleshed out compared to the characters in S&B, even with the story being shared by 5 different POVs.

#viv answers #sab meta #grisha discourse

[lizzybeth1986]

(Screenshot borrowed from @ohsnapitzlovehacker)

First off, I'm glad Andrew stepped up for his colleague, and talked about the treatment he faces vs what his fellow female writers of colour especially have to face for their written work for PB - in this particular case, ones where they are book leads. I'm just expanding on his argument with what I've observed, and in no way am I trying to justify the premise in QB itself. I'm just pointing out a pattern I'm not often seeing over here.

Andrew Shvarts was the Book Lead for Bloodbound, from start to end. Mind you, this is the same book that ends...by killing off either a black woman, or an Asian man, for no other reason than to advance the MC's storyline and complete her transformation into a goddess - and in fact Lily was subjected to this sort of fate twice (she is almost murdered by Jameson so that the MC can be even further embroiled in the vampire world, then killed in certain playthroughs). (Also, for someone who seemed to show such a disdain for capitalism in some of his tweets, the involved-in-genocide CEOs in his story sure seemed safe!)

As far as I can recall, even though there was criticism of this storyline from the fandom - Andrew as Book Lead wasn't subjected to this scale of criticism. His next book as lead writer, Blades of Light and Shadow, was celebrated the moment it came out. He was widely credited for it and I'd seen many posts praising him for his writing, and often his tweets as well. Many in the fandom still praise him heavily despite the fact that his first book as lead writer pretty much killed off two default characters of colour arbitrarily.

Here's another example. Jennifer Hepler, the book lead for A Courtesan of Rome. The fandom was constantly showing her (personally) their appreciation for her writing of Mark Anthony, and the book despite its imbalances and highly problematic elements was praised and is still remembered with fondness. Jennifer was so essential to the writing of the book that they preferred to rush the end of ACOR so she could finish it, rather than hand over the reins to anyone else.

ACOR was a book that allowed for a black colleague of the courtesan!MC's to be slut shamed both by the MC and her admirers, and ended with said black woman being sent to slavery, with two black people laughing at her plight. I saw a number of posts that highlighted exactly how horrible and damaging this sort of writing was, but the backlash was never so intense that the writers had to come out and explain the way Chelsa had to this week. Jennifer was also remembered with great fondness, and when her return to PB was announced long after, the fandom as a whole celebrated it. I didn't really see Jennifer take this much heat for these racist subplots, and I didn't see the fandom as a whole reminding us of any of this when her return was spoken about.

It's not that there were no criticisms of these storylines specifically. There were plenty. But it's a fact that majority of them were addressed to, or spoke about, PB. It acknowledged that often the company and higher-ups were the ones in power. So it's extremely suspect to me that fingers are immediately pointed at CHELSA the moment news of this storyline came out. That hate was addressed to her personally, questions upon questions were asked to her personally - to the point where her white male colleague had to step in to point out the double standards.

How is it that Andrew can be seen as separate from the decision to kill off either Lily or Jax, or Jennifer from the decision to send Xanthe to slavery, yet the immediate knee-jerk reaction to a potential student-teacher storyline is to directly point fingers at the black...female...Book Lead? Not to mention there were plenty of relationships in earlier books that involved power imbalances of some sort or other - including one that featured a character himself notorious for a student-teacher "relationship" in a previous game (Thomas Hunt), who was then made the "hero" in a storyline that should have centered around sexual harrassment in the film industry. How is it that we will draw a line at student-teacher "relationships" in this particular case (which is a good thing, yes we MUST raise those issues and acknowledge how triggering and disturbing they can be - but we can do that without cherrypicking like this)...but not racism within narratives - the kind of racism that goes unchecked and unacknowledged, that is often normalized by narratives in other PB books? Is the latter so unimportant, so...normal to you??

I'm not saying you should go and flood Andrew or Jennifer or ANYONE'S DMs with hate or threats. You should never do that, that should never even be an option! Nor am I insinuating that the concerns about Queen B's subplot with the professor aren't valid. What I'm saying - and what I've seen other black players say better than I have - is...if you're going to expand this much energy hating on the lead writer for this storyline, but not on some of the other lead writers for stuff that is just as - if not even more - disturbing...you'll need to examine exactly why that is. And I can assure you won't like the answers.

#playchoices #tw: racism #tw: fandom racism #long post