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#not saying it’s predatory
starrylayle · 3 months
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coming on here to quickly rant abt remadora. Okk yess I know ‘another wolfstar shipper shitting on remadora’ here me out okay!!! Just for a sec!! I read the Harry Potter books for the first time back in 2017 and remadora was my shit. Remus was my second favourite male character and tonks was my second fave female character. (Harry and cho were my first faves — yes I self inserted into Harry and had the biggest crush on cho — yes I cried when they broke up — shut up we all had our embarrassing phases!!)
Anyways back to remadora, I just thought they were so cute together, even tho it felt a little random. But one thing that I remember that really pissed me off was the ship name. I never understood why it was ‘remadora’ and not ‘ronks’. Tonks hated being called Dora!! I remember ranting abt this on my Wattpad acc (yes I know SHHHH) when I was reviewing all the Hp ships.
I don’t ship it anymore (obviously lol) and looking back, I think my issue with the ship name is lowkey symbolic for my key problem with remadora — it basically removes everything that made her interesting in the first place and reduced her to just Another Woman Character in the series. When she got with Remus, she became more mellow, more feminine, more complacent — which are fine traits btw — but that’s not tonks!! Now as I’m older, and re-reading the series, I see a lot of subtext for a gender non-conforming and possibly genderqueer person forced into a heterosexual relationship simply becoz jo didn’t want ppl thinking Remus was gay and coz she had this weird thing abt all ‘good’ women being mothers.
Which brings me to tonk’s pregnancy — I wouldn’t mind a storyline for tonks having a child — I just hate how jkr had to fit it into this whole nuclear family model and get her and Remus to get married. I feel like a more compelling, or at least consistent characterisation would have tonks having a one night stand with Remus after they were both mourning their cousin/uncle/lover’s death. Shit happens sometimes. And it would be interesting to see Tonks and Remus grapple with this and what it means for their child.
Another head cannon I saw on tik tok was that Tonks had a threesome with Fleur and Bill and since polyamory wasn’t socially acceptable she asked Remus to be the stand in legal father — and ofc Remus would say yes coz he’s Remus!! This hc sounded wild to me at first but they all gave me queer vibes and it just makes me happy so now this is the headcanon I stick with lol.
Anyways not every woman has to have a husband and 2-3 kids to be a good person jkr!! Families are complex! Women are complex! And Tonks deserves better imo.
P.s. if you ship remadora that’s completely okay!! This is just my opinion!! I’ve seen remadora shippers who don’t water down tonk’s character/subtextual queerness — I just hate how jkr depicted the ship in canon.
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gay-otlc · 1 year
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Actually I think we should talk about how incredibly fucked up it is for sapphic women to say shit like "I'm no better than a straight man 😔" when attracted to a woman in a way that isn't 100% pure and wholesome, or act like men's attraction to women is inherently dirty, predatory, or objectifying.
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rawliverandgoronspice · 5 months
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Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy
I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.
Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.
I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.
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I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)
I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.
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But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.
So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.
This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.
Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.
But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.
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There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.
And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).
I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.
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amarriageoftrueminds · 11 months
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maybe it's bc I grew up seeing (and can still see from the outside) how cis men play/joke/fake gayness as a display of domination but yet all somehow knew to avoid actual gayness like the plague (bc the it's so real how cishets manage to know what we are b4 we ourselves do) but I see that exact same "locker room" idea of playing gayness for laughs (usually by violating of sexual boundaries) + treating actual gay love like an unmentionable replicated by the cishets making media
like, look at marvel's iron man thor and gotg movies littered with writing that might nominally be considered "gay" jokes abt men being placed in sexual situations each other (again, often by laughing at the idea of sexual assault/nonconsensual sexualization) but cishet norms don't consider this gay in any real sense. it's the "accepted" way of portraying "gayness" in a way that signals to the audience that it's there to poke fun at the characters and knock 'em down a peg for comedy
This is part of why I rolled my eyes at ppl claiming queerbait at tfatws (completely not knowing what the bait part of the word means). Those "gay" moments in that show were the most classical homophobic dudebro locker room comedy that I've grown to recognize as an extension of the homophobic rough housing culture growing up among cishet boys. Every "moment" was just a Gunn-esque laugh at the male characters being degraded by being put in a position that seems gay against their consent, either by literally falling/rolling into it, by purposeful taunting by a malicious (and shoehorned) character, or literally by the force of the state(state as in governing body). it's meant to be funny in that the cishet culture the comedy comes from dictates that violating men's boundaries with a superficially "homo" act is a way to enforce hierarchy within the group. the jokes come from homophobia (which is why the creators were baffled at the idea of shipping in that show, they recognize the difference between real gayness and their homophobic lockerroom-culture jokes)
This is also why we never see anything even remotely like that between Bucky and Steve, they have genuine love for one another, the same cishet "gay" rough housing culture recognizes that between them it wouldn't be a joke, it'd be actually gay, so they avoided it like the plague. That's why we hardly ever see Bucky and Steve's canon platonic friendship portrayed, it holds actual love for one another that can't be played off by stoicism or homophobic lockerroom-style comedy. They can't do Gunnisms to make it a haha hehe, so the marvel franchise opts to not show the best friends inseparable from playground to battlefield as actual friends. Actual factual, sincere, earnest friendship between men is considered to approximate to gayness by comic book dudebro culture, so they don't show it and then blame gay ppl for "ruining" the platonic make friendships that they were too scared to show because anything more than hooking up with a bunch of interchanging women and meeting up one a year at a bar to talk about the women they've hooked up with is considered to gay by cishet men who still haven't grown out of that homophobic (& misogynistic) locker room culture.
Anon you're so right, and this is also how Tony can be cracking jokes about holding Rhodey's dick in the Avengers movie and no one in the execs room has a gay panic about needing to separate them!
Given that it also had Sharon mocking Bucky for being 'Mr America' tfatws especially seemed to revel in these nasty little homophobic digs. 😥
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joskippy · 6 months
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There is such a big racism and antisemitism problem in the nightvale fandom that its fucking crazy
#jontalks#wtnv#ill main tag this what fucking ever im gonna delete this immediately anyway#stop drawing carlos tan with brown hair stop depicting him as a dead beat lying predatory sex pest#stop fucking demonizing him for his character flaws you wouldnt be calling him some of the shit you people call him if he was white#ive seen the biggest artist in this fandom say they wish cecil got put in a cage and expiremented on in the year 11 arc like that#isnt revolting to say about a jewish character#ive seen the same people dissapointed that did not happen like the two writers arent jewish and would write something as disgusting as that#ive seen an artist draw a white character fantasize about brutalizing a brown character#and no one gives people shit for it and they still fucking do disgusting shit with these characters#ive seen people mad carlos didnt do something awwful to lubelle to give her reason to hate him like#the whole point of that wasnt that lubelle was a privilege white women jealous of a brown gay mans success#you people are so fucking aggravating and disgusting#and you need to start giving people shit when they are fucking weird about these marginalized characters#because some of you do not think when you depict carlos. a dark brown latino gay man as a predatory sex pest who is a dead beat#and treat cecil who people either draw lighter than or white as this perfect angel who has done nothing wrong#you would not be calling carlos a impulsive lier and a piece of shit for just being written as a emotionally closed off character#if he was white or if he was a paler latino man#it just fucking boggles my mind this is still an issue in this space and that it ALWAYS has been#its not surprising to me at all that this is the same fanbase in the early days that were refusing to see carlos as a dark skinned man and#that people who didnt want to depict him as such were fucking defended#this is the same fanbase that started shaking in their boots when people were questioning why everyone defaults to white for cecil its like#some of yall are very racist and you need to revaluate the bs you say about#a cast of majorily marginalized characters#and why you demonize the brown character for the same shit the one that is aracial in podcast and you draw as white as a perfect sweet ange#lol
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littlestellababy27 · 6 days
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Sometimes you need a hard fuck and to be treated like a hole to use. Sometimes you need to passionately make love and be treated like the most important person in the universe. But either way, degradation or worship, you are still 100% deserving of respect and consideration. There is no point at which your safe word becomes invalid, regardless of the circumstances or the type of play. Anyone who says differently is an abuser.
Please, subs, I’m begging you to take the time to find a Dom/me who actually cares about your safety and well-being. It’s so worth it.
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mintharasthrone · 1 month
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i wish people would stop calling your 20s the best years of your life
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handweavers · 6 months
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another common intrusive thought is the fear of being a sexual predator in general, not just with children but with anyone, to the point where interactions with people of all ages & genders are experienced through the raw fear that you will sexually harm them somehow, that you will accidentally traumatize them forever by touching them, speaking with them in a "bad" way even if the conversation is not remotely sexual in nature, or being near them in a (sexual) way that causes them distress - the persistent anxiety that your presence is inherently sexually predatory. and because you are so scared of being a sexual predator it makes any interaction that Is actually of a romantic or sexual nature completely terrifying because your mind is telling you that you are going to sexually harm this person somehow and they will be traumatized and think you are a sexual predator and tell other people that as well, etc. and this fear can be so strong that it prevents you not only from pursuing relationships with people but from having those kinds of feelings at all because even having feelings for someone feels like "proof" that you are a predator.
and in my experience many people with these intrusive thoughts tend to id at one point or another as some variety of aroace or within that realm, or interpret this fear as being a regular healthy experience of someone who is aroace (it is not), and maybe continue to id as such for their own reasons such as to "explain" their isolation from romantic or sexual partnerships, without necessarily realizing or being able to address that what they are experiencing is intrusive thoughts stemming not from a lack of desire but from a deep anxiety and repulsion, and this is not of sex or romance itself but from being or being perceived as a sexual predator.
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women are misogynistic too
women who mock women who wear or dont wear makeup. women who slut-shame. women who maliciously call other women bitches and whores. women who hate the other woman instead of their unfaithful partner. women who raise their daughters to be submissive and dependant on men. women who treat their daughters like a resource, women who have themselves been forced into marriage now forcing their own daughters. women who hate women so much they isolate themselves from others, and have no female safety net. women who judge other women for having or not having children. married women who belittle single women and the other way around. women calling other women arrogant or ugly. women who are against abortion rights. women who victim blame female survivors of sexual or domestic violence. women looking away from other women and girls being mistreated or abused by men, or justifying it. women who are unabashedly and publically supporting the sex industry. women who prefer their sons and partners over their daughters.
so why should we not hate on women who support the patriarchy just as much as the men? why should feminists still reach out hands even to women who contribute to female oppression?
because it does matter and actually changes the whole meaning whether a woman or a man is misogynistic. misogynistic women dig their own grave while men are unaffected and even profit from being misogynistic.
it‘s like working people hating on the poor and homeless, blind to the fact they are more likely to become like them then become rich. misogynistic women hate on other women not realising how quick the tables can turn, and they become the target. men dont risk that.
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ryukisgod · 10 months
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I’m begging men who pay “dating coaches” to realise women are not the fish, women are the bait, YOU are the fish, and the “dating coaches” are the fishermen.
“Dating gurus” survive on the desperate men who pay them, the way a fisherman survives off the fish he catches. Women are the lures these podcasters/YouTubers etc dangle in front of lonely men in order to get them to sign up for a course and hand over their credit card details
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hollyoaksmusings · 2 months
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“But then, I met Dillon, and I’d never felt anything like it before. I just loved everything about him - the way he looked, the way he walked, the way he talked. And he had this smile. So, I couldn’t believe it when I found out that he liked me. I just wanted to hold him, and kiss him, and more, so much more—” 😢
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shiiocha · 3 months
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instagram app is so unbelievably bad for someone who is inclined to spend money with its horrifically well tailored and catered ads fucking HELL i am staying away for now
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tsuki-hina · 3 months
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beware that raziel warmonic groomed luca when he was still a minor (17 years old) and she was MARRIED, divorced her husband, claimed alimony and continued pursuing luca in vrchat explicit roleplay and when he debuted in luxiem, and is now using the things she did for luca out of her own kindness against him to look bad after he demoted her from being a mod in his server after a situation before cutting her out of his life. this is a classic abuse tactic and essentially a smear campaign started by a groomer who cheated on her husband for a minor.
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thatskindasapphic · 10 months
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Love how every once in a while some random bigot appears in the LU tag. Go find a different webcomic or something if the fanbase being mostly queer bothers you so much. ANYWAYS EVERYONE IN LU IS QUEER AND TRANS!!! BE AFRAID!!!
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