#if nothing else I think it's just lazy and oversimplistic. I think “it was all totally mutually invalid” is the easiest conclusion

[bayetea]

it's so weird liking HOO these days as someone who was #here as they were coming out. it just feels like people... forgot... how jason and piper were written in the series. i do think piper being the one more conflicted about their relationship is a little more interesting bc she's a daughter of aphrodite- giving her a complicated relationship with her own love life is more interesting than the alternative. but modern day [you know.] shippers will tell you lies about jason's feelings when their conjectures are simply not true. like i think its overtly simplistic to say that j/asiper are written like a lesbian/gay boy ship. it's certainly An interpretation but it simply is not universally true—jason literally dreams of growing old with piper in BOO (which is so fucking devastating). like i'm sorry but he really does genuinely love her.

yeah it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people do everything in their power to insist that jason never genuinely loved or was even attracted to her because like... not only is that factually untrue (bro spends so much of tlh wanting her secretly and choosing not to show it) but why is it necessary to even do that. I'm just being cynical here but it reeks of The Thing in fandom where people will observe a man's canonical attraction to a woman of color specifically (especially bipoc/biwoc) and then invalidate those feelings (i.e. headcanoning said man as gay instead of bi/pan/unlabeled queer/etc) to knife all potential of that canon love interest in favor of what is deemed the More Valid mlm ship. it's reflective of a long history of woc not being seen as lovable/attractive/as legitimate love interests. sure it's not always rooted in prejudice but man isn't it weird how it happens all the time. like it's the kind of thing you'll see absolutely everywhere in almost every fandom once you start to take notice of it because fandom bloggers only care about men/dynamics involving men and just don't fuck with woc like that because they're extremely bad at practicing intersectionality. it's a trend that's biphobic and racist and misogynistic in one fell swoop! very efficient /j

I see what regard jasiper is held in nowadays and feel like I just occupy a very weird space here lol. things were so different ten years ago. like I do have to blame rick's lackluster hoo-ship writing to some extent because I myself don't really like jasiper (I don't dislike it either I just. don't think they ought to date lol) but I do care about their relationship and everything that happened between them, and I can't help but feel defensive of them because rick did them soooo dirty. like genuinely the way their breakup happened is just some of rick's absolute worst writing (imagine spending 5 books telling your readers that their relationship can be real and true in the end despite the fake memories and then you break them up offscreen over the fake memories. like okay so you just lied then LMAO). rather than recontexualizing hoo-era jasiper in the aftermath of their breakup as an event where neither party ever held romantic feelings for the other (again it's so unnecessary!!! you can ship whatever without denying that jason loved her!) I wish people could just internalize jasiper as a thing that was real and did happen. because it did!!! it did happen!

[thessalian]

Thess vs Exploitation

Seeing a post that I don’t want to hijack because it does make a good point, but I do want to add to it because it’s both a good point and a terribly oversimplistic one.

Basically, the message is, “The world as it is? The mess that capitalism’s become? It’s all our fault”. Because ... well, the example given was a cheap T-shirt. A bargain that “no one can resist”. One that we buy “Not for best, no, but it’s good enough”. One that earns the shopkeeper like five cents and the sweatshop worker who made it a penny at most. But we keep buying it.

Yeah, for some people, this is a true thing. For others? Here’s the thinking about that $1 T-shirt.

“Okay. Here’s a T-shirt that costs $1. I know that this was made by underpaid, overworked, abused people and earns some corporation more than it does anyone who actually did the work. ...But the thing is? I need a T-shirt, because all the other cheap ones I had to buy in the same circumstances have holes in them. And if I buy this T-shirt instead of making do with the ones with holes in until I can afford a better one, I get a healthier and more varied diet this month instead of subsisting on ramen again.”

The corporations that benefit from the state the world is in? They make damn sure that their exploitative model stays a self-perpetuating cycle. We don’t get paid enough, so we have to settle for cheap crap that is made by abusing people who get paid even less, and those people? They’re generally waved in our faces about how lucky we are to be paid a pittance and the threat is that our job could go to someone who’d be happy to settle for less, so we stick with it because a pittance is hard to survive on but easier to survive on than nothing, so we don’t get paid enough. And on and on ad infinitum.

We do need to accept that we are fuelling this self-perpetuating cycle of abuse and corporate exploitation. Thing is, there’s a difference between acceptance and blame. Blame suggests that we could do better if we wanted to badly enough. That we lack moral fibre. That we’re greedy and lazy and credulous. That we’re bad.

No. No, we’re not bad. The odds are stacked against us. Even those of us who desperately want to do right and do try to aren’t actually helping, because the corporations have arranged it that way. That more expensive t-shirt? Still sweatshop labour. Often the same ones that made the $1 T-shirt. Just they paid someone else a pittance to put a nice design on it. Maybe it lasts longer, but that’s because people treat it better because it’s more expensive.

Some of us - most of us - have to choose between the most ethical option or the one that actually provides for our needs. That is not our fault. It’s not our fault that we have to choose between patronising places that seem to treat their workers more ethically (but probably don’t) and going without, or patronising places that we know exploit their workforce and having enough to live. Not just ‘survive’ - live. I get that we want to be better people, but when you’re in a crashing plane, you put your own oxygen mask on first before you start helping others with theirs.

There is no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism. This isn’t something that people can fix with a change of spending habits. Given the sheer number of other interests any single corporation has, all they’d do even if a mass boycott got big enough to lose them even a tiny bit of money is to keep it as a tax write-off. This kind of shit has to happen at an international, corporate level. It’s going to take international standards on employee welfare, pay, food safety, goods quality, everything. This cannot be solved by one person, or one generation, denying themselves ... especially not when it comes to goods that are required for survival, like food and clothing.

And honestly, is this really the time to give people grief about buying as cheaply as possible? In the middle of a pandemic? With unemployment at a record high? When lockdown gets essential workers bullied about coming in despite government advice, giving them a choice between staying home (losing them shifts and possibly getting fired) or coming in despite government advice (risking them getting sick and at best not being able to stay home even when they test positive so spreading more disease, and at worse ending up in the hospital with no health insurance or, worst of all, dead)?

I know that this situation is tailor-made for exploitation by corporations. There is literally nothing we can do about that. Just for right now, maybe chill on the “BUY ETHICAL OR DON’T BUY AT ALL”. You can’t buy ethical anyway - it is literally impossible the way capitalism has been set up - so forget it. Maybe it would have been possible when this trend started way back when, but I can tell you from having watched through the eighties on up that that ship has sailed.

I don’t know of a polite way to say this, but it has to be said: video games are made in very exploitative environments. The CEOs are jackasses who do mass layoffs when they want to line their pockets, and force their underpaid staff to work in some cases up to 100 hour work weeks during crunch periods that last for months. These are non-essential items, and we buy them. Maybe when reblogging that post about how it’s all our fault that capitalism is how it is (when it isn’t; we’d have to go back a few decades to get to a point where we could have stopped this) where they cite essential items like clothing? Maybe consider reblogging a different post about non-essential items instead, or adding a note about the difference, or even just not reblogging it because it’s drastically unfair. Honestly, I’m not even blaming anyone for buying video games at this point; mental health is as important as physical health, and sometimes a good distraction and a bit of retail therapy helps. Plus all denying yourself all things that make you happy does is trigger or deepen depression and depth-charge one’s sense of self-worth Just ... I guess it’s kind of a combination of “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and “before removing the mote from my eye, attend the beam in thine own”. I get wanting to save the world from the capitalist nightmare it’s become. I want the same. I’m just realistic on how we do it. It’s not about boycotts; we’re well past that. It won’t help. All we’ll do by blaming people is cause more mental health issues in people than they already have, at a time when we need fewer, not more.

Just ... be kind to people, rather than even indirectly judgmental. You don’t know what they’re going through, and their reasons for doing things. Don’t shunt blame from the corporations onto the people. It was wrong when it was done regarding the environment, and it’s wrong now. We win through votes and lobbying our politicians, not through boycotts and bullying those who won’t or can’t do the same.

Incidentally, this message is brought to you by the country that literally wants to strip down employee protections about the maximum-48-hour work week and paid leave and any accountability about employee hours (even as they say that the proposals leaked in the Financial Times are lies, somehow), so I have a feeling I’m going to be finding out a lot about employee exploitation in the next couple of years.