I think there's a tricky place we can fall into with discourse about prejudice where the pattern goes,
"sometimes people will be angry! Demanding minorities to be sanitized and peaceful and pleasant to groups that have hurt them and in the face of behaviors that continue to hurt them is unfair!"
Which is a good thought!
But then it becomes, "it is always ethical to bully people who are More Privileged Than You!"
At which point there are three problems,
Problem one is that bully mentalities are not good, not in a moral sense as much as a practical one. Even incidents we do celebrate, like that one time a neonazi spokesperson got punched, we don't celebrate because it's a bullying action. It was a targeted act of deplatforming. That guy wasn't embarrassed because we wanted to snap his underwear and send him home crying. The punch was a means to take the platform away from a dangerous person who was using it to spread hate speech. The goal is to stop the harm. The goal is to stop the harm.
The goal is not to be a bully, because being a bully feels good and fun and cathartic and the more you encourage that impulse the more you will actively want to find people to bully, because it feels good, and being left alone with your feelings doesn't feel so good. So the categories broaden. As a means to vent anger it fails, because it makes you angrier, because you want to be angrier, because if you have more justifications there are more people to hurt. An endless buffet of people to hurt! You're better than ALL of them! (Not good for you, not good for praxis, not good to be around)
Problem two is that every human being on the planet is complicated and Privilege is a thing we can identify much more easily in vague abstract than we can in practice. Trying to split hairs and divide everything down to the finest degree to rule who outranks who on the great objective scale of privilege, creates a model where people are incentivized to strip themselves down to victim status for credibility. And most of the categories are extremely broad and affect people to very different degrees. Is my disability "disabled enough" for people? Or because I don't have physical disabilities and I'm not nonverbal, should I shut up forever, regardless of what I'm saying? Are strangers on the internet entitled to my medical history?
At that point it's basically just repeating ableism- you're only credible if you're suffering SO much you can't live without help and then we should all pity you and see you as such a victim. And that's just one example. There's a lot of ways this can go wrong.
Problem three- and the thing that inspired me to make this post- is that if you establish a narrative where the closer to a cis, white, straight, perisex, allosexual, able-bodied, english-speaking christian man in America someone is, the worse a person they inherently are, which gives ownership to all these qualities to the worst people.
I feel like I often see jokes or discussions of characters where male characters are ascribed 'stupidity' as a trait when the thing that the audience is clearly actually reacting to is that he's. nice. trustworthy. patient. And I feel like that's kind of unfair, isn't it? Are we implying any sufficiently smart man would hurt and maltreat others? That the best thing he can be is stupid? As a transmasc person myself, I don't really like the idea that if I reached a point in my transition where people saw me as a man more than anything else, they'd be afraid of me and have to decide if they think I'm too stupid to hurt them.
Men don't inherently suck, cis-heteronormativity creates a shitty box to put men in and this experience hurts them. If the hypothetical Perfectly Normative Man I listed above is the winner of the 'game' that prejudice creates (again, in America, not necessarily in every country) he wins a really bad prize. The primary nexus of misogyny, of racism, homophobia, transphobia, acephobia, ableism, prejudice against intersex people and non-christian religions and secular beliefs are directed off him, but he is made a soldier for these causes because he is never that far off the crosshairs. A cis straight man is often culturally socialized to be terrified of queerness because there is always the warning he could fail to measure up, and become rejected like those Others. Virtually always, in some way, he is already Other himself, even if he hits all the 'correct' categories he may not hit them in a way that power approves of.
This is a system that perpetuates itself through suffering, and the worst possible men, cis people, straight people, so on and so forth do not deserve to be given the right and privilege to speak for the category.
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the dr fandom cant handle wlw ships in any other context than background fluff with no depth
i like sakuraoi and tsumioda ect but they always get woobified and mellowed out like did they SEE 1-4???
aoi did not pull all that to get sidelined as a supportive background lesbian in your ishimondo fanfic
and don’t get me wrong. my girls need a break sometimes fluff is great i don’t have a problem with it. but it’s the constant sidelining of wlw ships in favour of het/mlm ships in pretty much any fandom that gets to me.
and how wlw ships are only acceptable in the community when they don’t have any dysfunction or toxicity, and if the ship does have even the slightest hint of the above qualities it is either mellowed out to the point of being unrecognisable or dumped on with thinly veiled misogyny and homophobia
and when i say slightest hint i mean the literally slightest hint. like the girls will argue once and the fandom will label the ship toxic while shipping. fucking kuzupeko or something.
wlw ships are seen almost entirely as a way to get female characters out of the way of mlm ships. in het ships the female character is a tool to develop the male character. they show significantly less depth and probably dies to forward the male character’s development (sound familiar?)
in any situation female characters are characterised by their relations to male characters. a female character’s (usually romantic, or at least interpreted as such) relationship with a male character is their defining characteristic. if said female character is in a wlw relationship they are reduced to their most basic traits while male characters are explored and given depth, and exist in the story only to offer support to the male characters.
i haven’t even mentioned how female characters must be in a relationship to be even remotely relevant in a story, but that’s a rant for another time.
grrah the way that female characters mirrors how wlw ships are treated by the community, and that characters/ships that aren’t completely perfect and deemed acceptable by the community are dumped on by the larger dr community while worse ships or characters are welcomed because they happen to contain a male character is gonna be my 13th reason istg.
anyways this rant is getting long but in summary danganronpa fans hate women and they hate wlw relationships that they can’t jerk off to.
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one thing that does make me a little nervous sometimes about writing up pericles meta is that like.... quite a lot of it goes in-depth about the extent of how incredibly vile and cruel the things are that he does to other characters, and his reasons for doing them. that's Important, and i do my best not to try to cushion it, despite discussing how it plays into his trauma and the shit hand he was dealt and vice versa. if anything the juxtaposition of those things is the point of all this meta for me, and it gets to the heart of so, so much that resonates with me about sdmi. erasing that would be a disservice to him and basically every other character in the show that i'm invested in.
.....and at the same time it's always really sucked how often i see people talk about how one-note pure evil he is, how it's impossible to write him as a complex or sympathetic character without making him totally OOC, how people who genuinely like him are [insert apologist here], how you're not allowed to enjoy exploring the awful dynamics he gets into with people, how they want him to be gruesomely murdered by the protags and think it'd be funny and satisfying and the show would be better for it, and just generally talk about How Much They Straightforwardly Hate Him Because He Does Bad Things. not everyone does this, thankfully, but enough of them have over the years that i just don't really want to see it anymore.
i know i joke all the time about how 'i love him and he makes me sad but i am going to peel him like a banana,' and i'm not going to try to tell other people they can't dislike him or anything, especially since i know a lot of the stuff he does is going to be really fucking triggering for some people. i do my best to just curate and block, mute, or scroll past if i need to. but he's genuinely one of my favorite characters ever and he means a lot to me--especially since i can relate hard to a lot of the sympathetic themes behind his being a piece of shit--and when i write my meta posts about him, i do it to share what i love about his character, and maybe get some people to appreciate him in a new light. and the idea of actively adding to the torches and pitchforks instead is..... kind of depressing to me and i really hope that's not how it turns out.
basically i guess this is me asking preemptively, before i start writing up posts Really Getting Into His Awful Shit at Great Length and in Great Detail, that folks please be mindful with 'i hate this fucking bird' comments on posts i make. i do hope people enjoy reading what i have to say about him, and get something out of it, but.... yeah. he sucks real bad but please be nice.
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