#ideological consistency

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

If it's bad when someone you dislike does it, it's bad when someone you like does it too.

Ideological consistency matters.

[nyancrimew]

OHHH THATS WHY. Youre european and using european party terms when you see america. American liberals are not european liberals

that's not really how this works bestie, yes the word liberal is used differently in the US, it's used as a catch all for anything left of republicans which makes it completely meaningless for actually describing your political views. that's the point I'm trying to make. also no it doesn't just magically mean something else in the US, it's just that the overall politics of the democrat party more broadly matches what passes as a centre right if not right wing party in europe with an ever so slightly more socially progressive tint.

that's not to say there isn't also people further left describing themselves as liberals, it's just that these words don't mean much in a two party system where both parties have an insane range of actual political ideologies.

[fite-club]

gotta be honest a lot of these "everyone unfairly demonizes men and treats them as dangerous!" transmascs got suspiciously offended at the suggestion to ask roided-out dudes at the gym where they get T. like a suspicious amount of people decided to interpret that as them being told to go get assaulted and are using it as proof of "transandrophobia". but like, why are you automatically assuming that buff men are going to assault you for talking to them? what happened to the unfair stereotyping of being dangerous??

[hoaxghost]

Don't think I ever shared brief shitty File Recovery human au. It takes place in England and only makes sense for 3 minutes

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[gendiebrainrotreceipts]

its so funny how TRAs swear that gender is not based on stereotypes and everybody can look the way they want regardless of their gender but then see a woman with hairy legs and no makeup and immadiately diagnose her as non-binary or even as a man

Ikr, and they’ll say ‘sex doesn’t equal gender!!’ then say it’s a bordering on genocide that they have to put down the correct sex marker on their documents 💀

[alistair-blackwood]

yeah so it turns out when you take an unapologetic eugenicist and give him a sympathetic backstory where he's been uwu traumatized you get a lot of people unironically defending a eugenicist. yeah it's because he's hot. yeah they're saying he has girlhood rage

[juniperpyre]

i do think the death eaters work as a far-right group, as well as the allegories in the text work in general lol, tho it takes some massaging. looking at the political make up and history of the WW with an analytical eye & treating it all as Real requires quite a bit of massaging so i don’t rly mind doing that for the DE cause

[tetrachromate]

yeah man protestants, famously the christian denomination most known for taking issue with divorce,

[wall-maria-around-ba-sing-se]

I love it when a “might makes right” character gets severely out-mighted by the protagonist and they immediately drop whatever villainous thing they were doing because “well I can’t argue with that I guess you were right”

[anamericangirl]

Pro-aborts constantly throw out the line “you know making abortion illegal isn’t going to stop it from it happening, right? It’s not going to change anything.”

Ok. If that’s what you believe and you genuinely think the legality of the issue doesn’t matter and won’t make a difference why not just go ahead and make abortion illegal? :)

[sapphire-theseainequator]

Mfw another funny harmless meme on tumblr is just transphobia + terfism

Love how the super progressive uwu let's be inclusive people gender is not real site would adopt memes that is just backward of their ideology

[captainjonnitkessler]

Actually wait, yeah, how are people reconciling their support for the Internet Archive with their hatred of AI? Authors were like "hey this website took all our work and is using it in ways we didn't agree to" and everyone lost their SHIT to the point of harassing authors over it. Now authors are like "hey this neural network took all our work and is using it in ways we didn't agree to" and people are tripping over themselves to support a lawsuit that could quite possibly set the precedent that makes fanfic illegal.

Obviously the real answer boils down to 'people think it's good for people to read books and bad for people to use AI', but fundamentally either authors have the right to determine where and how their work is used or they don't. Like if you don't think the Internet Archive distributing work for free does any active harm to an author, I'm not sure you can make the claim that a neural network scraping it among millions of other works IS doing active harm. Especially when it's not doing anything that fanfic authors aren't doing already.

[xylophonetangerine]

[jaggedjot]

Armand framing the coy, halfhearted protests he made when Lestat began to caress him in the theatre as though he was concerned about the hurt that this would cause, rather than him further flaunting to Nicolas, a man Armand considers his romantic, intellectual and ideological inferior, that Lestat is openly pursuing him instead.

[thebreakfastgenie]

I think horseshoe theory is real but I think it's because for a lot of people ideology is secondary and is essentially a justification for behavior they want to do anyway. They don't admit it and I think often don't even consciously know. That behavior does not always include cruelty or violence but it often does and that's where certain "horseshoe theory" patterns emerge.