Racing Turtles

the most annoying takes right now are the people twitter theorizing about why calling conservatives & fascists "weird" is Bad Actually and listen i'm sorry you missed the memo but there is no greater moral or philosophical purpose to this besides cyberbullying them in a way that actually hurts their feelings and diminishes their sway. they love portraying themselves as normal and they love being portrayed as evil and powerful. they extraordinarily hate being seen as weird little freaks everyone laughs at. i believe in the human capacity to hold both weirdo, freak, pervert (highly affectionate) and weirdo, freak, pervert (extremely derogatory) and to know the difference between them

One of the foundational cornerstones of fascist self-justification is that secretly everyone thinks and feels the same way they do, but normies are all too afraid of societal backlash to speak up, so they're doing us a favor by saying it out loud, and it's inevitable and good and just that one day they'll win.

Saying instead, no, I think you're weird and a freak (and not even in a frightening way, just an embarrassing way), is in fact phenomenally disrupting to this whole paradigm, and that's why it fucks them up so much.

genuinely irritated about the prevalence of brother-sister character designs where the brother has a huge nose and the sister has a tiny nose. 1) why are you a coward who hates the joy and beauty of women with big noses 2) have you looked at any real human siblings lately 3) why do you appear to think the nose is a secondary sex characteristic

wishing all women with big noses a beautiful day i hope you get everything you want forever and i'm sorry about the rank cowardice of general society you deserve better

friends, foes, and strangers i get that not all of you are routinely reading posts about frankenstein but if i see one more post about "well if you think about patrilineal naming conventions the creature's name IS frankenstein" i will pick up a sniper rifle and dedicate my life to picking you off one by one

you receive a name because somewhere, at some point, someone cared enough to give you one. you have a name when you have someone who cares enough to call you by it. the creature does not, has never had these things. he has no people to whom he belongs, no one who would give him a name or call him by any that he might give himself. the only names his ostensible "father" gives him are demon, monster, fiend.

there is no "if you think about it." the creature does not have a name because he was expressly denied one by the only person who could have bestowed it. the bastard child only gets his father's name if it's given, and the only thing in the world victor ever gives him is life.

#fantastic op so true#but I’d like to note Victor does give the creature a few other things#number one a rocking bod#number two approximately every complex and mental illness on the planet#finally and most importantly number three something/someone to act against#everything else the creature gives himself#but anyway yes op is so right one of the most fundamental parts of Frankenstein is the repurcussions of refusing to claim your child#something something the child who never felt the love of the village will burn it down to feel it’s warmth

YES YOU GET ME!!

@mnknox

i must once again criticize the girlbossification of mary shelley

just ran across someone very distressed to learn about the racism in frankenstein and this is what ignoring the orientalism of safie's narrative and the casual mention that clerval wants to help the english colonize india in favor of a flattened narrative about mary shelley's #feminism because she wrote a pivotal novel will get you!! it gets you people who forget that mary was an upper class english woman in the 19th century

since this has breached containment let me be extremely clear that i am not canceling long dead author mary shelley or her book which forms a fundamental cornerstone of my personality i am saying forcing historical figures into two dimensional Feminist Icon status is bad and leads people to have unrealistic ideas of those figures and their work. people who are grown ups can read work with problematique ideas without catching moral cooties

there is a thing about photographers in the pacific northwest where they'll post a photo of some mossy trees and describe it with words like "primeval" or "primordial" or "old growth." and i, having grown up in a town that has an old sawmill that has been closed for longer than i have been alive, can look at those photos and see that each and every tree is one that i could put my arms around, even if my fingers wouldn't necessarily touch on the other side.

and there's just something about moss as the aesthetic bandage that covers over the sins of the pnw's colonial deforestation, the idea that people come in and take pictures and ooh and aah over the moss and sword ferns and tell themselves this is what Untouched Wilderness is/should look like, while a guy whose family got rich off that deforestation is presently the mayor of Oregon's biggest metropolitan area.

and i've said before (and will say again) that not all logging is bad, that there are times when it is even necessary (to control disease, to thin crowded stands) but the logging industry is one that came to be here and thrived here through vile means, and if you know what you're looking at there's not enough moss in the world to cover that up.

moss can't hide the photo of my great grandfather posing with his saw next to a felled tree with a diameter wider than he is tall. moss can't hide trees that are small enough that members of the crew that replanted them are probably still alive.

all the moss in those photos tells you is that for now, at least, it's still raining.