julz321

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You guys think Steve Kornaki deserves a year long paid vacation after this election? 

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I mean, you’ve seen his eyes, right?

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Tired of Celebrating Crumbs

I’m tired of celebrating less than satisfactory LGBT representation on television. 

I’m tired of settling for last minute “reveals” or the “slow burns” or gay characters being brutally murdered. 

I gave The Hollow, Kippos and Harley Quinn more props for being direct like characters stating that they are gay or having a kissing scene mid way through a season. That’s progress. But shows like Korra, She-Ra or Voltron, you expect me to praise or celebrate blink and you’ll miss it representation, acts of cowardice or even gay baiting? No. 

I’m tired of the excuses that I tend to hear from both the Left, the Right and even centrists. I’m tired of the pretension. I’m tired of the cowardice, I’m tired of smiling and celebrating the fact we have barely gone beyond square one and barely gotten to the next step. 

You know dealing with bigots, nazies, conspiracy theorists, centrists, and the anti-sjw crowd was par for the course. I was used to it. I live on an island full of dumbass conservatives who look down on Food Stamps and who hold racists and homophobic views. 

And yeah dealing with comicgaters was already hard enough, but to have to hear similar comments or even admissions of complacency is just disappointing and appalling. 

I’m tired of getting crumbs or LGBT representation and being expected to appreciate it. Doing less than the bare minimum does not get you gold stars. I’m not asking creators and or studios to be perfect, I’m asking for them to not suck and do the bare minimum and not be cowards. 

No more settling with horrible pairings of a master and slave and glorifying abuse, no more hiding behind your species being non human, no more killing off characters so you don’t have to address gay relationships, no more subtext or slow burns or metaphors or parallels, no more making excuses about executive meddling, no more characters hiding behind euphemisms or vague dialogue and not using the proper terminology to beat around the bush. 

And if that is entitled to you, go ahead. I’ve dealt with gaters harassing me. What difference will it make if a bunch of privilege blind, performative allies who tone police people when they have every right to be cynical or mad going to do to me. 

If me not praising sub par representation offends you then go off I guess.

Now this does not mean I forsake my progressive views, I stand by them regardless. But if I’m going to be perfectly and intellectually HONEST we need to do BETTER. Stop settling for less and raise your standards. 

Companies and studios are afraid of getting yelled at by conservatives but yet they’re not afraid when the Left does it because we rarely do. And that needs to change. Studios and companies need to be pressured otherwise nothing will change. Dreamworks clearly got the message after the Voltron incident and that showed that the people screaming about the incident had the right idea. 

I’m not going to praise less than the bare minimum when it comes to representation. 

I’m tired of this. Just please do better.  

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I’ve had this on the back-burner for a couple months now. Just didn’t feel like finishing it because I don’t relish the idea of Star Wars “fans” trying to justify their hatred of Rey to me over this comic and completely ignoring the point of it, yet again.

“Arguing if Rey is or isn’t a Mary Sue is the trap, since the argument pre-supposes that “Mary Sue” is a meaningful, well-defined metric and not a nebulous insult applied asymmetrically to female characters if they so much as graze against a copy of Hero With a Thousand Faces.” —Dan Olson

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The Mary Sue, and internalized misogyny:

I agree that the types of characters nowadays who are accused of being a “Mary Sue” are usually just… women… 

Or at the very least, they’re not worse characters than male counterpart characters by any stretch of the imagination. Nowadays that term is thrown around to mean “She’s TOO GOOD AT STUFF!!” But… when I first got into fandom (early 2000′s) the term Mary Sue had a very SPECIFIC meaning, and it wasn’t “This woman threatens men with her competence!”

To my memory, a “Mary Sue” was a character 

who’s only flaws were superficial– insignificant, cutesy, and stated but never shown, 

who was hyper-capable in literally all ways imaginable with no limits, and yet still needed to be rescued and cared for, 

who was described as “plain” by the author while actually being described as highly conventionally attractive in every way, 

etc., etc., you get the idea.

Mary Sues were BOTH highly attractive/competent/skilled/independent/etc., AND none of those things at once. And I don’t mean in the nuanced way of someone who is emotionally together in one context but not another, or skilled at certain things. I mean their skills, attractiveness, competency, and ultimately their character changed drastically to fit the narrative, rather than the other way around.

Mary Sues basically checked every box, while having no cohesive personality or depth. 

They remind me of the two dimensional love interests seen in so much of our media, except for one key difference, which is that Mary Sues are the main character. 

Being written by women and/or trans people raised with internalized misogyny (most commonly young women or teenage girls) in fandom, they’re a character written to fit all the impossible standards placed on women and girls at once– which is of course literally impossible without making a character that is inherently a contradiction. Self conscious but conventionally beautiful, hyper-capable but needs to be saved– in every category she is literally the best, while also being not Too Much. She’s feminine AND a tomboy. She’s outspoken AND shy. She’s “not like other girls”. If she’s rash and stubborn, then she’s also always right. 

The Mary Sue is everything society tells girls they have to be in order to be valuable, and as a result, she’s something sort of superhuman and also has no discernible personality or identity. 

Mary Sues were (and are) characters that I suspect are cathartic to write, and are also very hard for young first time female writers to NOT write. 

They’re dealing with misogyny from all sides, and they want to write a story about a character they WISH they were. They WISH they could be everything our bullshit patriarchy tells them they should be, and tells them that they’re worthless if they’re not. This is also why so many Mary Sues are self inserts; they wish they could be part of their favorite stories. 

It’s a perfectly reasonable response to our society to write about a character who is ALL of those things, and it’s not fair or reasonable to have a problem with people who do so.

I still, however, think there’s worth in at minimum being able to describe the type of character this term was critiquing, because while it’s absolutely valuable for the author to be able to WRITE it…

It can be frustrating and boring to read.

It’s not compelling to read about a flawless two dimensional character, and characters like these tend to fall into other frustrating tropes as well, such as Obliviously Beautiful, the Invincible Hero, and Protagonist Centered Morality to name just a few. And while the act of writing a Mary Sue may be a feminist act for the one doing it (creating a female main character who feels personally empowering), the tropes and traits utilized to create characters like this come directly out of a misogynistic society. Women do not have to be beautiful or hyper-competent to be likable, and they don’t have to be likable to be worth reading about. Women do not have to be superhuman, and people are less interesting when they don’t have flaws.

That’s why people came up with the term to begin with, to be able to describe something they saw in fandom that they found frustrating or didn’t want to read. 

I don’t, personally, think there’s a problem with Mary Sues existing, but I do think the term has value. 

It’s frustrating to me that the term Mary Sue may have been irreparably corrupted  Being able to say “This fic feels like a wish-fulfillment self-insert written by someone who is either young or still full of internalized misogyny, and if that’s not something you enjoy then I don’t think you want to read it” HAS VALUE and is IMPORTANT to be able to say in fandom spaces. 

For the record, I’m also not saying that most people who used this term back in the day did so with self awareness of everything I’ve just outlined. It was a sort of nebulous definition based on how people felt about a character (and has only become more so), and a lot of people knee-jerk reacted to other people’s female OCs that they didn’t like with slapping “Mary Sue” onto them. However, as I’ve said, I still think the tropes it was most often critiquing deserve to be at minimum labelled if not outright critiqued. 

We may not ever get this term back to it’s original meaning, but I hope that if we can’t, we are at least able to come up with a succinct term to replace it. 

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So my writing has come to a firm halt after a review about my protagonist being a Mary Sue 😫 It is something I can't seem to escapee, what's your advice on not making a Mary sue character too unlikeable? Thanks for answering x

THIS IS WHY I HATE SHITTY REVIEWS!!!!

Look at this!  See this lovely person!  She has run up against a wall because of a review.  Is this what you want, people who insist every story put out on the web is fair game for your ‘constructive’ critique?  To make a writer stop writing?  You WANT to kill the goose that lays your golden eggs of free stories?  WHY????

*shakes self*

OK, now that I have that out of my system I’m going to ask you a simple question (which is a rhetorical device because I plan to answer it, but bear with me.  It’s hot and I’m grouchy.)

Why do you care if your character is a Mary Sue?

You know what characters are weirdly overpowered/good at stuff for no apparent reason?  Characters who everyone likes despite having less than stellar personalities?  Batman.  Luke Skywalker.  James Bond.  But MALE power fantasies are OK.  We don’t bat an EYE at MALE power fantasies.  But the moment a FEMALE character is powerful and smart and interesting we’re all “Oh, she’s a Mary Sue.  Tone her down.”

FUCK no.

I mean, half the time (99% of the time?) “mary sue” in a review is a meaningless criticism.  The phrase has no really accepted universal meaning and when people use it they’re pretty much trying to put you down.

Don’t let them.

Write whatever you want, and if that’s an exotically beautiful, ridiculously talented character who everyone adores for no good reason and who steals the show?  So what.  It’s your story.  That reviewer can go write his own story about a boring character who no one really likes and who doesn’t do much.   I mean, I won’t read it, but people should write the story they want to read and if that’s the story the reviewer wants, he needs to get on it,

(Also, link us up so praise can be showered upon you to try to take the sting of that review away.)

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Until I was 12 years old, Ms. Lane, I was as human as you are. This planet is the only home I’ve ever known. And I would sacrifice anything to protect her.

Superman: Red Son (2020), dir. Sam Liu

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What do you mean this isn't canon ??

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Spider-Man: Hero and Babysitter

So Miles Morales: Spider-Man #16 comes out this week and Saladin was generous enough to preview some crucial panels.

That’s Miles and his newborn baby sister Billie Mariana Morales. I guess Rio successfully taught her boy how to change diapers. So this is adorable. But here is the money panel.

Billie grabbing Miles’ finger is indeed iconic behavior.

Yep, I think Miles is taking his big brother role seriously.

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People will look at characters like spinel and bismuth and jasper and go “trauma doesnt excuse your actions!!! Unless youre pearl. Or lapis. Or pink diamond. Or steven. Or the diamonds, even though they were never traumatized. Or-“

Strange how its the butch, black coded, or autistic characters that are demonised for their actions but everyone else gets off scott free

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[ P I N K  N I G H T W I N G ]

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Stating with a straight face that Mag-fucking-Neto wasn’t really that Jewish in the first place to defend the character renouncing his Judaism is peak X-Fandom bullshit.

Holy fuck.

@ubernegro

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We don’t have much time. No, but maybe just enough.

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country road take me home

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Magneto Officially Renounced Any semblance of his Jewishness

This from the House of X, or Power of X, whatever nonsense. And this pisses me off for two reasons. 1. HE DOES IT IN FREAKING JERUSALEM!!!! The center of Judaism. I know he’s a Holocaust survivor and many survivors ended up shying away from G-d and religion. I myself grew up secular, as my family lived through religious repressions in the Soviet Union. So I get not being religious. I get not believing in G-d. But the symbolism here is very obvious. As it is done in Jerusalem. And this is a problem, because of the very obvious fact that him renouncing this doesn’t change the fact that he’s still freaking Jewish. 

2. This notion of the X-men considering themselves Gods is so wrong on so many levels. But primarily because it just basically threw the notion of Genosha as a mutant homeland in our faces. Genosha as a mutant homeland deserved better. It also kind of forgets the fact that mutants were supposed to be oppressed and turns it upside down. Give it another year and mutants will become the oppressors. 

Thanks for coming to my rantings on BS. 

I’ve given up. Does anyone even remember the trauma Magneto went through…..sigh. So much wasted potential. 

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Being a “good person”

To me, being a good person is a nice sentiment. However, from my experience, it seemed more like a social barometer. I was more concerned with how other perceived me. Whether or not I was going to make people happy or offend them. But as I grew up, I realized how I was wasting my time with such a nebulous and esoteric concept. 

Yes I listen to my friends when they need someone to talk to. Or when they need someone to seek advice. But sometimes I need to be firm with them and tell them to knock off certain habits or break off relationships with toxic people. And if they persist with these bad habits and progressively get worse then I have to pressure them into changing. 

I may not be perfect, I have a hard time knocking off bad habits. There is a person in my life I either need to put my foot down with or cut out but something is stopping me. So yes I know bad habits are hard to kill. Doesn't make it any better when you cling to them. 

“Respect everyone opinions” or “be nice to one another” or “don’t force your ideas onto someone” all sound nice and people who focus on being good people often follow these rules like dogma. And in certain trivial situation they do apply and make sense. But when it comes to a person’s physical mental health and well being, someone safety or overall quality of life then that is where pleasantries and platitudes no longer apply. 

SOMETIMES (and pay attention to that because people seem to have poor reading skills) SOMETIMES, it’s ok to be forceful, to put your foot down hard, to tell someone to stop, to tell them they need to change, to raise your voice, you need to hit someone with a harsh dose of bitter reality, to get angry. And you are not extremist for doing so. 

(So long as what your doing isn’t illegal or might invoke authorities obviously.)

They’ll hiss, moan, yell and call you a bad person for being so negative. But if people don’t feel like they need to change then they become complacent and nothing will get solved. 

I was often told to just ignore someone’s perverted, intrusive, overtly offensive mentally and physically abusive behavior. And that if I didn’t then I would be seen as a bad person. I did that for year. Smiled and was unconfrentational. 

And I felt good for a while. But then I realized I was sheltering pedophiles, abusers, libertarians, racists, bigots and all sorts of horrible people from consequences. One even outright admitted it to me and told me he tried to have sex with a teenager. One even kept pelting his friends with racial and homophobic slurs and I did nothing. And looking back I enabled an abuser to go on unchecked as the person drained their spouses income and yelled them into submission. I did nothing. I even encouraged people in those situations to not be confrontational and not rock the boat because it would ruin the “peace” I helped create in my local community. But looking back it was false peace I helped create. 

I was so blinded by the need to be well liked and to seem like a “good person” that I didn’t know I was doing something wrong.

What I’m saying is, you can be a “good person” and still do the wrong thing. 

Because being a “good” person is a very vague thing. Because you can moralize anything or use any platitude to justify what you’re doing. 

You can be a very devote Christian, believe yourself to be the nicest person in the world, trying your best to be a spiritually enlightened person, and discourage conflict as much as possible. But you can still make the wrong decisions. You can believe that killing babies is wrong and be anti-abortion, but you ignore the problems with banning abortion. That you risk the lives of newborns and young mothers more so than ever by doing so. You can be believe in the healing power of forgiveness, but overlook the fact you forgave a pedophile or an abuser too easily. You can tell someone to “not rock the boat too much and just ignore them” but in turn you tell an abuse victim to never stand up to their abuser or take any action whatsoever. Leaving them at the hands of their abuser by letting the statues quo continue. You can be a well meaning religious person and give someone Chick Tract comics and not realize they’re terrible mini comics.

You can do the “nice” “good” thing but you can still do something wrong and horrible. 

These days I’m done seeming like a “good person” and have stopped caring. Don’t mean I’m a savage, I know how to conduct myself in public. Mostly. 

And if I hang with my friends we’ll still see movies, play games, and talk for hours like normal. 

But absolutist beliefs in “positivity” or wanting to be a “good person” was not only a waste of time but also a damaging experience. 

If I ever give people real advice it’s based on life experience and they’re more practical. I do try and be uplifting and reassuring, but that only gets you so far. And if you want the person to improve you can’t rely on sweet words alone. You need to give them advice that can actually, pragmatically help them. 

And SOMETIMES, you need to raise your voice and start being harsh in certain situations. 

Yes the world is filled with problems and negativity. And we need more positive and wholesome people. But positivity can also create those very same problems and have them persist. 

I might get a bit too thoughtful or metaphorical here, but...

In different fields of study, positive usually refers to something that creates while negative refers to something that subtracts, reduces or removes. Usually. Traditional healing can be seen as cells multiplying, growing and sealing up damages. Usually seen as a positive thing. But cancer cells are erratically growing cells that can cause serious damage to the body. 

Destruction of objects can be seen as a bad thing sometimes, but not always. We destroy and reshape substance in the earth to make things like medicine, salts, or even paints. Or we chops up vegetables and meats to create a meal. Destruction, though negative, can lead to something wonderful. Create something wonderful. 

And sometimes in order for things to change you will need to get controversial, get aggressive, or put your foot down. You may not get it right all the time and you may not look like a “good person”, but it’s better than doing nothing, worrying about the vague idea of morality or contributing to a problem. 

Fandoms, communities, or people, they don’t become toxic because of the machinations of a malevolent super villain or some unholy corrupting force or the sin of humanity...they happen because people do nothing to actually help. And believe too hard in such absolutists ideas. 

Problems don’t go away by playing nice all the time. Sometimes you need to be a bit of a bitch. 

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We are sharing some of our favourite gifs each day this month for Antifa International’s fifth anniversary. Today: Nazi monuments being destroyed after the defeat of Nazi Germany.