#what women says to another woman obVIOUSLY U DONT HAVE BODY ISSUES

[hobidreams]

I also recently watched Bridgerton, and I think I liked it (I binged the first 7 episodes and had to force myself through the last so I don’t really remember much) but it definitely had it’s flaws. I like that they didn’t go with the black people are lesser route because even though I think conversations about race are important (as a black woman), sometimes I just wanna live in a little fantasy bubble for a while and pretend everything is fine, but obviously that’s not realistic. I think there was a lack of proper development with some plots and characters which makes sense since it was only 8 episodes and mostly focused on Daphne. I did lose interest towards the end when it was just Simon and Daphne sleeping their way through an unhealthy relationship, but I’d probably watch another season. I also never thought about the bedroom scene in the context of her wrongfully forcing that on Simon. I didn’t like the way either of them handled it (Simon lying and Daphne tricking him and then the stupid trope of thinking her love should fix him), but I was more focused on the message about the lack of proper sex ed for women, and I really like that the show addressed it. I think it’s so stupid and sexist that women are just taught to wait till marriage and that even breathing the wrong way near a man will ruin them and then suddenly they’re thrust into marriage and everyone is like babies?? Like Daphne didn’t even know how children were conceived (I was so confused when Simon kept moving away cuz I was like “that’s not how it works, who directed this” lol), imagine how humiliating it would’ve been if she had asked someone who wasn’t looking out for her and they’d spread that info around. I think abstinence as the only form of sex ed is such a disservice to women because it leaves them vulnerable to so many things (in the best case not knowing their bodies and desires and in the worst falling prey to the terrible intentions of some men). It’s so stupid to tell someone not to have sex without teaching them what it is; when I was younger, I was sold on the wait till marriage stuff and I still did all kinds of things (willingly thank god) because I literally didn’t know anything about sex. It’s so upsetting that guys can just stick it anywhere and get off (and of course the boys will be boys excuse), while women get shamed into celibacy and are made to feel like their desires don’t matter. This rant was so unnecessary and off the rails but I just wanted to get this out (I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable, please don’t answer this if I did).

i like how u say you *think* u liked it LOL 🤣🤣 you have a great point there abt the colorblind casting! we all consume TV in different ways & ofc your wanting to not think about race politics is very valid when you just wanna relax. i guess my biggest issue was with the “love conquers all” idea that they threw out there, bc like lol no, love does not erase racism/sexism/etc. but anyway. yes, i agree, there was a decent amount that the show did well, which is why i’ll be watching season 2 too! i like that there was a female focus in general, esp on Pen and the other side characters. i do think it should have been more than 8 episodes. or spaced out better. it felt like we went in slowly and then BOOM it all suddenly tumbled towards an end lmao. 

i haven’t looked into this because my research area is more 18th century English society than 19th, but i’m honestly more than a little surprised that Daphne’s mom wasn’t more explicit about the sex talk?? like there wouldn’t have been formal education about it back then, but securing an heir was TOP PRIORITY. so i feel like maybe the mom (i forgot her name lol) would have at least mentioned something even a BIT more concrete about sex, even if she didn’t go into details like semen, etc. that rain on the plain shit was just ridiculous and awful LOL. i guess its so they could bolster the storyline of having Daphne not know what Simon’s been doing the whole time but 🙄 yeah ok.

i guess in the end im really gonna be watching for the side characters, bc Daphne and Simon definitely became boring lol. no i dont wanna watch softcore porn of them for 10 mins again 🙃 no matter how hot he is hahah. you cannot hide a weak storyline with a cute butt, damn it!!!!!!

#fun fact #they were given fertility charts over in Korea at around the same time lol #and there was indeed formal education about pregnancy #though limited #but still #the fun of *historical differences* #*jazz hands* #LOL #rain reply #dreamers #also sidenote #it took until the early 1700s for them to stop believing that women were just inferior veresions of men lmao #so #yeah #reading about womens rights back then is VERY infuriating #ive read my fair share of conduct literature from that period and ..... >:((((((( #bridgerton

[lovebunnie]

nick carraway and jay gatsby are both gay and heres why

its 11:30 at night and i have class tomorrow but ive been itching to make this post for about a week so im gonna do it. this wont be centered as much around jay and nick being in LOVE, since id have to read and analyze it a bit more to make honest to god claims and opinions for that, but these r some of the reasons that point to both of these characters being completely gay. also, im going to be issuing some points from others sources, but ill include links to the original texts which i recommend reading!

1

so the great gatsby was written in 1925, a time full of alcohol, financial bliss, and parties like u would not believe. many of these themes are prevalent in the novel, making themselves known all throughout. even the term ‘gatsby-like’ is extremely well known. needless to say, this book is extremely well known in every front. one of the ones i saw the most was calling the great gatsby ‘the greatest love story ever written.’ and before i read the novel myself, i wouldnt have been able to tell u any different. but when u read it, and really, how u analyze it, really shapes how u see the characters. to some people, it really could be an amazing love story. but to me, this story is written about someone obsessed with a facade, denying himself who he is, and a man who watches his downfall and can do nothing to stop him.

one very important thing to acknowledge is how this novel is told: its told completely in nicks perspective. we only know how he feels, we only know these characters based on how nick sees them. it is immediately biased towards nick. and what he does is describe a hell of a lot of people. but it is very distinctive in the way he does it; men and women are very differently described.

nick describes daisy in her voice and the power it has over people. all of nicks flowery language goes into daisys speech, but not in great length about what daisy looked like. with jordan, nick does a bit more describing in the way she is ‘small-breasted’ and had the ‘shoulders of a young cadet.’ these traits are masculine, and we know from the novel that nick does enjoy jordans company and he does say he ‘enjoys looking at her.’ hell, even the name ‘jordan’ is traditionally masculine. nick sees jordan leaning more towards masculinity than femininity. but even still, the flowery language is not as grand as it could be, not as we know nick can get.

its when nick is describing men that things get bold and expressive. even while describing tom does nick go into great and intimate length with him;  ‘ He had changed since his Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding boots could hide the enormous power of that body he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage -- a cruel body’ the author of this paper literally said this passage ‘pulses with sexual energy,’ and this is for a character nick doesnt even like. it obviously means more in the way nick describes him, has more heart and passion put into it.

and now gatsby, who nick, in the final chapters, dwells on even more. we know gatsby is attractive, that much we can tell without nick even really having to describe him. but even in a single paragraph about his smile does it provoke more feeling than anything else about daisy or jordan;  ‘ He smiled understandingly-- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you might come across four or five times in your life. It faced --or seemed to face-- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.’

like. damn nick. this is only about gatsbys smile. this was no accident or cruel twist of fate; nick is enamored with jay and obviously finds him attractive and also enjoys looking at him, like jordan. nick sees men and women differently. this could be chocked up to ‘it was the olden days’ and ‘sexism,’ but nick isnt rude to these women, nick is simply not interested in them, at all.

but how do we know nick is gay? wheres the textual proof? its written out word for word, you just have to know where to look. and where to look is at the very end of chapter 2.

so chapter 2 does a lot for the plot; it basically introduces nick to the life these people live and makes him see how unappealing it is. we meet a large cast of characters and expand on others, like myrtle, her sister, and most importantly to the subject of nicks sexuality, mr. mckee.

mr. mckee is described as a ‘pale feminine man’ and nick offhandedly describes the smudge of shaving cream on his cheek. weird right? later in the night, nick describes himself as ‘ Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.’ nick has been LOOKING at this married man all night and cleaned him up when he was messy like come ON. plus, a ‘pale feminine man’ could very easily be a stereotype of a gay man, especially in the 1920s.

but then comes the most important part about nicks sexuality in the entire book: the ellipses.

the great gatsby is relatively short, only about 200 pages or so, give or take. fitzgerald would not include anything he wouldnt need, as he is also an expert in metaphors and making things seem as they are not. everything is masterfully placed and paced, making it seem to flow like water. 

the scene in question describes mr. mckee and nick on an elevator, leaving the party. mr. mckee walked out, leaving his wife, and nick decided to follow. heres the scene:

Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge. . . . ”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.

LIKE. WHAT.

those ellipses separate the time between nick and mr. mckee on the elevator and nick and mckee at his home, with one in underwear and then nick leaving for the train at 4am. there is a large gap of time missing from this, and nick decided to leave it out while fitzgerald decided to keep it in. it means something, and the use of ellipses gives the audience enough to know what is happening without explicitly telling them. it is the authors ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ to the audience. think of the environment nick was in; tom was cheating with myrtle, the heavy metaphor of the eyes watching over the sins we think no one can see. this party was full of mischief and nick fucked a married man.

mckee does not seem intoxicated, he invites nick out to lunch while gripping the elevator handle, which are always objects shaped like dicks. plus in the novel, the scene does feel somewhat out of place; nick does not spend too much time discussing the interactions between mckee and himself, it seems thrown in. i get the impression that nick almost didnt want to include it it his writing, and put it in last minute. however, nick is fictional and i dont have much to go on off from an almost 100 year old book. its open to personal interpretation, but it seems like nick and mckee had sex and nick left on the 4am train, leaving mckee in his underwear at his own home looking through his pictures.

even at the beginning of the novel, nick is planning on living in a house with another man before the plan falls through and he goes to washington dc. could this be a failed boyfriend? we cant say. but it is a possibility.

nick carraway ends the novel mourning his friend jay gatsby, moving back to the midwest alone and away from the glitz and glam of new york. his ending does not involve getting married and having kids and riding off into the sunset, which seems bittersweet for our narrator. however, given the way things planned out for other characters, this is the best ending we could hope for for nick, one away from the destruction and one where he can at least begin to to to be happy again.

and now we move onto jay.

ill admit, this has little to do with textual evidence; i cant point out a place where jay fucks a dude or describe the way jay sees men and women; with nick being our narrator, again, he only know his perspective. but we do hear things about jay from other characters, how he acts and acted before nick and the type of man he is.

wolfshiem describes jay as ‘ very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.’ this means that jay knows women and knows when to back off, never advancing on someone he had no claim to. this is very important to me for several reasons.

1. it implies jay is not a cheater

2. it implies jay has been around enough women to know who is who

3. it shows jay is respectful

this also says to me that jay is not bi; he only has eyes for daisy, and not other woman. and those eyes for daisy are questionable.

we know daisy and jay had last seen each other 5 years prior to the events of the novel. in that time, jay had collected numerous things about daisy, built a house just so he could see her, and blew thousands of dollars every weekend for parties in hope that daisy would show up, even obtaining money illegally just to impress daisy.

jay gatsby is obsessed with daisy.

this is obvious from the text, the behaviors he puts forward are strange and creepy in pursuit of daisy. gatsby stares longingly out the window, cant hold a conversation with nick, and flat out bolts out of a restaurant to avoid embarrassment. he is an awkward guy, no doubt. and he lives his life as trying to be someone else, specifically, the man he thinks daisy wants from 5 years ago. when the car crashes with myrtle, all gatsby cares about is how daisy feels; when hes literally about to get ganked all he thinks about is daisy, daisy daisy daisy.

this isnt love, and i think deep down, jay knows it. this is the equivalent of dudebros who go above and beyond to prove they arent gay but end up the most gay of them all. gatsby is compensating for his feelings and trying to push the limit to deny himself more and hide back into the closet. he wants to seem the most manly he can get and basically say ‘wow i love women! i love women so much! look what i did for this woman! look at how much i love her!’

daisy is the first person jay felt he could be himself around, could begin to feel happy. and when he went to war, he no longer had something to push all his feelings onto. plus he was surrounded by other men, and for someone so in denial about their own sexuality, it probably drives them to pretty bad places. pretty obsessive places. he needs daisy, not because he loves her, but because he needs to security blanket. he needs to feel validated.

those glaces and stares out at nick feel like cracks of the real jay poking through, one who likes men but cannot admit it to himself. after all, as a man so attached and desperate for the ‘american dream,’ back in the 1920s, that did not include marrying a man. jay lives with internalized homophobia and tries to calm his nerves with his pretend love of daisy.

i could go on and on about this forever but its 12:30 and i have class.

if u take nothing from this, let me leave u with these main bullets:

TL;DR

nick fucked a dude

nick describes men erotically while he describes women very dully

nick almost lived with another man

jay is obsessed with daisy to repress his emotions

the separation and wartime made things worse for him

his internalized homophobia causes the plot

his longing stares out the window at nick are cracks in his facade

ty and goodnight

#space.txt #the great gatsby #natsby #jay gatsby #nick carraway #I SPENT AN HOUR ON THIS #YALL #idc if no one reads this i had fun writing it #ut yeah nick fucked a dude confirmed

[selenas]

Hey Aimen, what are your thoughts on The Bold Type and the Muslim rep on there?

okay im scared people are gonna debunk and devalue my opinion as a hijabi wearing muslim woman because im not the only one out here and dont represent an entire group of hijabis or muslims for that matter, but i guess i’ll just say it anyway and pray for the best. Idk if you mean muslim rep (which i think is good) or hijabi rep (which i think lacks) so i’ll talk about the hijabi rep. Most people i’ve seen that claim its great muslim hijab i rep have been non muslims or muslims who dont wear the hijab. I’m personally happy muslim women are being put in roles and i saw a few episodes of the show and it addresses the stigma really well so im glad about that, but my ONLY and i mean ONLY issue with the show is peoples perception that the hijab and hijabi muslim women are being represented properly. The hijab is more than just a piece of cloth on a muslim womans head, “hijab” actually means to cover in arabic so its more than just the hair. If anything its barely about the hair and more about general modesty (which, whether you think is misogynistic of islam ((lmao))or whatever is a key part of a hijabi muslim woman’s faith and if thats what we want to follow we have every right to because it how WE choose to dress and a religion WE choose to follow). Like idk they’ve got a HIJABI muslim woman, so clearly they are trynna follow the modestly in islam and expression of religion but then they have their character put on a hijab and then something sleeveless and its like!! rippp i dont wanna say thats incorrect and tell other hijabis what they can or cannot do but as a general concept its really really off if they’re trying to represent that as all hijabi women because thats actually in the minority, if anything most will express the importance of modesty on the body more first, then your hair. At first, i thought they’d have their character express how its HER choice to wear the hijab and also be less modest on her body - which would be totally fine because it would enforce the idea that its HER choice and all hijabi muslim women arent the same - but they didnt to MY knowledge so they’re basically saying thats what a hijabi muslim woman is/dresses. Muslim woman, can obviously dress however they want, but if they’re going to represent a HIJABI muslim woman and her modesty, at least do it right and it makes me so 😩😩 bc i wanna love the show and people wanna say its great hijabi rep but its not. Its almost like a slap in the face to a lot of hijabis (including muself i’ve talked to about the show because its almost like the show writers didnt care to actually research about the hijab and its meaning and took it as a mere religious symbol like a necklace w a cross on it while they’re worlds apart. And another thing that bugs me a lil is every show that has a hijabi always ends up showing the hijabi w/o her hijab on and its like.. whats the point… but i also understand that some choose to do that in order to show normalcy and fight the stereotype that muslim women like,,, sleep in their hijabs and shower in it shejdkdkd so thats also why they have non hijabis be a hijabi so that its easier to translate the story that way for when the character isnt wearing the hijab but then it also forgets to include the idea that theres an audience, and not all are girls if that makes sense, sigh idk if im gonna get attacked for this but thats just my opinion on the rep i’ve seen as a hijabi muslim woman. I just wanna be represented right for once and somehow theres always pieces missing or lack of knowledge on the writers part and its so discouraging to see that. Other than that, i respect the show and how its handled topics about islam, i just cant get 100% behind it because its not representing me, a hijabi muslim woman, physically the way i wish they would. if u put that one bit aside though, the show is the best rn for muslim rep even if its not best for hijabi rep, and esp facing stereotypes and also representing lgbtq+ muslims and THAT makes me really happy. ive seen so many non muslims all over defend it for its representation and talk over muslim woman or hijabi muslim women and didnt bother to say anything and quite frankly im scared to post this but,,,,

#i was so nervous writing this theres so many typos lmao sorry #idt i expressed myself properly either so watch me get dragged #if the show comes on netflix i might stick to watching for the muslim rep even tho i cant stand behind the hijabi rep 100%

[janiedean]

(part 1) ur gonna roast me for this but im legit curious why mafia AUs are so bad? im asking in a non confrontational way, i get it romanticizing mafia is wrong, but i also believe that 1)most mafia AUs are a really toned down type of mafia;2)they do make for some interesting kinds of dynamics with fanart and with fics; 3)in a fic specifically u can create your own world and call something mafia and still make it so they don't kill innocent people but only idk members of other gangs or sth

(part 2) plus theyre a way to put ur charas in a completely diff context and see what theyll do. i mean i dont believe that writing ships in a certain context (like mafia) equals romanticizing that context. mafia AUs arent even my fav things to read (in fact i almost never do), im sure many ppl romanticize it and i obvs dont agree with that but im just trying to udnerstand bc i believe fandoms are a way to explore things that we normally wouldnt.

I’m not gonna roast you don’t worry xD okay wait let me check if I replied to this already if yes I’m gonna c/p because it’s half past midnight otherwise I’ll just go at it again wait *checks tags* fff obviously I don’t have a general post but anyway pls read this after you’ve done with my post and then this which is also choke-full of links. plus for a (not nice) laugh: here. AH WAIT I FOUND THE POST.

okay, so, let’s have it out of the way: I have nothing against mob aus or crime aus. I have a problem against calling them mafia AUs because in the US mafia = organized crime at large, in Italy mafia = ACTUAL EXISTING ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE ACTIVELY HARMFUL. now that I introduced the topic I’ll c/p you the reply I gave to another anon who while discussing the issue pointed out that most writers don’t even know Italian mafia is a thing, which is pretty much on the same discourse so...

*The thing is - in the US it might not be enough of a deal anymore and I honestly do get why people make the mafia = regular mobsters, since the mafia was the first foreign organized crime being exported to the US via italian immigrants (sorry if this sounds horrible in English but I just woke up and I still didn’t have coffee) so I understand that mafia became the umbrella term.But the thing is that - as you said, these people don’t even know that there’s a mafia in Italy anymore or where the word comes from.

 I’m going to link to italiansreclaimingitaly’s tag about the mafia and its perception outside Italy because they posted about this extensively and it’s an excellent resource, but meanwhile I’m gonna do a very short bullet point list and about the topic:

Mafia might not be a big deal in the US, but it still is here. We have the beauty of four different mafias (Cosa Nostra - the Sicilian one, camorra which is the one in Campania but has tendrils spread everywhere, the 'ndrangheta which is in Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia) which are all active [especially camorra and 'ndrangheta] and whose actions have direct impact (negative) on our economy and on our society. Actually mafias are one of the main reasons we’re currently economically fucked up, and if I start talking about how mafia culture keeps some areas literally backwards I could talk about it for three months.

There are still people who are killed for standing up against them. These days the most prominent personality is Roberto Saviano who is a writer who dared to put together a book documenting minutely the way camorra works and he’s been living under protection for years by this point. Like, they want him dead because he wrote a book. And I’m sorta sure that he was talking about leaving Italy and going to the US after years of sticking with it here because he can’t take it anymore but I don’t know if it was a taken decision or if it’s still debating it.

It wasn’t even thirty years ago that we had the stragi di mafia - in english it’d be something like the mafia slaughters, basically around the beginning of the nineties there were a number of bombs planted by the mafia targeting people who were trying to oppose it including judges Falcone and Borsellino, actually the anniversary of Falcone’s death is like... tomorrow. And they’ve killed people for way longer than that. Here is a list of only Cosa Nostra victims including the ones from the eighties/nineties. And people are still dying because of it. The slaughters I’m referring to are just the ones in the nineties which are enough of a number.

They also perpetuate a culture where if you testify against your mafia-employed relatives you’ll be shunned forever. There are women who testified against their families and couldn’t see their children anymore never mind that they weren’t automatically considered a relative anymore the moment they sided against the mafia. Some people have committed suicide after becoming witnesses also because our police force/justice system can be terribly non-supportive in this kind of situation so they got left on their own. Never mind that back in the day - it was the beginning of the nineties? - I recall at least a particular story of - I think, correct me if I remember wrong but I can’t remember the names for the life of me - where this guy testified against the local mafia when he either used to work for them or was forced to pay them the pizzo and in retaliation his six-year old (or five? Anyway he had a son younger than ten for sure) got kidnapped, killed and thrown into acid to dispose of the body. That happened in what, 1993? 1994? It’s pretty much yesterday. And now the camorra is doing the same - there’s a list here of camorra victims among which accidental passerbys that got killed because they were in the way which I can tell just by glancing is not complete. And I’m not even going into the 'ndrangheta. That is to say, here mafia still kills people and cripples our country.

Now, I get that it’s a word, but the point was: let’s say that instead of the Italians the Japanese came to the US first and the umbrella word for organized crime was yakuza rather than mafia and let’s say yakuza was still what it was originally in Japan while in the US it stopped being a big deal and people write yakuza!AU instead of mafia AU. Let’s say someone Japanese gets angry at that and goes like 'listen the yakuza is a real deal it does this this this and that and it’s a plague in our country so can you please at least look it up before writing your fanfic’, which is what had happened way back then when this whole mafia and fanfic thing blew up. A bunch of people told us to get over it because it’s just a word and if it’s a problem in Italy it’s not in the US so why should they care? Now, if we had been Japanese (or Chinese or Russian or Mexican) would they have said the same thing? Considering the general tumblr attitude I’m pretty sure they would have received either an apology or 'this is an important deal let’s keep that in mind’ with signal boost reblogs and stuff. 

It’s the fact that we should get over people not knowing that it’s still a real problem for us and that they can’t take five seconds to google it that is the problem imo. Especially when instead of mafia au you can just say mobsters au or tag it as organized crime and everyone is a lot happier, mostly because as the tag above explains romanticising the mafia is a good thing for them because it means they can act outside Italy with less stigma because everyone thinks that the mafia is dead or not relevant anymore, if I’m explaining myself. (And it’s active outside Italy - like, there was a mafia kill in Germany in 2007 where six people died (sorry the link is in Italian but there isn’t an English wiki page, if you look the city up you’ll find something probably) and it was because of the 'ndrangheta.

I’d really like to not get worked over it because it meant it was a thing of the past y'know, but the problem is that it isn’t and I’d rather spread some awareness in hope some of these writers look it up (because it’s a good thing that people know what mafia is since as stated they have tendrils everywhere - if you read Saviano’s book the entire first chapter is about how camorra regularly deals with Chinese import/export in Italy for one) than shrug and figure that since they’ll think everything is good for fanfic then it’s not even worth my time.*

Now, ^^^ that was the c/p-ed reply that should answer most of your doubts. What I didn’t address was:

im sure many ppl romanticize it and i obvs dont agree with that but im just trying to udnerstand bc i believe fandoms are a way to explore things that we normally wouldnt.

aaaand as we say here in Italy, this is where the donkey falls (sorry we have weird sayings), because in theory there’s nothing wrong with that... except that in 99% of the mafia aus I’ve seen around the thing is that they’re supposed to be cute.

like, I see a lot of shit with TINY MAFIA BOSS STEVE ROGERS with RUSSIAN ENFORCER BUCKY (????? bucky isn’t even russian???) and the yoi thing I saw before had the japanese character being the leader of a russian mafia gang which is... like... guys it doesn’t happen it really doesn’t, and a lot of them re-use wrongly terminology taken from the godfather without context or knowing what the hell it means, and it’s always from the criminals’ pov and they’re somehow seen as criminals doing justice where the police can’t (???) and like... no. mafia bosses/enforcers/employees are bad people period, and at least here if you try to leave or repent they kill your family in retribution. like, not even ten years ago there’s been a woman who used to belong to a mafia family (or one colluded with the mafia) who testified and her entire town/family shunned her and she couldn’t take it anymore and... killed herself drinking acid if I don’t recall wrong. it’s not even special cases. this shit is not funny, it’s not cute, it’s not adorable and it’s not good fodder for your imagine your otp scenario (srsly I saw one like.. let me find it,

LIKE. just look at this shit. in a regular context, the enforcer goes to the show owner to force them to pay a monthly sum to their boss lest they destroy their shop and their lives and their family’s life never mind that mafia culture is deeply homophobic so the mafia enforcer flirting with the shopkeeper is like completely fucking out of the question. I mean, people here like to shit on the sopranos but that show was actually excellent representation of Horrid Criminals Who Were Never Supposed To Be Good People and the small arc that happened when one of tony’s friends turned out to be gay (closeted) was REALLY well done. btw, it ended that when they found out he was gay most of the crowd rejected him and thought badly of him until I think they killed him also for other reasons, but that spiraled from finding out he liked dick. and that’s american mafia that they actually based on well-done research of the culture in Italy it came from, I assure you that here it doesn’t work that differently. like. the shit above is so inaccurate and frankly offensive, it’s like... I get people romanticizing problematic stuff but the thing is that when you tell them that it’s actually offensive you get brushed off as ‘ah well you’re being too sensitive it’s just a word u__u’. now, I’m all for exploring shit we wouldn’t be into, but not like THAT, because that’s like mafia romantic comedy and that’s not how it works. now, you wanna do a fic where the mafia characters are deeply flawed and bad people and the police tries to catch them? fine, great, go ahead. you wanna do a fic where the enforcer above deals with dunno an entire life of internalized homophobia when he finds the shopkeeper attractive and feels conflicted over having to con money out of him and doing horrible shit for a living and maybe understanding that crime isn’t worth it and then he actually collaborates with the police and gets shit from about everyone he knows and loves for that? okay, awesome, go ahead. nothing bad in that.

but the shit above is not exploring things we wouldn’t/writing darkfic, it’s THINKING THAT A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION WHICH IS STILL A THING IN OUR PART OF THE WORLD IS CUTE AND ADORABLE. and that only plays in their favor because it takes the bad aura out of the word and we really should not let that happen. like. that is what is bad about mafia aus and mafia discourse, that people don’t realize the mafia is alive and well and thriving and not a thing that doesn’t exist or a generic word for organized crime.

you wanna write the shit above? okay, CALL IT CRIME AU or mob au, not mafia au.

btw, add-on: idk if I mentioned it in the above post or not, but in case I didn’t, I said that people would balk at the idea of a mexican cartel au. sadly since then I’ve found out a fandom where not only there is one but it’s also extra cutesy and people apparently love it and it has a bunch of kudos/comments and idek I’m not even touching that with a ten foot pole but like... I’ve avoided it and everything that author wrote because to me it’s just... nope. like, nope. if you do mafia aus don’t make them fucking cute. (also: in the same fandom I had to mute a v. famous fanartist whose art I actually liked but did cutesy mafia aus and.. like... haahahhaahahahahaha nah sorry. can’t go there. nope.)

#mafia #mafia for ts #Anonymous #ask post