#any scrutiny

[helv-ete]

Going to an american high school rn is so fun and cool bc why do I have to go through literal tsa at 8:30 in the morning every weekday 😭😭

[visenyaism]

really what the wizard of oz is about is a plucky young sjw new deal democrat and her pet dog (useless VP nominee) getting even the brainless (reactionary southerners) heartless (yankee political machinists) and cowardly (white collar liberal bourgeois) (new deal coalition) to work together to defeat wizard jennings bryan who is trying to crucify oz on a cross of gold (yellow brick) who commands them to defeat the wicked witch of the west (industrialist union-busters) and her flying monkeys (thats evolution.) Before it is of course ultimately revealed that the Glinda the good witch (wilsonian liberalism) and wizard jennings bryan are of course charlatans with no electoral power beyond populist rhetoric. And what does Dorothy do? Click her ruby (red for the blood of the working man) heels together three times and realize that the power (expansion of executive authority) was in her purview (supply-side economics) all along. and then of course she gets home and reports her father to the proper authorities for planting an extra acre of wheat.

[phoenixwithapencil]

Okay but did Crisis Core’s fan clubs have remotely true factoids about any of the firsts?

Did Zack even know if they were true or not?

Does Seph really use a whole bottle of shampoo? Did Gen really find that copy of Loveless in his parent’s study? Does Ang really garden in his free time and have a cherished camera from his mother?

Did Zack ever find any of it out before it was too late?

Did he ever know his peers better than the hundreds of thousands of adoring fans who didn’t know any of them at all?

[serpentface]

Are there any non-Odonii circumstances that let people “get away” with gender non-conforming clothing/personal styling? Whether that’s about social acceptability or flying under the radar

In general a lot of small deviations from gender conformity aren't a huge fucking deal in practice. A woman wearing more androgynous clothing that doesn't outright violate social norms of modesty (bare minimum is covering your hips and legs down to the knees) or not maintaining a hyper-feminine presentation is probably not going to catch any serious heat for it and might not face much pressure from their own family, context depending. (In theory this would be true for akoshos as members of a female underclass with ubiquitous presentation standards, in practice they are under more pressure to maintain hard feminine conformity so as not to cross the hazy line where the acceptable femininity of their gender assignment meets the unacceptable concept of ''''effeminate man''''). Also a lot of ideals for feminine presentation are nearly impossible to uphold if you have to perform manual labor for a living, so the first response to a woman going out with unbraided hair and a shin length skirt is often going to be 'that's a peasant girl' or 'that girl looks unkempt' rather than 'that girl is dressing masc and is probably a slut'.

Though that being said, if you're in the public eye or otherwise expected to be the image of respectability you can 'get away' with less. If you're female nobility and seen to be deviating in Any way it's a potential opening for people to scrutinize you and your family, gossip about whether you're a slut somehow, criticize your husband/father for not having adequate authority over you, etc. It might not come to anything worse than gossip, but you'll be under a lot of pressure nonetheless. As a woman you're effectively a physical embodiment of your family's internal state and dignity, and if your family is powerful or otherwise considered important you're expected to represent them well (and will likely have had these expectations thoroughly impressed upon you throughout your childhood from female relatives). (Classism plays into this too, you also just want to appear as your station and not look 'like a peasant').

It's a little easier for men to deviate in Small ways, given they're granted more autonomy in general. Men are also deeply incentivized to represent their family well, but they operate in society as more autonomous individuals rather than as extensions of a husband/father. There's also layers where, in practice, just Happening to have idealized physically masculine traits goes a long way towards people receiving you as hard masc and ignoring small bits of gender nonconformity (ie Brakul dresses SIGNIFICANTLY less masc than Janeys does, most of the non-pants clothing he chooses is considered androgynous or slightly feminine, and will sometimes overtly describe himself in feminine terms like calling himself his khaits' mother, but he doesn't get anywhere near as much shit because he's 6'2 with broad shoulders and a full beard and a deep voice and not wont to cry when he's angry). The concept of 'effeminacy' in men focuses as much (or even slightly more) on behavior than presentation, so men Can flex norms a little more without anyone giving them shit so long as they play their expected part. This only goes so far though, and cultural trends of paranoia about 'male effeminacy' are only getting more acute.

Sex workers are actually expected/made to present in gender nonconforming ways. Women/akoshos are outright legally forbidden from wearing veils (partly to keep them publicly identified to monitor their movements, partly to signal sexual availability, partly as a matter of ostracizing them from the concept of respectability due to an 'unclean' profession). They're often discouraged from braiding their hair, and in most places female sex workers are required (not Legally but by their employers and general social expectation) to wear men's tunics. This is again on some levels setting them apart from a sense of having 'respectable' femininity (this style of dress violates modesty standards), casts them as oversexualized via masculinization, and also is just a means of exposing some parts of the body that are sexualized on women (legs/thighs). (They're still expected to shave any facial hair and often wear makeup; they're supposed to physically 'look feminine').

Male sex workers (outside of the small demographic with primarily female clientele) also are usually made or encouraged by their employers to look a Little unmasculine, but not in the same sense as female sex workers (who are considered to be basically crossdressing). This is more aimed towards looking young, via keeping beards shaved and hair short (pubescent boys cut their hair short until adulthood at 16) and often shaving body hair. This has similar functions of appealing to clientele while setting them apart (to a much lesser extent) from an appearance of respectable masculinity. Most male sex workers serve male clientele, mostly as 'passive' partners, and not a lot of nuance is culturally held that 'being emasculated' might not be their actual preference. It's kind of a self-sustaining loop where that presentation is associated with male sex work, which is associated with bottoming/sucking dick as a sexual preference, which is what most clients are going for and thus an economically viable mode of presentation. A man who is Known to keep his hair short and shave a beard/body hair is usually assumed to have that proclivity (if you just Can't grow a beard and you've cut your hair in mourning no one's going to IMMEDIATELY go 'CUNNARI LOLLL' but they might have a giggle about it).

Some men who are Not sex workers will intentionally present the same ways because they Are interested in male sexual partners and are signalling such, are willing to take the inevitable poor treatment from openly displaying this/looking like a sex worker, and usually don't have close relations who are going to yell at them for bringing shame to their family. This is culturally complicated because gay sex in of itself is not stigmatized, being interested in men and women is considered normal for men (so long as their interests are being an active sexual partner and don't get in the way of marriage and child-having), thus there's gotta be some 'not normal' men out there to do that with and not all of them will end up as sex workers. It's considered simultaneously perfectly natural and a shameful personal failing.

Men can 'get away' with this presentation in the sense that they're not going to get murdered for it (though being a victim of aggression and sexual violence is likelier to occur than the baseline), but they're also going to be considered by many to be bereft of virtue, a blight upon not just their own honor but that of their family, and just kind of embarrassing. A lot of your sexual partners will also see you this way, and even those who have genuine love and respect for you are still going to be influenced by these norms (as are you yourself). There's kind of no winning.

In terms of fully sliding under the radar the most common thing is women (by internal identity or gender assignment) passing themselves off as eunuchs to access occupations otherwise forbidden to them, escape their home lives, attain legal autonomy, etc. This isn't nearly as hard as 'passing' as an intact man in terms of appearance and voice, though doesn't open up the same variety of career paths (you're probably going to be a servant, but you have a greater and better variety of servant positions open to you than as a woman), but there are some opportunities to get into a priesthood and if you are EXTREMELY lucky and talented you could make it into a warrior order (and get class mobility benefits as a result) (this going to be a diminishingly rare circumstance though, since most orders don't induct eunuchs in general without displays of truly exceptional skill, and your opportunities to attain that skill will be limited). All this isn't by any means socially accepted but there's a Chance your employers/peers won't out you if you're discovered and do good enough work.

This culture also does have plenty of stories of women disguising themselves as men to enter combat or to avenge slain family members in a duel, which certainly does happen from time to time but is pretty damn rare. Women just openly defending themselves in raids or participating in local skirmishes is way more typical. Ephenni riverlanders are the only Wardi-speaking group that habitually teach their female children some combat skills (they're all pastoralists, there's a lot of livestock raiding/banditry going on in their land, and basic self defense is considered a necessity) and the one known 'woman who disguised as a man and made it into a warrior order' in recent history was one of them. She didn't do anything particularly cool and was mostly utilized in raiding dissenting clans from the Yellowtail River Valley tributary, but had a pretty good record in combat for a few years (until getting killed by a thrown spear) and was only found out when her body was being prepared for cremation.

[loewens]

They should have a cat. Elise pretends to hate it, or maybe she really hates it. Its unclear.

[hughesybear]

Hronek celebrating with Petey after his assist… you can see just how much everyone on the team is believing in him

[voelene]

When did Renoir and Verso have their big fight ?

They were still travelling together as of E58 (edit : I misremembered things here, they weren't traveling together as of 58, but they did work together for years before splitting), so I originally thought Verso rejected his father relativity recently. But in the flashback to Julie's death, Verso already has the scars from their fight.

So, different possibilities:

A) Verso lied to Sciel about how he got the scar. Julie was the one to scar his face, and he's kept the reminder ever since. A bit unlikely, considering Renoir's own scar, but we should always have a "actually, Verso lied" possibility

B) It's just a continuity error, or reused assets. Although the devs had Verso without the scars when they showed the original's death, so also unlikely?

C) Verso and Renoir fought just after the Fracture, when Clea revealed everything to them, but they made up soon after and agreed on the course of action for another 40+ years before they had another big rift and Verso left more permanently. Maybe it was about Verso wanting to die (something he didn't want just after the fracture from his journal entry) and Renoir obviously disagreeing.

[sysig]

Happy Pride, gay therapists (Patreon)

[adragonsfriend]

Star Wars is an Epic

Which is to say, the politics is the set—the curtains, the costumes, the paint—not the story.

Whatever George Lucas may say in his commentary, all of the politics and setting in star wars are set dressing for a story about a couple of individuals. Even if he truly believes otherwise. The setting is there for verisimilitude—the feeling of believability—not realism—true resemblance to reality.

Star Wars falls solidly in the genre of the epic, in which the stakes of a character’s personal narrative and choices are raised to the level of their entire world (in this case the entire galaxy) by creating a story in which the fate of that world relies on an individual’s choices—often just one, all important choice. An epic is thus an inherently flawed setting for a story about politics and systemic issues. At best, it contains the lesson “politicians lie sometimes;” good to know, but not exactly novel.

This is not to say the Star Wars universe *cannot* be adapted to tell stories about systematic issues, but it is to say that a lot of work has to to be done in order to shape it into something appropriate for those kinds of narratives.

This post is a follow-up to a point i didn’t directly address in this longer post, if anyone is truly interested.

[bathylychnops]

120k followers sounds like actual real life hell

it was so bad bad yeah 😭 the pressure was sobad anytime i posted that ijust didnt want to draw anymoree

[qiu-yan]

jiang cheng at the club

i answered kind of speedily but hm blorbo should not be at the club

teenage era? the most debatable era tbh. on one hand - for one, if jiang cheng goes, he's going because he thinks that's what the cool kids his age should be doing, rather than because it's what he actually wants to do. for two, if he goes he's certainly going with wei wuxian. there's a good chance he'll have a good time with wei wuxian, but there's also a good chance that he'll spend the entire experience way too high-strung about wei wuxian doing something stupid (guaranteed) that will make both him and yunmeng jiang look stupid (not guaranteed but still likely) and/or put wei wuxian in danger (also very likely). there's also an even higher chance that wei wuxian will end up fucking off to chat/flirt/etc with other people (eg. lan wangji who wei wuxian also managed to drag to the club, who then gets drunk and thus wei wuxian now has to babysit), thereby leaving jiang cheng all by his lonesome. jiang cheng can probably talk to strangers, but he came here to have fun with wei wuxian and now wei wuxian has ding dong ditched. bonus points if wei wuxian promised to be designated driver and now jiang cheng has to uber home.

on the other hand - teenage wei wuxian and jiang cheng are definitely making the club more fun. mostly wei wuxian. and, despite all of the above, jiang cheng is probably having a good time...most of the time...too.

adult era: nah. jiang cheng is busy. it would be nice if he could let loose and forget about everything for a few hours, but he would not do that. realistically he'd just spend the entire time stressing about his growing to-do list, and the music would give him a headache.

also, everything at the club would remind him of wei wuxian. wei wuxian, certified party animal, was almost certainly the one dragging jiang cheng to the club in their youth; jiang cheng probably does in fact have some happy memories of clubbing with wei wuxian. but those happy memories are gonna curdle into depressing ones the moment he steps through the doors and is reminded of wei wuxian again. the photos of wei wuxian doing a keg stand behind the bar are making him miserable, and he in turn is going to make it everyone else's problem.

postcanon era: also nah. mostly because he'd almost certainly run into jin ling et al. sneaking into the club with fake IDs, and now everyone's yelling.

on the other hand....maybe he and wei wuxian can eventually reconcile over a night of partying they're both frankly way too old for. or maybe when they wake up the next day in the same ditch with matching hangovers.

[autisticlancemcclain]

Could you explain your position on Shallura? Since Allura was established as a teenager when she started dating Lance and Shiro was very clearly an adult. I can understand the bi shiro headcannon but the shallura thing worries me

i am going to remind yall that i have been in this fandom since 2016. and in the early seasons, allura was not established as a teenager. in fact she was coded as older, as closer to shiro's age -- there was a specific divide between her and the younger paladins that she did not have with shiro. they made her younger (both explicitly and in mannerisms) as the show went on. and i do not give a fuck about voltron like...post s4 and i didn't even watch s7-8. so like. especially with older fics, im going to enjoy shallura.

[whomeidontknowthem]

I read that one long meta post I just reblogged and a fanfic snippet of the tech working with MB's POV was born. So here.

Part 1??? (I might have a few more ideas for snippets from this POV)

[Look at this

Attachment: funky_graph.image.]

Ginson was really supposed to be working. Te didn't need the fines for getting distracted at ter workplace, te really didn't, but when did Minoa do anything but be distracting? He'd be the death of ter, Ginson was sure.

[What's that?]

[Come on, its work. Just take a look]

Te gave in. [Huh.]

[Fascinating isnt it? It f-ing shifted the whole statistics up with that stunt]

[What happened there?]

[Well thats what I hoped youd tell me :}

Attachment: unit.link]

Ginson glanced at the clock. (Well, te did the feed equivalent of glancing, which really was more like briefly shifting your attention to a background process and suddenly knowing the time. Te always found it annoying that there just weren't the right words to describe what working in the feed felt like.) Te wasn't supposed to take a break for another half hour, but, damn it. Te was nothing if not curious. And Minoa was right, it was work! …almost, in any case. Ginson wasn't the statistician, te worked with constructs directly, as individual Units.

So te loaded the profile and wasn't surprised when ter clearance was enough to access everything. Of course it was one of ter Units. Minoa wouldn't have come to ter if te didn't have what he wanted to know.

Ginson poked around the data, then sent an excerpt. [Client chance of survival predicted at 8.27%. Extraction successful.] Te wondered if it came across as bragging. It sure felt like bragging: that was ter SecUnit! And look at its performance!

[ :( no juicy detail?]

[That's Unit's logs, not your serials.]

[Awww :( ]

Ginson minimized the connection, focusing on the logs of the SecUnit te was actually working on. Te was trying to figure out if a more thorough memory purge was in order. The contract it returned from wasn't the kind of occasion that made such measures mandatory, but it was nasty in the “clients involve their SecUnits in petty infighting” kind of way, and te hadn't yet booted the Unit on to check its performance reliability, but considering its history and age and time since last memory purge...

[There cant not be smth special about the unit.] Minoa sent, because of course he wasn't going to leave ter alone. [Its performance baseline level’s better than most for the last half year, ignoring the spike (which, woah but could be just luck). 

Whats so special about it??

Every other unit is gonna look like theyre underperforming if this goes on XD]

Ginson sighed. The NDA didn't really prohibit ter from talking to another company employee working with the same Units about the information he might actually find useful in his job. And it's not like there was any privacy concern. Te didn't know why te was hesitating, alright? Te'd put a lot of work in here (including unpaid overtime ter manager praised with the kind of smile te hated, it's not like te did it for her, and if she was so happy with ter performance she could hint to the supervisor that a raise is in order, which she hasn't), just to erase the effects of the incident. Bringing it up after that felt… wrong, somehow.

Which, of course, didn't make any sense. And Minoa wouldn't leave ter alone until te admitted, so. [It was from Ganaka Pit.]

[!!!] Came an instant reply. [Damn

Werent they all nonfunctional after that?

How the f did you do that?? :0]

[Memory purge.]

[Ha! Keep your secrets, tech magician

Technician = tech magician. In your case]

Well. It's not like Ginson wasn't proud of ter work here. Te’s done a really, really good job with this one. 

(Te knew that couldn't be the reason for the Unit’s better performance. Returning it to the baseline functionality? Sure, that was ter. And that was a damn good achievement in itself. But te knew te hadn't done anything that would explain the sudden climb of the statistics that happened months after the incident and the repairs. That was the Unit itself.

Ginson wasn't looking too hard into how it achieved that. What mattered was that it worked, and it worked well.

It looked good on ter resume.)

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

thinking about Ellen’s greatest fear being societal dehumanization (through being declared mad) vs Orlok explicitly as a force of nature who is narratively stripped of most all humanizing features except for “appetite” and desire to control. he is frankly, not a person, and when speaking of vampirism the characters talk of him somewhat more as almost a zombie than an intelligent undead creature. he is entirely othered in the movie, to the point where we never fully see his face until he is in full sunlight. arguably, the same point where Ellen achieves the most connection and empathy, and is fully understood by Thomas— with her past fully, literally, brought to light

I don’t think this worked though for Orlok. there’s no real connection for why he would be depersonalized, or necessarily be a foil to her in that sense. when in part, his power over her is how he is the only person who may know her in all aspects of herself. being the cause for her dismissal from society doesn’t necessarily translate to him experiencing the same, especially not if his othering is meant to be taken as face value fact

[mikimeiko]

Arcane | Season 1 (2021), Christian Linke and Alex Yee

[thefrogdalorian]

I think on this fine Saturday afternoon it's a good opportunity to take a breather and remember that there are really no ethical paparazzi pictures. Every single one is inherently exploitative.

Just because photos were taken on a movie set, when someone is 'working,' does not make the practice any less invasive and creepy. Imagine just going about your day, doing your job and having some weirdo snapping pictures of you to sell without your consent for others to endlessly repost online.

There are thousands of pictures of your favourite actor online already. Plenty taken with his knowledge and consent. I'd really like to see more of them on my dash, rather than the creeper shots.

And don't get me started how disseminating these pictures directly leads to people going to said sets. What starts off as admiring how good someone looks has real world implications.

No, hanging around a movie set and disrupting people doing their jobs is not harmless fun or a way to show your appreciation.

If you hang around a movie set, you are a stalker.

Don't tell me that it's okay to take your online admiration for someone offline. You may admire him but he does not, and will never, personally know you. He will never be your friend/boyfriend/daddy. He is a stranger.

The only way meeting your favourite actor is going to happen is at a convention or maaaaaybe a movie premiere if you're incredibly fortunate. You know, places they appear specifically to meet fans (or not in the case of premieres, where the purpose is to promote a movie. Which is also completely understandable if actors don't stop. You are not owed an interaction).

Of course, you cannot help it if you randomly run into someone you admire in the wild. Even then, consider that they probably won't be all too thrilled to be approached in public by a complete stranger. It's up to you to gauge the situation, but remember there is a person at the heart of all of this.

Boundaries and respect are a kindness which deserves to be extended to each and every human being regardless of their looks/talent/fame/wealth.

Fandoms blur those lines a little too often for my liking and I think just scrutinising what you're interacting with, or what behaviour you could be possibly falling down that slippery slope towards is nice to do every once in a while.

I mean no malice with this post and it is not directed at anyone in particular. It's something I cannot help but feel strongly about because I've seen this destructive cycle time and again in fandoms over the years. It's not healthy and it makes us all a little bit more disconnected from our humanity for it...