quixotic chaotic

This is also a very educational response because it takes apart the question in a very useful way. A good exercise for those of you who are interested in rhetoric and logic in discourse.

It’s also a good insight into the motivations and psychology of people when they send this type of messages. It’s couched as a personal attack on you (and it is!) but behind that is a person who is working through stuff badly, and trying to assign the blame for that to a different person (you). By studying that, you can understand more about the Discourse and the motivations behind it. It can also help to heal you (and others) from attacks of this type. When I read the initial ask, it made my body flinch: I felt that I myself was being publicly attacked by a strange and hurtful person, and that I had to defend myself, flooded with instinctive responses. Seeing the blogger’s thoughtful response calmed me.

Reminder that protesting is worth getting suspended for

#yeah a walkout is disruptive but you know what’s more disruptive? FUCKING SHOOTINGS

I’m reblogging this again because I wanted to add a note: PROTEST ANYWAYS.

If your schools threaten to suspend you, protest anyways. En masse. Because you know what gets tracked by district, state and federal administration? Suspensions.

Schools and schools systems *must report* their suspension levels etc. Every year all this data from the state gets compiled into a huge report and presented to the State Board of Education and the state legislators. By. School.

You know what happens to schools districts with unusually high rates? Big Trouble.

So if your principal/superintendent threatens to suspend any student participating in a walkout? Still do it. Because here’s what will happen: You’ll walk out, get suspended, the school will be empty basically for *days* effectively starting a strike, the principal will have to report it to the district, the district will have to report it to the state and there’s a solid chance your school’s administrative team could be replaced.

YOU HOLD ALL THE CARDS HERE. Don’t let them think otherwise. There is literally nothing they can threaten you with that won’t come back to bite them square in the ass.

And dear teenagers who worry what college admissions might say about a suspension on your record… they’re gonna love this. 

the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is actually not the full phrase it actually is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back” so don’t let anyone tell you not to be a curious little baby okay go and be interested in the world uwu

See also:

Blood is thicker than water The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Meaning that relationships formed by choice are stronger than those formed by birth.

Let’s not forget that “Jack of all trades, master of none” ends with “But better than a master of one.”

It means that being equally good/average at everything is much better than being perfect at one thing and sucking at everything else. So don’t worry if you’re not perfect at something you do! Being okay is better!

These made me feel better

Also, “great minds think alike” ends with “but fools rarely differ”

It goes to show that conformity isn’t always a good thing. And that just because more than one person has the same idea, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.

what the fuck why haven’t i heard the full version to any of these 

“Birds of a feather flock together” ends with “until the cat comes.”

It’s actually a warning about fair-weather friends, not an assessment of how complementary people are.

I’ve always felt like these were cut down on purpose.

I really like these phrases and plan on spreading this knowledge.

The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

I want to make designs out of these.

Funny how all the half-finished ones encourage uniformity and upholding the status-quo, while the complete proverbs encourage like…living exciting, eclectic lives driven by choice and personal passion.

quick protip: if someone is crying or freaking out over something minor, eg wifi not connecting, can’t find their hat, people talking too loud, do NOT tell them how small or petty the problem is to make it better. they know. they would probably love to calm down. you are doing the furthest possible thing from helping. people don’t have to earn expressions of feelings.

I’m just gonna put it out there that if someone’s freaking about something small, they’re really freaking out about something big that they’re trying to deal with, or something long term that’s been building up, and that little thing is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I don’t know, try and give people the benefit of the doubt. Don’t be the next straw on their broken back.

Needed this today.

People don’t actually go from 0 to 60. If you think they did, you have failed to notice how long they’ve been at 59.

when millennials were first heading into high school and college there was a huge trend in news stories about how stressed out our kids are, how their backs are getting messed up from carrying so many books, how they’re sleeping less and doing more school work, and how we should do more to help our kids have the childhoods we had because our kids are falling apart from stress and being forced to be more productive than kids should be. but then once millennials started hitting the workforce all the news was about how millennials are lazy and narcissistic and entitled lmao you were real concerned about us until you found out a 23 year old is more qualified to do your job than you

That’s because at some point in the middle we stopped being “their children” and became a bloc of terrifying outsiders with foreign values and little regard for what had been their established cultural norms.

I’d forgotten this but you’re right. I think it started earlier though, it started when we started out performing them on exams. Then suddenly all our schoolwork was easy and we were being rewarded for just showing up.

Jesus omg oh mygod holy lord

They’re evolving…

This is exactly the thing we’ve been talking about, with abusers adopting the lingo of groups and exploiting their dynamics.

GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

This is so manipulative and disgusting.

THE POKEMON EVOLUTION IMAGE IS SPOT ON

legit though this is so fucked up because it sounds like it could genuinely trick someone into thinking it’s reasonable but it’s just a reworded way of manipulating someone.

feminism and bodily autonomy is about making these choices FOR YOURSELF. you decide if you send nudes or not. you decide in what contexts you feel sexual or not. do not let other people shame you into either covering up or revealing more or less than what you’re comfortable with. if you want to send nudes, send nudes. if you don’t, don’t. it’s that simple. don’t let asshats like this tell you what feminism is and what you should do. manipulation, regardless of the rhetoric, is manipulation. for genuine equality, only you can make these decisions for yourself.

and there’s a difference between saying “we should all consider why we think of breasts as innately sexual and maybe try to unlearn that” as opposed to “you must send me a tit pic right now or you’re not a feminist.” get the fuck outta hear with that garbage.

If someone tries this bullshit on you, tell them they can’t be feminists because they don’t respect your right to choose how and when to show someone your naked body.

Do not let these fuckboys get away with this crap.

Makes me think of the “Mr. Sensitive” flavor of abuser in Lundy Bancroft’s book Why Does He Do That?

“Often he has participated extensively in therapy or twelve-step programs, or reads all the big self-help books, so he speaks the language of popular psychology and introspection. His vocabulary is sprinkled with jargon like developing closeness, working out our issues, and facing up to hard things about myself. He presents himself to women as an ally in the struggle against sex-role limitations. [bolding mine] … Mr. Sensitive wraps himself in one of the most persuasive covers a man can have. If you start to feel chronically mistreated by him, you are likely to assume that something is wrong with you …

“He may give you a stream of pop-psychology language (’Just let the feelings go through you, don’t hold on to them so much,’ or ‘It’s all in the attitude you take toward life,’ or ‘No one can hurt you unless you let them’) to substitute for genuine support for your feelings …

“The central attitudes driving Mr. Sensitive are: … As long as I use a lot of ‘psychobabble,’ no one is going to believe I am mistreating you … I can get inside your head whether you want me there or not.”

Anyway, that’s just what it made me think of. Also this book is amazing and covers a lot of fuckboy attitudes (MRAs, Pickup Artists, Nice Guy ™, etc.), even if he doesn’t call them by those names.

a little louder for the people in the back

his findings

1. white racists (like you “good” whites’ uncles, grandmas, neighbors, and friends) only change their behavior when they are confronted by other whites with more status. 

2. when Black people confront the racists attacking us, they just pile on harder because they get a kick out of knowing they’ve gotten to us.

tl;dr - just like Black people have been telling you for decades, it’s up to whites to end racism and you can’t do it by remaining friends with your cousin and grandma who voted Trump because “fuck political correctness”.

For those wondering “what more can I do?”

Here’s an idea for speaking up upside our echo chambers, that sounds like it might do some good. 

Based on the findings in the study – and I would be the first to tell you that people behave differently online than off, and anonymity adds another layer to that – I actually think this study supports the personal findings of many white millennials with racist family members: if the racist acquaintance doesn’t consider you higher status than themselves, anything you say to them is ignored or met with worse behavior. People who regularly say this crap (online, with anonymity) apparently care about status, so now is the time to put your privilege to good work. 

So maybe racist grandma or uncle won’t change because you call them out, but your 10 year old cousin who is parroting your uncle might well take your opinion to heart. You’re unlikely to get your boss to stop being such a dick, but your coworkers and peers you may be able to herd into better language, or at least better language in public (which is still a small win). You might not be able to tell the coach that that isn’t okay, but you can get your teammates to not use that word anymore. 

My bet would be that this viewpoint on status and marginalized group membership extends to quite a few other categories, too. Those of us in the marginalized group – another ethnic subgroup, or queer, or disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, etc – speaking out against bigoted language are likely to be met with unchanged or worse behavior, but someone with status from outside the marginalized group can say hey, that’s not cool, let’s find better words here. 

Look to your peers, especially the older you are. We can’t put all of this on millennials when older generations perceive them as so low status. Look to your subordinates and followers, especially the more popular you are, the more people seem to value your opinion. This is the one instance where punching down seems to be the way to actually help.

I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending

Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:

Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)

And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography

I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet

I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it

Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society

It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free

And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)

Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places

I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women

And I’m going to need it to stop

Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.

Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world - in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.

It’s about sex. It’s always about sex. 

From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence - unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time - there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.

And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ - they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ - they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.

The core assumption underlying all of it - an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting - is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.

To anyone who’s reading this - and there’s always a few - thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?

It’s bible banging bullshit in a progressive mask.

This tea is lovely.

Huh.  Well, as a woman, i find it interesting that OP seems to think any critique of women BY women must in some way be…anti women?  I’m not certain what’s trying to be said here.  If you’re talking about the men, both inside and outside the community who DO INDEED critique women for all sorts of things, i’m right behind you in saying that those men need to shut the fuck up about women’s sexuality and it’s expression.  That’s not their lane and they need to stay the fuck out of it.  But by you’re own admission, majority of fan writers are women or NB, and since most of the critique of fan works seems to come from within the community itself, it stands to reason that we are in fact, talking about women and NB’s critiquing themselves yes?  right? Bible banging?  repressing women’s sexuality?  uhh, no.  i don’t think that’s the case here.  i really really don’t.  Does that sort of thing happen in fandom?  Of course.  Does it happen WAY too often?  Shit yes.  And if all you were saying is exactly that, i’d be slapping that reblog button no issue.  But that’s not all your saying, is it? Seems to me that the heart of the message here is all about your desire to ship as you please, and nary a quibble allowed to be made.  After all, that would be repressing your sexuality right?  Normally i’d agree with you, even on this, buuut for that tiny tiny issue of rape and CSA kinks.  You know, the ones that are so obviously written by abusers for abusers it should practically come with a sign. 

So, as a woman, and as a childhood sexual abuse survivor, i gotta ask you, can you seriously look me, and all the other rape and CSA survivors in the eyes, and say you truly think it’s ok for someone to create a fan work that romanticizes these issues, or apologizes for abusers in some way?  You really think that’s ok?  You think it’s okay because it’s a woman doing it?  or because that’s her kink?  Really? I mean…i’m going over and over in my head how i can possibly show you how this idea makes me feel, but i’m failing.  Utterly.  So, please, explain to me why it’s so much more important for someone to post their daddy kink than it is for me or so many others not to relive their own trauma.  

yes, i can look you in the eyes and say fucked up things happening in fanfiction are 100% aok even if you, a total stranger with full control over your media experience, aren’t into reading it. 

not thrilled by you calling me a “fucking pedophile” in your tags as if disagreeing with you is somehow sexual violence against children, or the way you’ve just called a person an “abuser” if they write about fucked up stuff and deemed the audience abusive for reading it. 

you don’t know these people, you’re projecting your idea of immorality onto complete strangers and declaring them unclean, as if those of us who are survivors are polluted by our experience and must not talk about it where decent people might see. 

maybe don’t dip your toes in the discourse if you’re planning to engage in victim shaming while you tell people to lay off victims.  it’s pretty shitty being rando-splained that sexual violence is somehow my fault because of my unclean behavior, and you have crossed that line tonight. i have had a lifetime of that nonsense, and you’re not welcome to perpetuate it here even if you’re 99.9% certain you know who the bad guy is, and 110% sure it’s not you.

edited for rarr.

“Huh.  Well, as a woman, i find it interesting that OP seems to think any critique of women BY women must in some way be…anti women?”

It’s called internalized misogyny.  Being a woman does not make you automatically exempt from being wrong about your perceptions of other women.  In fact, this internal policing is one of the shittiest, trickiest, and most effective tools of oppression the patriarchy has got.  

I will also note my observation that many antis are  victims of older, male abusers, often family members or care givers with authority over them, but they go after the often young queer, female and non binary producers of fan works as if it was the source, and that they (the producers) specifically caused this particular event, and that’s fucked up.  That is absolutely playing into and reinforcing the oppressive power dynamics that let’s actual abusers get away with shit, by not holding them accountable for their specific, direct actions.

I get being scared, and powerless, and not having much if any recourse against the people that hurt you, especially if you’re still under their influence.  But flailing at strangers on the internet because you want to pass the hurt on to someone else and make yourself feel more in control again is absolutely a no-no.  You are punching down, and left, and right and pretty much every direction but up, and someday most of you anti’s are going to have enough time and distance to process that, and you are going to feel really god damn awful about it.

ALL OF THIS.

too tired to write a proper coherent essay about this so here are some things i’ve been thinking about in relation to this:

1) this is not the first time we’ve been having this conversation in this particular form and i can trace the discourse about public morality and responsibility and the poor impressionable hysterical wimmens whose sensibilities are now excited and senses inflamed by consuming this lurid, pornographic literature all the way back to the discourse surrounding the advent of the novel as a form of writing. yes, those dry books by walter scott once inspired the same pearl clutching as an adult writing teens in romantic & sexual relationships (for some reason, always the fic writers, never the pro adult published authors who get targeted by this ire) do today. people are being neither revolutionary or thought-provoking when they revive this strain of discourse again. cis straight white men have been doing this to us for centuries. 

2) this same discourse was repeated with the rise of the gothic romance which, okay, walpole may have kickstarted it, but eventually it became a genre for women and by women. i’ll say a lot of the themes and concerns of the gothic romance are repeated in darkfic today, so its worth looking back at what was said to those women - what is still being said about this genre, without ever interrogating why someone might choose to write the stories in this form without reflecting on the authors’ inferred personal morality and inherent “unfeminist” inferiority - and how, ultimately, it did nothing to actually change the pervasive social structure of the time but did plenty to remind us that women are inherently silly and stupid and full of unruly and awful desires.

3) the ‘all depictions must be pure and edifying’ is a peculiarly Victorian strain of thought and is one of the reasons why, for the longest time, children’s lit was this bizarre genre in which children were saintly and suffered beautifully without complaint and were in the end rewarded for their adherence to christian virtues - while the naughty children obviously were frowned upon and went on to be inherently defective and awful till they became the criminals they were destined to be. thank god there were writers who decided to write a form of children’s stories that were ‘realistic’ in that they were not moralistic handbooks designed to browbeat children into submission to the perfect Victorian ideal OR ELSE, but instead for children to read, relax and have fun and probably develop some ability to think critically for themselves and recognize when children in the stories were acting like asses without necessarily having it punished on-screen. 

the idea that depiction = endorsement, which is so inherent to the negative discussions of darkfic, noncon, dubcon and even fucking unhealthy relationships (why would i want to write about it, you say? you don’t understand? for that, see #4) is frankly ridiculous and i have no qualms calling it neo-victorian because it is, quite literally, about the aesthetics of morality - performative morality, instructional morality, predicated entirely on individual action and personal responsibility - rather than an actual discussion of ethics, of what it means to live in an inherently ‘sick’ society (a patriarchal society, a society in which we are hurt one way or the other either by people, by our social milieu, by our culture and by our media) and what actual structural social change would look like. it ain’t healing or helping people, it’s just concerned with making sure we present ourselves properly OR ELSE (or else you are literal trash, you are the worst, you are not only an apologist, but you feed rape culture, you are a pedophile, you are the very thing that hurt you in the first place.)

4) PERSONAL TIME. when i was twelve i wrote my first short story and it was about a girl who was angry, lonely and hurting - so she destroyed everything. quite literally burnt it down. this was not good, did not glorify god and also worried my mother, so instead of sitting me down and asking me why i wrote this story this way, what was i trying to say, my mother rewrote that story for me. quite literally. in fact that whole story was jossed and what we wrote was a thinly plagiarized version of the story fly away home. why? because it was uplifting and hopeful. 

this is what i mean by performative morality. antis don’t seem to care about the actual whys and wherefores of any given fic so much as its existence, so much as the fact that it stridently exists on its own terms and is there, is glaringly messy and awful and not at all part of any of the ‘good’ narratives we tell ourselves about marginalized folk. this is the soul exposed (kind of) and presented for all to read. amazing! some people like thinking about the questions these awful things present. some people don’t. that’s, i think a far position to maintain. 

what is awful is this demand that only ideologically pure and innocent stories get written and yet again, we’re forced to remember that these horrible bits of ourselves, the demons we’ve been struggling to exorcise and the parts of us we’ve been trying to excise, need to be hidden. this is not revolutionary or helpful. we can’t talk about being vulnerable and open and radical love as healing process, healing as a social process, if we’re going to insist we only do this the stiff upper lip way and keep all those horrid horrid things out of sight, smile and wave boys everything’s all right. the story you find personally offensive might be the story which clarifies something for someone else - and might even give them someone to reach out to. 

5) to resume the problem of depiction = endorsement - i resent the idea that somehow teens are going to be so naive that they can’t be critical of what they read and therefore, that things can’t be written that aren’t 100% pure. its actually really fucking patronizing to assume that their mental faculties are so underdeveloped that they can’t draw the line between a fantasy, or the exploration of a taboo subject in an artistic medium & what can be endorsed and explored irl. chances are the average teen is going to be exposed to far more worse stuff by just studying lit in their schools - shakespeare, for example, really doesn’t demur or shy away from serious adult themes, and i think at some point everyone learns yeats’ poem about leda and the swan which is well, a rape story in essence - and anyone who has the remotest interest in mythology will have had to grapple with the complex morality of the greeks. give the average fourteen year old credit; most of ‘em come into work of fiction with the implicit assumption ‘do not try this in real life’. most of ‘em will also walk away with a great deal more awareness of what a socially ill world looks like than if they hadn’t read it (i know i understood what the patriarchy looks like much more by reading plays like Ion and Medea when i was 14 than if i’d gone ‘oh ion is a problematic story best not read it’. it is problematic. that’s how i learnt to be leery of male characters and male writers and patriarchal societies.) 

6) i’m much more worried about books that present themselves as good and non-problematic romances than i am darkfic or fic in general, which i’ve generally observed is usually rigorously tagged for and covered with the appropriate disclaimers (and somehow, like one of the commenters mentions, its always these labelled fics that attract attention rather than the ones which are labelled as something else and have their own problems - which again, performative morality; its easier to go after a visible target than a non-obvious and insidious one). 

in fact i’d much rather have critical discussions about what is ‘romanticization’ and what constitutes rape culture in fiction - why is something “bad”, in what ways does a text fail to convey what the author was trying to say and why - so that we can think critically about its tropes and forms and presentations, than these ongoing blanket statements that ‘x person is romanticizing abuse because they wrote a particular pairing/trope/whatever’. did you read the fic? did you understand what they were doing with it? did you actually engage with the work at all? do people really park their brains so much while reading they can’t delineate the difference between fiction and reality? teenagers read a lot more heavy stuff in school as part of their literary curriculum, i promise you - and incidentally, its this same argument that’s led to the banning of books like Brave New World in some curricula, because of their ‘negative’ themes. ironic, because i can’t think of a book that teaches criticality and awareness than Brave New World. 

7) i mention it earlier but its worth reiterating again: darkfic is almost always tagged. this means there are trigger warnings all over this shit. there’s something going spectacularly wrong if even the sight of a trigger warning is enough to set people off, or is supposedly creating an atmosphere of hurt or an unsafe space. there are tools and technology to keep this shit out of your sight. if someone ain’t tagging, ask them to tag - if they refuse, unfollow, walk away from them (in fact give them a wide wide berth in general imho). but like, what is the point of a fucking witch hunt because of the existence of these tags? unless, of course, what we’re aiming for is to purge this heresy so we can only do rightthink and rightthought all the time, even in a society that is more or less hell-bent on fucking us up right from birth? 

ETA:

8) way too many fanwriter friends have privately confessed to me that a) the current atmosphere makes them literally terrified of writing anything that explores anything dark or vaguely problematic because they’re afraid someone is going to misread exploration for endorsement (and lbr, it only takes that one match for the smear campaign to get going) and b) that they are actually afraid to talk to other fannish friends about the things they want to explore because they have no idea how those friends are going to react and whether or not they will end up being the Next Big Wank and callout. this isn’t healthy. this isn’t a healthy state for a community to be in at all. fannish creators can only control responses to their works so far - the original definition of death of the author declares that the reader fills in a lot of the gaps with their own social milieu and their own ideas. you literally cannot be expected to create a work that everyone will understand 100% because surprise! no one comes from the same background or the same worldview and no one responds to a work in exactly the same way, in exactly the way the author intended.

like, we have got to abandon this idea that there’s something like ideologically pure and perfect sex because there isn’t or the fact of wanting to write about bad or problematic sex being enjoyable being bad because it isn’t. humans are weird. brains are weird. fantasies are weird. none of this necessarily makes people bad, least of all when they know they’re never going to act on it.  

look, its not healthy at all for us to have been pushed to the point to have designated friends who will ‘get’ this shit and not write up a callout post for us, or who will not bring this up if ever the friendship dissolves or a grudge is formed for whatever reason - and friends who are ‘not safe but enjoyable’. and i’ll go one further and say: i’m actually really fucking tired of doing the whole performative ‘i know i am garbage but consider this’ bullshit, because i would like to launch straight to ‘here is some porn, enjoy’ or conversely, ‘here is some pain, enjoy’. it is psychologically taxing and its infuriating because fandom is meant to be a form of relaxation, in which we bond over the things we love. anon hate and callout posts and doxxing are not revolutionary praxis and at least two of those have highly dubious origins in the SJ sphere (that’s another discussion to be had).

I am literally never going to stop believing that Thorin is basically right here. Are his reactions disproportionate? Yes. Fuck yes. It’s one of the defining features of a number of mental illnesses. 

Is his basic reasoning correct? Also yes. 

The evidence of Thorin’s illness isn’t in his anger, but in making his anger grounds for war. (On the other hand, it’s not like Thranduil helped on that front, showing up with an army to back the Laketown refugees.) It’s in the way he shuts out all other voices, refuses all dialogue, even with people who are on his side.

The anger itself is pretty fucking justified.

Honestly? The fact that it’s even a debate that terfs don’t deserve LGBT resources is incredible to me. No they do not. They’re not here for LGBT people. They’re strictly here for gynosexual wealthy white women and literally no one else. I’ve had terfs threaten me with physical violence because I dare defend trans women. You wanna put me in a room with someone who doesn’t want me to be safe? Fuck you. They can have terf resources (or, preferably, they can sleep on concrete until they learn how to not be bigoted), but they should get nothing from our community. 100% of the LGBT resources that have been given to terfs should’ve been given to trans women, because bigots don’t deserve nice things.

FUN FACT: it seems like more and more people are coming out as asexual because we finally feel safe enough to do so, it is not a fad, it is not a trend, and if you think it is one of those things please hop on the shut-the-fuck-up train to don’t-fucking-speak-to-me-ville.

Holy shit, it’s been put into words.

Also, people are coming out as asexual because we finally know that this is a thing that exists. We are reading things on the internet and thinking, “Oh, this sounds like me,” and, “There are other people who feel like this?” and, “Maybe I’m not broken after all.”

I wasn’t aware asexuality even existed until a couple of years ago. I mentioned asexuality to a coworker maybe a month ago and her reaction was astonished joy and, “That sounds like me!” I spoke to a woman in her fifties who said, “I always just assumed I was broken.”

People are coming out as asexual because they’ve learned that asexuality exists.

#q#yes this#also like#just because you as a non-ace person are just now hearing about it doesn't mean it hasn't been a low-key community for a long time???#I had a friend come out as asexual in fucking 1997#and after a brief gigglefest about asexual reproduction#she just said 'no like how Beth is bisexual I'm the invert of that: no interest at all'#and we just all went oooooh right okay that makes sense#and stopped trying to set her up with people#you fucksticks that was NINETEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO#it's not a fad#ace people just finally have access to safe places and networks online#and a place like Tumblr where we've FINALLY started beating out of people the idea that cis-het is the default#asexual#actually queer#bigotry within the queer community (via)

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Phone cases for Dwarfs

@ahiddenkitty won first place on my giveaway and asked for Bilbo and (satyr)Dís getting along wonderfully! ♥

THIS IS LITERALLY THE PRETTIEST THING, LOOK AT THEM ALL, IT’S SO HAPPY I CAN HARDLY STAND IT

Dís is so majestic with her jewels, her beautiful Shire gold and Bindbale bluejohn jewellery, all the square chiselled lines!  And her EYELINER, my god, I am in love, and she’s telling some terrible story about Thorin’s childhood and look at him, he doesn’t even care, he’s so happy that she and Bilbo get along so well.  Bilbo’s got his BEST WAISTCOAT on for his sister in law and his little smart ascot and he’s so tickled by Dís’s story!  AND look at the body language, how his hand mirrors hers but he’s leaning back into his husband and their legs mirror one another, it is SO CLEVER and so natural!  GOSH Thorin is so quietly content here, as he deserves to be, and everyone looks so comfortable, look at Bilbo and Thorin’s happy squishy tummies!!!  It’s too beautiful and pure and I love it.  Tattoo it inside my eyelids plz.

He really does, even more so a moment after this iirc!  

If I may ramble for a moment (feel free to cut on reblogs, god!) - this is one of my fave FR blocking set-ups for disguised-character-development-as-misdirected-tension.  Though the movie has shown that Max won’t use personal space violations as intimidation, it’s been pretty subtle so far.  Kinda hard to make that obvious in a brawl (though the cues are there).  So here is where the movie makes Max’s scrupulous boundary behavior (translation: his integrity) come home like a ton of bricks.

It’s a tight space.  Max is still dangerously frightened and so clings to the idea of retaining some options by having a hostage.  And so he wedges himself in there forcing Angharad to share a space that would be nauseatingly close with someone of unknown integrity and who has a gun.  And yet… he’s leaving Angharad as much room as he can - look he’s backed off as far as he can be.  There is never, even for a moment, a sense that Max will threaten her by invading her tiny remaining personal space, let alone do anything else.  [as an aside, it would be absolutely par for the course for a man to just trample personal space here without even noticing it - just by unintentional shifting around.  How many times have men blundered into your personal space bubble as if it didn’t exist, simply because they believe so completely in the presence of their own bubble? (no slight intended to the men who have awareness - you guys probably notice the same thing from these other guys!) Amazingly, Max doesn’t even do that despite the tight quarters]

But no - Max has already shown multiple times that while he’s maintaining his only-recently-regained personal space by any and all guns necessary, he also does everything he can not to crowd anyone else’s space as a means of intimidation.  He backed off of Furiosa the moment he knew he had the upper hand.  He blocked all of Nux’s enthused attempts to connect and ultimately put him on the dirt knocking the wind out of him without ever bulling into Nux’s space to establish dominance (for contrast, remember Slit trying to dominate Nux exactly this way).  He doesn’t use the ability any guy with his strength and size could use, to crowd people as a means of intimidation.  It’s totally and completely out of character for ‘scarily physical guy wins confrontation’ body language - and yet he doesn’t do it, not once.

And that same body language carries over here.  I wasn’t sexual-cringe worried for a second when he forced Angharad to share such a limited niche with him - because everything he’d done up to that point showed he would not use invasion of space as a dominance maneuver.  And amazingly, in this tiny constricted spot, he still manages to adhere to that body language.  He’s not crowding her as a means of intimidation to keep her under control.  He’s got the gun - he doesn’t need to exert one bit more force.  And because he is not dominance seeking, he doesn’t.

As character development for Max as a trustworthy human, this is beautifully executed.  And as character development for the movie itself as a movie that will refuse even momentary microaggressions (either to build tension or as icky humor), this is beautifully executed.

Fantastic.

That makes me think of one of my favourite shots from this film: 

This is quite possibly one of the only shots in the film that is truly sexually charged. Our focus is on Angharad’s naked collarbone, her gorgeous hair and lips, the closeness of their bodies. The camera’s focus on her neck and mouth make the viewer almost feel the movement of her hair and her warm breath.

There’s just this moment of perfect stillness, offset by the tension in the Pass. As the rock walls grow close around the Rig, Max and Angharad’s bodies are pressed close together just inside the hold. At the risk of being too Freudian (though, let’s face it, it’s Miller and everything is Freudian), we are given the complimentary images of a gun barrel next to Angharad’s full lips and the long Rig penetrating the long, narrow archway of the Pass. The staging for this scene is uniquely sexual in a way that is quite different from anything else in the film. 

And yet - Max is busy watching Furiosa’s movements and the cliffs beyond; he doesn’t really look at Angharad until she begins having her Braxton Hicks. As we see in the top gif, he looks past her to scan his surroundings; only when she cries out does he seem to remember that he’s sitting next to a pregnant girl and his eyes read: ‘oh, shit, now?’

As @redshoesnblueskies points out, this scene shows us a whole lot about Max, his integrity, and his respect for women. He’s oblivious. To him, she’s just another person that he happens to be crammed into a box with. And, oh fuck, she’s having contractions.

But that brings me back to the screencap I inserted here. The initial shot, focusing on Angharad, tells us more about what Angharad is thinking than what Max is thinking. Again, up until she cries out, he’s not thinking about her - he’s thinking about the Pass. 

But Angharad? Angharad’s thinking about him.

This initial shot, we don’t see much of anything of Max but his shoulder, pushing in on Angharad’s space. And his gun, dangerously close to her face.

But we do see the tenseness in Angharad’s neck, the careful neutral expression on her face, even a glimpse of the downcast eyes. She doesn’t look him in the face, she just barely turns her face towards him, her movements subtle and stiff.

This moment is full of sexual tension. But it’s not Max feeling that tension - it’s Angharad.

And so here, within just a few shots, we are given a full demonstration of what male privilege looks like in day-to-day moments. Max is just having a normal (for him) day. Standoffs with hostile enemies, possible shootouts, the works. But in Angharad’s mind, she is framing the situation in terms not of possible gun violence, but possible sexual violence. Her body is pressed against another man’s, a gun to her face. She is tense, but also strangely collected. She has been in this situation before. Neutral expression and downcast eyes? That is the automatic-shutdown expression of a woman who has been abused before and who expects to be abused again.

For that one, tense moment, we’re not meant to see things out of Max’s perspective, we’re meant to see out of Angharad’s. And in her mind, she’s not thinking of what a good guy Max is for not abusing the situation. In her mind, she’s only expecting a groping hand - or worse. Not all men are rapists. Some are like Max. But that’s not the point of this shot: the point is that all women know what Angharad is expecting.

It’s only when the action starts up that we’e snapped back to Max’s perspective, once again worried about blazing machine guns and pregnant women.

And that, friends, is how you do visual storytelling.

- bai-xue

OHMG! Thank yooou!!

This moment always made me uncomfortable. When people would talk about how this movie didn’t do the male gaze, I’d think ‘yeah, that’s mostly true,’ but I’d think of That Shot. And when the top meta came out, I was like ‘yeah, they’re not wrong, but something still makes me uncomfortable about this reasoning.  I can’t articulate why though….’

AND THIS EXPLAINS IT! This is spot on. Everything in the top meta rings true with me. Max isn’t trying to take her space, just can’t think of a better solution. But Angharad is feeling gazed upon and threatened, and this framing embodied that, made me feel what Angharad felt. 

MARGARET SIXEL IS A FUCKING GENIUS! 

Sorry. Just… I mean, I know she didn’t take the shot, but the way it was put together, how no other moment in the movie feels like this, made this stand out, and conveyed EXACTLY Bai-Xue’s point here. 

Just, thaank you for placing my discomfort peerrfectly. 

Something else I’m noticing is how Angharad’s face is in shadow, but her body is lit.  One can read many things into this lighting choice. 

It shows how often women’s bodies are the only things paid attention to in many cases.  Their faces, their personhood is obscured or muted, erased, as their bodies become objects to be looked at.  

It also shows how many of us, ourselves, may feel when this is happening.  We want to hide our faces so our emotional discomfort is out of view.  We don’t want people to know we feel ‘wrong’ in this situation.  We’re supposed to like being looked at, right?  Especially if we’re gorgeous, we should want attention on our bodies, right?  Of course we should…so we mask our discomfort, even if it’s written on our faces.

I would love to ask Sixel if they reframed shots to any extent. (Which isn’t hard with tools like Avid.) Are all the compositions from the original Seale cinematography, or was Sixel saying to Miller “Let’s take her breasts out of that shot” while in post.

I need to add this…kinda disturbing observation but it’s not untrue- regarding women’s bodies as objects and their expected reaction being pleasure at being admired, let’s not forget there’s also a very long tradition of sexualising a woman’s fear, of simultaneously praising her chastity and insisting she can be relieved of it at the man’s discretion (and her desire for sexuality is subject to his approval). Vulnerable, frightened women= women in need of a man’s strong direction. The difference between the villain and the hero in those situations is shockingly small. 

So with all the effort made by the film crew here, from script to costume to acting to directing to camera to editing, with all their combined effort not to allow Angharad to become a spectacle of titillation, they’re still fighting a sexist tradition so strong that it’s still fairly easy for a male viewer to look at this scene and think ‘sexy’. Or, you know, if he’s kidding himself: ‘a classical damsel in distress, her beauty underlining her purity etc etc’ without for once considering that the point of the scene is her discomfort, not how well she fits into sexist tropes. That it’s worth noticing how Max tries not to be a douche instead of wishing you were in his place because you see the scene to be sexually-charged as per the rules of all romance and pornography.

It scares me a little bit. It’s like the water scene- a fair amount of people still thought it was about showing off the women’s bodies, because that’s their default interpretation when seeing a woman on screen. And they like it that way.

Thought: This film is one of the vanishingly small number in the action/speculative genres to consider the male audience as NOT default. Other gazes are considered in the writing and filming of this movie.

dude god could come down from heaven with a million angels and tell me that gif is pronounced “jif” and i still wouldn’t fucking do it

I’d just shrug and say, “Okay, thanks, Jod, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Mara Wilson comes out

She’s such a lovely person, and she was so gracious about these attacks on her. But this is a pretty clear picture of something I see in the community: policing who is and isn’t welcome in our spaces. The thing is, even if Mara Wilson is/isn’t straight (and/or cis), I’m not okay with telling someone who comes to our doors with a message of love to get out. I’m not okay with telling sympathetic voices to shut up just because they’re the voices that listen when we shout back in response to being told to shut up, ourselves. And Mara’s message here is so clear and so valid: our community’s response to being told to get out has never been–and should never be, IMO–to tell people they’re not welcome in our spaces. The club didn’t feel like her space, and that’s fine. It wasn’t designed for people like her, and she recognised that and didn’t go back. We didn’t tell her to go, because if we tell other people that they’re not allowed to be in our space, we draw a line of alienation, and we make the idea of a community that welcomes the disenfranchised into a lie. Our safe spaces should be truly safe. Safe for a kid who doesn’t understand yet that they’re queer to be that “straight kid” in the crowd, too–and if you think gay club tourists aren’t there because they’re at the very least questioning, you don’t understand what it’s like to be caught on the edge like that, too gay to think you’re straight but too straight to think you’re really gay. Some people figure out their sexuality really early and really easily, and that’s great. Others struggle and have to decipher the clues to fully understand themselves, and that’s valid, too. Yeah, there are some shitty allies out there. There are some allies who just want to pat themselves on the back and talk loudly about how their thoughts and prayers are with the Alphabet Soup community, without actually feeling any of the burning disappointment and anger and fear that we are feeling right now. I’m not going to say that everyone around the community is secretly gay. But some of them are, and even if they never realise it, even if they recognise it but never acknowledge it, even if they go their whole lives thinking they’re straight? We need to make room for them, too. It’s such a common story for an Ally to slowly tumble into the pile and realise that they’re bi or pan or genderfluid, and when we tell people who are still working that out for themselves that they need to shut up and get out of our public conversations, we not only set them back on their own self discovery, we strip them of perhaps the only place they may have to explore and understand this secret grief they don’t fully understand. I get being angry. I’m angry. We’re all angry, and we’ve all got the right and reason to be angry right now. And if someone’s legitimately appropriating our hurt for their own benefit–see any of those posts going around of hypocrites in the government taking their stars and stripes to half mast while the rainbow burns in the yards of their constituents–then yes, flay them. But gentle messages of love and respect? From someone who orbits the community with such care and concern? Shut the actual fuck up telling them they’re not allowed to cry with us.