#radical axis

[tootern2345]

Some storyboards from 2007’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters drawn by Bob Pettitt. It’s from the scene in which frylock explains the true origins of the titular duo

#animation #production art #storyboard #aqua teen hunger force #aqua teen hunger force colon movie film for theaters #master shake #meatwad #frylock #creation #2007 #2000’s #adult swim #radical axis #big deal cartoons #matthew i jenkins studio

[aquateenpatrolsomethingshowshow]

TW// - bl//d, org/ns, gore, creepy imagery

((Please view with care and caution, and if you’re bothered/triggered by anything trigger warned, please don’t force yourself to look at it and have a nice day /srs /pos /nm))

It’s spooky month, and you know what that means? Halloween is just around the corner!

Incredible, but graphic, and rare, piece I found on the old “Radical Axis” Facebook page; circa 2011 by artist, Ploy Rojanavipat

Image depicts Meatwad being carved, cut, and cored, like a jack o’ lantern

((All credit to Ploy; this obviously isn’t my piece. I love this sm though and I thought I’d share it, since I don’t know how much of the fandom, or if any of it, has seen this beaut before))

#we be breaking out rare athf content y’all #((lmao that was so cringe)) #but yeah- #though i would share this here since i think it’s really cool and i have never seen anyone in the fandom talk abt or mention this #also thought since halloween is next week that this would be appropriate to post now :3 #and like i said- #all rights go to radical axis and ploy #i own nothing #and if you would like to see this outside of my tumblr- #just google radical axis facebook and it will be there #obv radical isn’t around anymore but their old account and posts are still up #athf #aqua teen #aqua teen hunger force #aups1 #aqua unit patrol squad 1 #meatwad #radical axis #facebook #jack o’ lantern #halloween #graphic design

[wyrvel]

horse boy

#mob psycho 100 #cursekid au #ageswap #hanazawa teruki #art #sorry. i put him on a steep radical for pathetic chart but he's on the Z axis or whatever #and that axis is 'sad horse in a horse girl movie'

[valeriesrevenge]

Neither class nor race has ever saved a woman from misogyny

#it adds layers of oppression #but the axis of sex is still oppressed on its own #class struggle #sexism #racism #intersectionality #intersectional feminism #radical feminism

[my-chemical-rot]

Between his obsession with a symbol of Imperial Japan that’s commonly associated with their colonialism and atrocities during WWII & his uncritical use of a Nazi dogwhistle as a silly joke, I’m starting to think that Mr. Murdered-Fascists-Make-No-Noise former Leathermouth frontman might not be sincerely informed about WWII history or antifascist politics 🧐

#Fast forward to a few years from now he makes a thirst post about Mussolini to complete the axis 🙄 #Soooo crazy when a celebrity pretends to have radical politics to look cool & punk without sincerely holding those believes. #totally never happens. and it’s so totally not deeply embarrassing to watch when show what an ignorant ass they are. #(I always get so much second hand cringe from posers like that -_-) #Like if you wanna be ignorant about politics go ahead that’s your business #but at very least be openly stupid about it and don’t *pretend* to be radical just for the Cool Edgy Guy aesthetic or whatever -_-

[ungodlydandelion]

I have so many damn terfs blocked on main that sometimes I'll randomly discover one ranting blithely at me on this blog as I go to block another. Enjoy being ignored, I suppose.

#it is kind of funny #typically it's one sentence about how i don't know what radical feminism is about as if i haven't read a bunch of radical feminist shit #i know what it is - it just sucks #sex is not the root axis of oppression

[daisyachain]

Male authors cannot and will never stop writing the character archetype of The Attractive Charismatic Politically Radical Man is in Love With Me [cough] I Mean My Protagonist But I [cough] I Mean He Doesn’t Like Him Back Because He’s Not Gay. Why Would He Be Gay. Does He Look Gay. Does This Seem Gay to You.

#the Griffith-Kaworu-DIO axis. and potentially this book. it’s at least shaping up that way #kelsey liveblogs books #arguably just a variation on the whole lavender scare thing where gay=traitor and therefore somebody writing a dangerous edgy character #will just add on a little flick of the wrist because queercoding is the same as villain foreshadowing in that milieu #and the presence of a traitor or villain in the story can only be made important by the traitor being close to the protagonist #so there’s a perfectly reasonable non-psychoanalytic reason. #the traitor character must inhabit the ‘bestie’ space in order to have that trust to betray. #the traitor character must also be legible as such and so the shortcut is: your obviously gay friend who is also going to go dark #but at the same time…the construction of this archetype as radical as well as trusted means that they just come off as The Coolest #the other reading that’s too easy to make is that a good few male authors are fascinated by the idea of a guy who is cool but also gay #or even…less that…than by the idea that The Coolest Guy has some form of gender ambiguity.

[hero-israel]

One of the reasons for the "Left" becoming more and more like a cheerleading squad for exactly the kind of things Leftists are supposed to hate is because so much of this new coalition of young people are coming from conservative backgrounds, but not doing any real work to deradicalize themselves.

They grow up with these Puritanical ideas of sin and justice, crime and punishment, and instead of unlearning any of this they just switch the targets of their disdain. It's switching teams for them, not learning that they don't have to play the game. Most of them are soft conservatives who just want free healthcare.

And these Leftoid chud debate pervert streamers like Hasanabi are a big contributing factor to this, not the only factor, but a prominent one. He definitely puts this veneer of artificiality and commodification over the Left. American society is under a lot of stress right now, culturally and economically. Instead of the Left organically building coalitions it's mostly unorganized college kids reading Al Jazeera and Russian and Chinese propaganda and running as fast as they can away from privilege and having a toddler understanding of class consciousness. It's so pathetic and basic and it will not save us.

You cannot save a society that you don't think is worth saving. They're just practicing radical disengagement and some kind of edgy nihilism. They purport to hate America and the West and want to burn it all down but they know that will never happen which is why they're so comfortable with the cognitive dissonance. It's why they don't vote, and why organizing and demonstrating is like teeth pulling for them. Either black activists have to do all the leg work for them, or the protests have to be about tearing something down, not advocating for any positive change, right now that's Israel. Soon it will be something else.

Unironically, the pussy hat resist lib wine moms did way more with their women's marches than any of these wannabe philosopher college kids are doing with anything. Like I know for a fact a "Leftist" would read a post like that and be like "L + ratio libshit, imagine supporting the neoliberal fascist colonialist concept of due process?" like we're so beyond the pale at this point. When fascism takes over, I'm sure they'll think they're fighting back, but if the fascists learn to coopt enough phrases about climate and Palestine and healthcare, will they even notice the fascists taking over?

I've got a few friends who were raised hardcore fundie Christian, "gays will burn" creation and rapture types. They went to normal public colleges and wound up becoming very left-wing, all the left memes and slogans you can think of, fastidious in their distinctions between and protections of every conceivable marginalized group (which none of them are, on any axis). And.... you can't disagree with them about anything. Can't point out that a source is questionable or that a slogan is psychologically backfiring and producing skepticism or mockery instead of benefits. They will not hear of it, because they are still fundies. They did a binary flip from one team to another but never moderated their tactics or temperament.

#Leftist antisemitism

[lafemmemacabre]

Also really tired of how the same people who preach that believing Crazy Things such as "men benefit from the patriarchy and have a strong class motivator to uphold it so most of them at best don't fight it, and at worst actively fight to keep it up" is identity politics or essentialism, simultaneously hold that treating lesbians as inherently suspicious of Evil and Bigotry no matter what we do or say, or how we do or say it, is somehow not any sort of identity politics or essentialism.

Gotta applaud the seamless ability to uphold an oppressor class as neutral and even 110% innocent until proven guilty, but a class of people oppressed by two intersecting axis of oppression (misogyny + homophobia) automatically is Naturally, Essentially guilty and malicious no matter what proof of innocence is brought up, all while pretending to be Progressive or Radical.

[enbycrip]

YES.

ALL OF THIS.

THIS is why this film still hits so hard after all these years.

It’s not some sugary BS about “you can think yourself out of suicidal depression by just learning to appreciate what you’ve got”.

It’s about the fact that people who work really fucking hard for their communities experience active, targeted, criminal pushback from exploiters.

About the fact that caring, in all its manifestations, is incredibly physically and mentally taxing and is often done by disabled people - YES, George Bailey is a disabled protagonist. His impairment prevents him from military service and actively causes him chronic pain that, as a person who lives with it, *will* affect his energy levels and fatigue constantly.

Notably, IAWL actually has a bunch of disabled characters. Not only is George disabled, but I’d put money on his uncle who loses the money being ADHD and very possibly having other learning disabilities and the film *actively* flagging that fact to the audience, even if it doesn’t necessarily know what ADHD is.

Which casts a whole new light on its principal villain being disabled. Instead of Old Man Potter being a flat caricature of “disability = evil”, what he *actually* is is a fantastic example of the fact that marginalisation in one axis does not prevent someone being an active oppressor - and wealth and class privilege, in particular, tend to mean a person actively acting to oppress other people who share their marginalisation in order to privilege the interests of their own class as a whole. Sometimes even damaging their own individual interests to do so.

It’s also super interesting that the *material* miracle in the film is not the appearance of an angel to show George what life would have been like if he had never existed, but the *community solidarity* that saves him from jail and his family from penury. The supernatural intervention can change his *mindset*, and that is *incredibly* important, given it *literally* stops him killing himself, but the *material* intervention is mutual aid from his own community that he has given so much to.

Which is incredibly radical as a message. It’s not saying “faith is worthless”; it’s saying “faith can be an incredibly important factor in creating resilience in moments of despair, but we can’t, and *need not*, wait for a supernatural miracle to save us; we have the capacity to save ourselves and each other in our hands right now”.

#it’s a wonderful life #film criticism #disability #disability in media #mutual aid in media #george bailey #wow I know I liked it’s a wonderful life but apparently my feelings are way stronger than I appreciated #why I fucking hate sugary reductionism in pop culture sometimes #fuck I love this movie #disability in film

[crippled-peeper]

people who say “the difference is that terfs want trans men to detransition and they want trans women to DIE” have apparently never, not a single time, EVER, talked to disabled deformed trans mascs before. or Jewish trans mascs. or homeless trans mascs. Or literally any trans masc that isn’t a 17 year old fucking child on twitter

the fact yall are completely serious when you say shit like that is so predictable and fucked up.

full offense but I don’t want to share a “community 🥺” with people who cover their ears and go “LALALALALA!!!! I DONT SEE IT!!! I CANT HEAR YOU!!!! ITS NOT REAL!!!! SHUT UP TME!!!!” when the history of eugenics is brought up, or when a trans masc talks about their life being endangered by their family members, or when far-right “radical feminists” doxx a jewish trans man

the world is a big complicated place with complicated people and all forms of oppression do not rotate on the axis of your personal experience of womanhood. sorry 😢

#personal

[tootern2345]

Background art from Dave Willis and Jim Fortier’s Squidbillies. done by Ben Prisk

#squidbillies #ben prisk #dave willis #jim foriter #background art #adult animated shows #adult animation #adult swim #radical axis #awesome inc. #williams street #made in georgia #atlanta animation industry #traditional #acrylic #ink #not my art #photoshop

[caparrucia]

Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

#shut up rie #again this isnt about fiction #this is about lefties getting comfortable using genocidal rhetoric #because the purity culture rot doesnt let them realize theyre being genocidal #center harm the people who don't are historically on the wrong side

[rf-times]

The whole “radical feminism isn’t racist because it’s the most common form of feminism in third world countries” is just really intellectually lazy and doesn’t challenge any of us to work on our biases or bring intersectionality into our work. Liberal feminism is such a harmful ideology because it buys into patriarchal, capitalist, racist lies and then promotes that this will save women and it is often used to promote imperialism and racism.

Liberal feminism is far more popular in the first world because it appeals to women privileged on other axies who believe in the capitalist, meritocratic myth. Women who are sold the idea of having it all: full gender conformity, fairytale husband and kids plus capitalist success.

Of course most feminists in third world countries will put anti-racism and anti-imperialism at the forefront of the movement’s goals and will be far less likely to buy into liberal feminism. This doesn’t mean that anyone who disagrees with liberal feminism is now automatically non-racist. As radical feminists we need to do the work to actually align our politics with the interests of third world women, not just be like “see we both hate liberal feminism for one reason or another!”

#feminism #intersectional feminism #libfem #radfem #radblr #radical feminism

[nothorses]

y'know i've seen various versions of the "There's no such thing as a binary trans woman" thing and I think it's an interesting argument with a lot of merit but I'm always sitting there like. you can make the exact same argument about binary trans men and i've never seen it. and i feel like people would throw a shitfit if someone tried because they haven't unpacked the idea that only "non-men" can have complex experiences of gender/"man" is the easy gender so it's impossible to experience in a complex way

Honestly, I think there's a reason this tends to be specifically about trans women- it feels like this sentiment has roots in old radical feminist/Baeddel ideas.

Like, the foundation of Baeddelism is that transmisogyny is The Worst Oppression, The Root Of All Oppression, and the very concept of a nonbinary-specific oppression challenges that notion inherently. If there is a trans-specific oppression that trans women do not experience, that threatens their position as The Most Oppressed on a fundamental level.

Not to mention that a lot of other arguments Baeddels had about this hierarchy of oppression hinged on there being no other kind of trans oppression; "TMEs" are exempt from transmisogyny, and that is a privilege they hold over trans women, so they benefit from the oppression of trans women, so they are the oppressors of trans women. If there is a class of TMEs that experiences oppression that trans women do not, their own logic necessitates that trans women must therefore oppress these TMEs on the basis of trans identity.

There's a reason so much of Baeddel ideology concluded that transphobia literally just doesn't exist on its own. Transphobia must actually be transmisogyny, and the transphobia experienced by non-transfems is actually just a sort of transmisogyny collateral damage. So it doesn't really count, and once again, trans women are the most oppressed.

It makes a lot of sense to me that people who feel threatened by the existence of exorsexism would do everything in their power to claim that axis of oppression as well. "There is no such thing as a binary trans woman" reads, to me, more like, "there is no such thing as a trans woman who does not experience exorsexism".

Or perhaps more directly to the fear being expressed here, "there is no such thing as a trans woman who does not suffer as much or more than you do".

I don't think this is the only possible analysis of this phenomena, but I do wonder if there is a connection between that idea, and the fears that Baeddelism, or radical transfeminism generally, tend to feed on.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am discussing anime academia today, I was reading another paper that was equally frustrating, along a different axis:

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This as a premise is a good concept; someone mining the 90's Usenet anime communities for how the fandom saw female fans back then (the article title is quoting one such thread). So of course, the opening line of this article about the anime fandom in the 90's is....sigh....a reference to Donald Trump:

Commenting on the 2016 American presidential elections, multiple news reporters noted that a relationship could be found between Donald Trump supporters and online anime fans

It of course goes on to discuss Gamergate, 8chan, online right-wing radicalization, references to the "Fascist" themes of Attack on Titan, and on and on. The obvious problem with this is that it is irrelevant; the "methodology" section involves this aside about how they pulled this data from Google Archives but Google is an advertising firm and not a replacement for a real archive and we need to Fight The System and buddy my dude that is not germane to your sample size!!! But more importantly, it is backwards. I don't need to explain the argument here in detail; the article is positing a throughline from 90's anime discourse to modern right-wing internet politics through a sort of 'lock-in' effect of built culture norms around misogyny. Which is fine, you can make that argument - but why is all this future stuff in the first section? You haven't really presented the argument yet! This isn't a book, its not the intro chapter - literally 30% of the text of this article is stating a conclusion upfront, justified not through the text itself but citations to other articles about its truth.

This is something media studies pulled from traditional science - traditional science states "established facts" up front that the paper is building on. But that is because - a thousand caveats aside - in chemistry those facts are....facts. They may be wrong facts, but they can, ostensibly, be objective descriptors. This paper cites "anime is still synonymous with far-right ideologies of white and male supremacy, and events of anti-Blackness" like its citing the covalent bond count of carbon. That is not and never will be a fact one can cite, that is an argument; and its not one that is important for understanding this analysis of Usenet groups. This structure is pulled from other sciences, but it flourishes because it lets you pad the citation count of your peers. Its embarrassing how often you can skip the first 1/3rd of a paper in this field - really the worst possible thing to copy from economics (ding!)

This paper also does the insane thing of jumping between citations from 1992 and events in the 2010's like anime culture is continuous between those time periods. Its an extremely bold claim it just does in the background... but lets set that aside.

This hyper-politicization & hyper-theorizing leads to the second issue of extreme under-analysis. This is the actual value-add of this paper:

From this search, I was able to find the discussion threads “How many females read r.a.a.?” (135 messages; opened on July 13, 1993), “Question: Girls on r.a.a?” (23 messages; opened on February 25, 1994), “Female Otakus” (221 messages; opened on June 25, 1994), “Women watching anime” (72 messages; opened on October 4, 1994), and “Female fans - Do they exist?” (61 messages; opened on October 26, 1995). While these discussions may seem like they were spaces for marginalized users to discuss their experiences, they were often started and overwhelmingly occupied by identified male users. In total, I extracted 252 messages from 1992 to 1996 that were relevant to the gendering of anime fandom, and among those, I classified them as 7 kinds of negative networking discursive practices: (e.g. Table 1. Negative networking practices on rec.arts.anime).

252 messages, five threads - later on it will name other threads, so its more than this, but you get it. It has a bunch of data. And from that data, the article quotes...less than half a dozen examples. There are no quantitative metrics, no threads are presented or discussed in detail from this data set. Some other event is discussed in detail, but again it quotes essentially one person once. The provided "Table 1", the only Table, is a list of the author's categorizations of the data; the data itself is not present. Its file format is a CSV, presumably to mock me for clicking it.

There is, from top to bottom, a complete lack of engagement with the data in question. This would fail an intro anthropology seminar; the conclusion is simply presumed from 1% of the sample size while the rest of the messages are left on read. I just don't think there is any value in that, a handful of messages from 1996 divorced from their context and stapled onto modern politics as a wrap-up. What did the people on this Usenet value? How did they think of women collectively? As anime fans, as outsiders, as romantic partners, as friends? What subfactions existed? Questions like those would presumably be the point of this investigation, but they are treated as distractions.

And this article was, in anime academic circles, a pretty well-trumpeted one. I'm not cherry-picking a bad one here, it was the "hot paper" of the month when it came out. Its just that the standards can be so low, its a field that simply lacks rigor. Which doesn't stop a ton of great work from being done btw, that isn't my point at all. My point is that the great work is not selected for; it goes unrewarded, bogged down by academic standards divorced from discovering real insights.

(I do not think the question "why are they misogynist" ever crossed the author's mind. That should be your literal thesis, and its a ghost. Just ugh.)

#anime academia