#problematic transgressions

[xipe-slayground]

How I feel these days when celebrity gossip addicts won't shut up about how we should hate _____ because reasons:

[wonder-worker]

"The division between the two families [the Woodvilles and the Nevilles] and their allies can be seen in the royal charters that they witnessed. Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville of York, while serving as chancellor and afterwards, were fairly constant witnesses to royal charters and consequently often appeared together. This was not, however, the case for other family members and friends. From 1466 to 1469, if Scales or Woodville associates like Sir John Fogge, John Lord Audley or Humphrey Lord Stafford of Southwick witnessed royal charters, then members of the Neville group, such as John Neville, earl of Northumberland, or John Lord Wenlock would not, and vice versa. Discounting the ubiquitous Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville, of the twenty-four charters issued between February 1466 and June 1469, twelve were witnessed by men associated with the Woodvilles, eight by men associated with the Nevilles and two were witnessed by no member of either group beyond the two earls at their heads and the archbishop; only two charters, both from 1466, featured associates of both families.

Such striking segregation of witnesses suggests that something more than simple convenience or availability was at play. [...] The evidence of these witness lists does show the extent of the split between the two groups from early in Edward's reign and of the need for political society to work with that cleavage in the heart of the Yorkist regime."

— Theron Westervelt, "Royal charter witness lists and the politics of the reign of Edward IV"

*This is specifically applicable for Edward IV's first reign; in contrast, the charters in his second reign displayed a great deal of aristocratic and domestic unity and cohesion.

[elvisqueso]

starting a campaign called "you should rewatch Pocahontas (1995) bc it actually isn't as problematic as you've been taught to think it is."

[dostoyevsky-official]

The existence of an immigration-enforcement agency isn’t inherently the problem. Most people accept that states have a right to control their borders and that there’s a legitimate role for authorities charged with enforcing immigration policy, especially when it comes to those who have committed serious crimes. ICE also investigates trafficking, smuggling and other transnational offenses that clearly require federal oversight. The core issue is less the agency’s mandate than its methods. Well-documented abuses — denials of due process, inhumane conditions and politically motivated enforcement — have undermined public trust and raised serious ethical concerns. The worry is not whether immigration law should be enforced but how, and at what human cost. The holding facilities ICE uses are part of this system: They house people awaiting deportation, court appearances or further investigation. What’s in dispute isn’t the need for such spaces; it’s the treatment of detainees within those spaces. Many facilities have drawn criticism for degrading or dangerous conditions. Still, as a beneficiary of a trust that rents a property to ICE, your leverage is minuscule. You can’t unilaterally break the lease. Even if you could, ICE would simply relocate its facility. And while moral complicity is a serious concern, receiving income from a legal tenant, however problematic, isn’t generally considered an ethical transgression on its own. We’re all entangled in systems we don’t control. As citizens, we’re already implicated in the actions of government agencies that act in our name and that we help fund. If those actions are shameful, they cast a shadow on all of us. But that shared entanglement also opens the door to shared responsibility — and response. [...] Here’s one constructive path: If this money feels tainted, redirect it. Use it to support organizations that advocate for the rights you believe ICE has violated — groups like the A.C.L.U., the American Immigration Council or local legal-aid nonprofits that provide support for detainees. Back candidates pushing for humane immigration reform.

jaw-dropping new york times column reassuring readers that receiving blood money from the gestapo is ok

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[pawberri]

The key problem with "proship vs anti" discourse is that the most extreme versions of each side, the ones who actually bother to identify with these labels, accepted each others worst takes as arguments they had to debate. "Fiction =/= reality" is, in practice, an absurdly reductionist, anti-intellectual, thought-terminating-cliche that dictates we can learn nothing about a person via art and that their fiction reflects no political or moral messaging worthy of critique. In response to this, the "puriteens" who are too young to possibly hope to articulate their discomfort, to untangle their position from what is often real trauma experienced online, simply argue "yes, fiction influences and reflects reality in a 1 to 1 capacity." They, and people who want to use the groundwork they laid to make bad-faith callouts, make bad arguments about how the action of engaging in problematic fiction is on equal ground to real life abuse, or is a clear indicator of interest in real life abuse. Both of these arguments are terrible, but each side seems to radicalize the other further and further into their own brands of anti-intellectual reactionary belief. "Proshippers" become libertarian absolutists about free speech and view all transgression as righteous and alternative and therefore leftist. They gain a reactionary nostalgia for the past, desiring a time when people didn't seem to care about the implications of art. "Antis" become authoritarian and hypervigilant for signs of moral decay, at their worst, willing to align themselves with government bodies that offer carceral solutions to the debate. They are willing to use harassment as a tool of punishment, which then leads to false accusations and a fear of openness that puts people at risk of being triggered via obfuscation. (That said, proshippers also take part in plenty of harassment.)

I will say that I believe both of these movements are equally sensitive to co-opting by right-wing forces. We see the authoritarian tendencies of anti culture in harassment campaigns and even the way Republican law makers co-opt "grooming." The proship/fic crowd has such extreme nostalgia for the past that I often see people align themselves with the cultures of 4chan or other happily right-wing websites. They so heavily reject the idea that a drawn sexual depiction of a child could reflect any desire that they are disinterested in analyzing what the motivation behind the depiction is. i.e If we track the history of lolicon in Japan we do find that is, yes, countercultural, but that counter culture is right wing, very misogynistic, and defensive of patriarchial Japanese culture as it is and was including its culture around rape and abuse. Plenty of fictional content works as radicalization material, and radicalization material needs to be ambiguous. There is a valid reason to be hesitant to trust people who consume this content, even if I do not believe most of them will ever be dangerous towards children. The mere presence of sexuality is not enough to make a movement left wing. This kind of thing can again be seen in right-wing libertarian movements in the US. (And even leftist movements can be bigoted and even "pro-pedophilia" or otherwise disinterested in social reform around abuse.)

Is all content with elements of age-play this way? No. But to me, that is why kink media deserves to be treated as art and analyzed, critiqued, treated seriously. It doesn't have to do anything to anyone to be worthy of a moral critique. Said moral critique just doesn't warrant harassment and cruelty and reactionary exaggerations of the person consuming said content.

Anyway, what's my point in saying all this? I don't know. I'm just begging you to tag your God damn content with specific tags instead of random and nebulous shit like "dead dove" or "dark content", and also begging you to stop harassing people who do tag their content so I don't have to guess what "dead dove" and "dark content" mean. No one will erase incest kink fics or people who feel sickened by the idea of them off this earth because we aren't god, but we could at least all be responsible about tagging, flagging, and age-gating our stuff.

[artbyblastweave]

The beat that always stuck with me in regards to Uber and Leet was when Taylor mentions that they beat up sex workers on livestream while LARPing Grand Theft Auto. Uber and Leet get a lot of mentions before they actually show up, and the drumbeat is that they're pathetic, they're fodder, "as incompetent as supervillains can be while staying out of jail." Leet is the butt of a rom-com gag where Brian gives Taylor pointers on how to choke a man out more effectively. But they made money by beating up sex workers on livestream. That's a non-negligible number of potentially ruined lives! That's not softball fun-and-games! It's like textbook misogynistic violence against the marginalized! It's awful!

The narrative doesn't really dwell on this, because it's told almost exclusively from the perspective of people who have the firepower necessary to get away with treating Uber and Leet like jokes. But I think that it's a useful reminder that if you aren't one of the initiated, so to speak, then an encounter with the C-list, D-list, Z-list supervillain can be life-altering if not life-ending. The dumbest listicle-fodder DC or Marvel villain you've ever heard of has probably ruined at least one person's life over their handful of appearances, if not more. And it's an early indictment of the broad concept of the unwritten rules as advanced by Lisa, where she calls out Uber and Leet as the textbook example of villains kept in circulation because they're "amusing but harmless." This is within parameters? This doesn't merit heroes and villains putting aside their differences to clean house of problematic elements? Of course it doesn't. Both examples that Lisa gives of that dynamic in 3.6 involve a cape transgressing against another cape.

[maritteknewtheenemy]

Genuinely the most compelling part of Sunrise on the Reaping to me was the two pages we got describing Wiress' games. It's indescribably fascinating to me how Haymitch seems to find her initial serenity and intelligence off putting and vaguely creepy. Like, to the point where I think I would have preferred if SC had written her games instead of Haymitch's for this prequel. Haymitch thinks she's 'bizarre' and notes it was hard even for the districts to root for her because of the eerie manner in which she outsmarted the capitol. It would have been fascinating to see what day to say life is like in a district other than 12 for once, and to see a tribute who won without killing anyone (a complete antithesis to the way the games are supposed to be played). It would be interesting to see the retribution she would face from the capitol in the immediate aftermath. I think it's safe to say prior to the arena that it's unlikely that Wiress was a fan favourite, but I want to see her interview persona, what angle was decided as her best shot of getting sponsors, and the outfits her stylist chose. I want to see her noting the shiny stuff in training and later kicking herself for not realizing it was connected to the games. We'd get to see Beetee as an actual mentor, showcasing his true brilliance with a pupil who could meet him on his own level something missing from the original trilogy and SOTR both. Hell, she could even include a mention of Ampert, or even a cameo of him at the District 3 reaping. We could hear Beetee potentially lament his fear of Ampert being reaped to Wiress, or it could even just be an offhand thought in Wiress' mind, that the eldest child of District three's most recent (and disliked/problematic) victor would be twelve next year. Maybe one of the careers in her games could be the child/neice/grandkid of a former victor and she could think back to meeting Beetee's family before leaving on the train and wonder if that would happen to Ampert? It would be interesting to explore Beetee's fear and Wiress' perhaps preumptive pity from that angle. It might have hit harder even, for us to see a brief cameo of eleven year old Ampert and hear about Beetee's transgressions against the capitol, but have Ampert's fate left ambiguous/a sword hanging over Beetee's head.

Also- the Nest of Mirrors? Come on. Katniss makes a point in the original trilogy of saying the arena can look like anything, but a Wiress book would be the first games we'd read about where the arena doesn't look- at least on the surface- like some random lanscape, not to mention the horror of the entire concept. Blood reflected off any and all surfaces, being unable to get your bearings, nothing being where it appears to the point you could end up impaling yourself on a sword you thought you were dodging? It's an arena with the highest and most blatant element of psychological horror we've ever seen and it would have been really interesting to see how those games played out, especially through Wiress' narration. Not only is Wiress very intelligent and grounded, but she hid in plain sight. She was IN the games but she wasn't an active participant. The narration would be almost from the point of view of a spectator, like those in the districts or the capitol, except with a level of scrutiny no one but a competitor could have. The fact she didn't directly kill anyone would further highlight this- but so would the fact kids might be dying literal feet away from her that she couldn't save or defend herself from if it came down to it. We even know we'd get to see her judgement call, the decision she had to make about when to stand up so the final Two boy would see her, charge at her, and brain himself. We know she understood how to play with the mirrors and how the light beams work, so she must have intentionally placed herself in a way she knew he'd run right into one of them. But how did she know he wouldn't try a long range weapon to kill her from a safe distance? And why did she wait so long after she won before letting the hovercraft pick her up? What was she thinking? What was her post game interview like? What did Beetee say?

I can see how this her victory and reticence could appear so eerie from an outsiders perspective- district and capitol alike- especially when it seems so antithetical from the way most contenders in a typical games play and participate. Wiress didn't participate and that's why she won. It's wild. It's facinating. It should be explored. She didn't participate and she won anyway which should be impossible. But she did it.

Then there's the fact that one of the themes of SOTR was propaganda (and was, imho, the most poorly executed element of the novel, please don't @ me). I think Wiress' book could have the potential to address this in a more subtle but better executed way. Just thinking about mirrors and the arena and the symbolism that could come from it. Something about the same image (or narrative or word or-) seen from a thousand different angles by thousands of different people, how they warp and change and become distorted. Something about retroactively convincing the public that the girl who didn't participate was a strong contender the whole time. Something about spinning the Capitol's inability to find her into something humorous instead of an unintentional display of weakness and gross incompetence. Something about playing up Wiress' 'oddness' so as to make her undesirable and unpalatable to even district citizens so no one would ever rally behind her much less take her or her refusal to participate as a viable option let alone a strategy.

Yeah, to me, not writing Wiress' story instead of Haymitch's will always be a missed opportunity.

[skaldish]

Alright folks. Here it is, my theory of what Ragnarok actually represents. It is very messy and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to actually convey my understanding clearly like I try with most things, because genuinely this is shit I would write a doctorate-level thesis on.

But we're going to try anyway.

So. After doing a lot to try to replicate animistic thinking, as well as taking a VERY deep read of the Norse myths, my theory is that Ragnarok is specifically allegory for societal collapse—the "end of the world" imagery and such is meant to convey what this feels like.

Recall what Odin says in Grimnismal. It goes something like this, since I can't be arsed to find the exact quote:

Huginn and Muninn fly over the world every day; while I fear Huginn ("thought") may not return, I fear Muninn's ("memory's") absence most.

When a society collapses, so does it's memory. It loses its technology, its methodologies, its paradigms, and everything it has learned about the world up to that point. Gone. Entire chapters of history erased.

What causes societal collapse is not always a conquering force, but is oftentimes the result of circumstances that a society orchestrates for itself. Think Rome.

People who have gone through societal collapse will probably develop an invested interest in figuring out how to prevent it entirely, so they don't have to start society all over again.

It's one thing to preserve the memory of "things collapsed and here's why" using a story. But it's another thing to do what apparently the Norse people did, which is cultivate a methodology for cognitively hardening their own society against collapse, using stories as a way to do it.

Like...I'm not kidding when I say they legitimately knew how the human mind works, and then built an entire system of stories and narratives that intentionally support the mind's freedom, cultivation, and agency. I can only convey a fraction of how this works in this post because the rest requires a deep-dive into behavioral psychology and neurological development.

All the tales leading to Ragnarok demonstrate various instances where the gods choose to follow their own agendas at the expense of the real people and forces in the world. All of these little things contribute to the magnitude of the event that is Ragnarok.

The tales represent these transgressions using allegories rather than literal events. This is because these stories were designed for children, who don't process information through a prefrontal cortex like we do as adults. They don't have them yet. But this gives kids an intuitive understanding for how circumstances of collapse feel, so they can recognize them in all their forms.

Loki is an allegory for the mischief we feel as children, and for the behaviors we demonstrate before we get to the age where we start valuing cooperation. In the myths, every time Loki causes mischief in ways that creates problems, the gods get mad at him and threaten Loki's life until he fixes his mess. Loki eventually becomes vindictive, kills Baldr in a jealous fit, and then is punished by being bound and buried beneath the ground, only to fight against the gods in Ragnarok.

The surface-level takeaway is a lesson in parenting: If we punish kids for their mischief, they're going to become vindictive adults, and these adults are going to have it out for the rest of society because they've been disenfranchised.

But it doesn't just end here. Consider how we punish ourselves for our own sense of mischief, beating ourselves up for having "problematic" thoughts and trying to bind and bury those thoughts in the depths of our mind.

These thoughts come from a place our mind known as the limbic system, which is focused on avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, and—most importantly—does not understand the world or make decisions using logic and reason, but in terms of what feels enjoyable and what doesn't.

We tend to call this system our inner child.

When we punish our inner child, that child starts doing exactly what Loki does and resorts to malicious and petty tricks. We can hold this behavior at bay until something causes us to "snap" (like Jörmungandr's tail does) and out comes the malice of the disenfranchised inner child, which creates a terrible cascade of social consequences for us.

Now, if we were to listen to these stories as kids, we would naturally be very upset whenever Loki was threatened of punished, because we think out of the limbic system at that age and Loki is meant to represent us—specifically, the state of being a kid. We would see what comes to pass, with Loki being imprisoned and fighting the gods against Ragnarok, and it would become clear to us that there's consequences for punishing mischief AND also causing too much of it.

Now I don't know about you, but I was very motivated by a sense of justice as a kid. Hearing Loki's arc would have inspired me to learn how to be friends with my sense of mischief while also learning to use it in ways that were cooperative and social, because this would have been how I could right the wrong I felt was done to Loki. It would also mean my own limbic system will not fight against me in the future, but be a modality of thought I can always access. (This is the beauty of the way the Norse myths are crafted; they are designed to instill knowledge of the world using mechanisms that reinforce one's own sense of agency and competency, so rather than being told the moral of this tale, it sets me up to run right into the conclusion it wants me to draw, but in a way that makes me feel smart and therefore inspires me to value it.)

The binding of Fenrir serves a similar allegory. When we become explosively angry in the way that Fenrir represents, it consumes our wisemind the same way Fenrir consumes Odin during Ragnarok. But this only happens if we bind Fenrir/our anger. By demonizing this nature of ours simply for existing, it will not only refuse to listen to us, but also turn against us. Remember that Fenrir was willing to socialize and cooperate with the gods before his betrayal.

(Honestly, I believe this is why ulfheiðnar existed the way they did. Even though the animalistic rage of ulfheiðnar was too terrible for domestic society, it was not demonized, but instead given a social function. People would learn to understand and partner with their own sense of rage, and I'm guessing this is also how they were able to keep their sense of reason and priorities straight even while going berserk from psychoactives.)

These two examples serve to illustrate how societal collapse stems from binding or punishing our own natures. But also fearing our own nature as mortals factors into it.

For example, Naglfar. This is a ship constructed of dead people's fingernails, and its completion is part of what signals the beginning of Ragnarok. But as the story goes, we can delay Naglfar's construction by trimming the nails of the dead before we bury them.

Naglfar represents "neglect for the dead," and this is significant because the act of no longer viewing the dead as people is sort of like the canary in the coal mine for no longer view each other as people...and no longer seeing people as people is what defines Ragnarok.

A society is at peace when its people have no fear of death, and having no fear of death comes only by incorporating death as a normal and familiar part of life, just like we do with birth. Our relationship with death is a litmus test for our relationship with our own humanity—if we fear the dead and cannot see them as human beings, then we are always going to fear a part of our own humanity, and be at war with it. The simple act of keeping the nails of the dead well-groomed because it stalls Naglfar's construction was a way to remind people why such a simple act was profoundly important.

And these are just the things that I can think of off the top of my head that are the most obvious examples. There are—and I shit you not—multitudes of these things laced within the Norse myths.

(I haven't even gotten to the part about how the Norse creation myth uses what the womb feels like to characterize it. Telling this story to very little children helps them establish a sense of familiarity, belonging, and secure attachment with the entire world from the get-go. If they learn the world is everything they've already experienced, then their bodies will never be afraid of it, because nothing about it will feel unknown or unknowable. Like, how fucking dope can you get.)

So here's where we get to the really dense irony of all this: Why we don't pick up on all these nuances as Westerners and have so far missed this entirely.

It is for two reasons.

The first is because our society values the things that the Norse people identified as contributing to societal collapse—namely, the act of conquering/competing against other forces and conquering/competing against our own natures. The transgressions of the Aesir are not things we register as problematic because to us they're normal.

The second is that we don't think animistically. The way we are taught to convey, interpret, and transmit information is designed PURELY by and for the prefrontal cortex, with neglect to everything else (if you ever wonder why Americans look weird in how we behave, this is why). But because we only prioritize communicating this way, we're missing out on all the context added within the Norse myths. These myths function the same way Old Norse kennings did, in that they are designed to speak to ALL areas of the brain at once and in tandem, but if we only engage with it using one part of the brain, we're only going to get a small piece of the picture and the rest is going to look weird.

(Little experiment for you: Try to logic something out in your mind or think through a complex problem without using words or sentences to do it. Use any other kind of thought-process besides language. I promise you that not only is this possible, but it yields a completely different kind of experience and conclusion than you might otherwise reach.)

Honestly, I don't even think Snorri himself fully understood what he was looking at when he was recording the Norse myths. I think he was just writing them down according to how they were told, word-for-word. But his cluelessness is our good fortune now, because he not only preserved the cultural stories, but also what I consider an entire cognitive technology.

And every time I look at it, I can't help but think about the generations of people who sat around the fire in the dead of winter, weaving, crafting, and figuring out better ways to fortify their society, raise kids so they became fine and truly fearless people, and conserve information. This is, as far as I'm concerned, real magic.

They knew some shit.

[opencommunion]

one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

[thydungeongal]

Yeah. Sometimes I feel alone in this but I will always take inarticulate or even problematic yet sincere allyship over someone clearly just trying to check the right boxes.

Inclusion is important but when, say, dragon age uses the word nonbinary it feels incoherent. You can't just insert queer language without thinking about why the language exists in a given world, but a corporation is incapable of thinking about that bc it's inherently messy.

Oh absolutely. And this is actually something I have talked about to my friends: identity means so much to me and while it's sometimes just fun to play a character in D&D who, like me, is a queer woman, without any friction, I care so much about stories that center identity and about the potential for storytelling and exploring those topics in fantasy that I don't want just another heroic fantasy story but the characters introduce themselves with their 21st century identity labels and pronouns.

I want to know how gender and sexuality work in the messed up fantasy society where magic is real. I want to know what made-up terms people who interact with magic on the daily will come up with to describe their relationship to sexuality and gender. I want to know the unique ways in which people transgress those boundaries.

And heck, I want games that explore those topics through metaphor. Like how Monsterhearts is on the surface about monsters but on a thematic level it is about queerness. D&D is queer on the surface in the sense that it has a gay coat of paint. But on a thematic and gameplay level there's nothing.

[cultkinkcoven]

Lucifer HATES those who use their power to harm others. Like child abusers and rapists and pedophiles and the people you're defending. His whole mythos is about rejecting harmful authority. If you think that he would care about anyone who uses their power for bad, let alone help them, it just confirms to me what I've known for a long time. You don't know Lucifer. You think you do, but you know the bits and pieces you've romanticized in your fanfiction novels you post. That seems to be all of him you've ever met. It should make you sad, it certainly makes me sad.

Oh I'm so excited to answer this one. yay

This is not a debate over whether abuse is wrong—we agree that it is. It’s a conflict over how evil is dealt with: eradication vs. reformation; vengeance vs. radical accountability.

Lucifer is an ethical sovereign, who holds dominion over Hell not because he is evil, but because he is strong enough to be responsible for evil without becoming it. Lucifer doesn’t excuse, but he does not abandon. You want Lucifer to be a God of moral clarity when he is the God of moral complexity. Want quick and easy black and white morals? I hear Jesus and his posse is really good for that.

Here's a very interesting lesson about Lord Lucifer that you're going to love, Lucifer as the God of paradoxes. Lucifer as the God who refuses simple definition. Lucifer as the God who turns away from doctrine.

"Lucifer HATES those who use their power to harm others." YES. Of course he does. You're right, much of his mythos is about rebellion against unjust authority, liberating the oppressed, and protecting the vulnerable from abuse. Absolutely, he is the light bringer. The one who breaks shackles. He is the God of taking back power.

However, he is also the God of the Outcast, he is also the God of the Degenerate, the freak, he is the father of monsters, Ruler of Thaumiel and keeper of the hidden gnosis. He is both the protector of the vulnerable and the warden of the monstrous. Lucifer is a transgressive force, one who operates outside of binary morality.

He is the king of Hell, not because he is evil but because he understands evil, intimately.

Protecting the vulnerable from abuse, funnily enough, means keeping abusers on a pretty tight leash. Is he protecting abusers from harm because he likes them? No, he is making sure his department stays organized. Your emotional feelings about his department do not matter to him. It is one of his primary responsibilities to not only contain those who are considered the worst, but to do so without disrespecting his principles of liberation, autonomy, self respect. To disarm evil without becoming evil yourself.

You think Lucifer is afraid to do what is difficult. You think Lucifer doesn't know how to approach bad people with anything other than violence, and that is because you do not know Lucifer. You don't understand that there is another option. You want easy solutions because thinking is too hard.

Does Lucifer help abusers? No.

Does Lucifer like abusers? No.

Does Lucifer manage abusers? YES. management is not endorsement. Does Lucifer punish abusers? YES. Does Lucifer discard abusers? NO.

He holds them tightly, with empathy, not sympathy, and looks them in the eye. He ensures that they are disarmed of their ability to cause harm, he dissects them, and then! and then! He transforms them. He forces them to change. Empathy is an instrument of confrontation, dismantling, and reconstitution.

Lucifer doesn't love abusers. He doesn't have to. He is responsible for their punishment and retribution. That does not mean he is a Lord of cruelty, nor will he be cruel for the sake of your personal feelings.

Lucifer does not feel affection or love for all his demons, nor does he love all those who belong in his sphere. Lucifer is the God of the degenerate and the freak. He isn't going to flinch because a fetish is problematic. He does not know shame, he doesn't care about respectability or arbitrary morals. He is going to act because an action is harmful.

Why does Lucifer tell us to have empathy for abusers? For all people in general?

Because you cannot adequately overcome what you do not understand. You cannot know how to disarm abusers if you can't even stand to look at them. You cannot make people be accountable if you cannot hold them. Lucifer doesn't want to kill all abusers, no. That's far far too easy. Lucifer wants to hold all abusers accountable, he wants them to live and experience the consequences of their actions. That is justice. That is how we protect victims. By keeping abusers in check, not by villainizing them.

Lucifer has seen the worst of the worst. He is responsible for the worst of the worst. And he is there to be witness to all those that society turns their eye on. That includes those who are dealing with complex and taboo fixations, his goal is to help these things be understood so they can be navigated. That is always his goal, understanding.

He does, absolutely reserve space for those who have done wrong. Yes, even the most wrong thing in the entire world. Not because he has sympathy, not because he excuses, but because he is the God of Resurrection. He is the one who atones for sin, and he is the one who remains when everyone else turns away. He will not forsake, he will not abandon, he will not deny. He will hold everyone accountable.

Empathy for abusers? You think that's too hard for Lord Lucifer to do? Lmao. You underestimate him. Lucifer’s radical empathy is not softness, it is power.

Your problem is that you desperately want to simplify and sanitize that which was never simple, clean, or safe. Lord Lucifer is not afraid to do his job, and he does it damn well. Lord Lucifer is not afraid of what makes you uncomfortable. Your inability to handle the reality of his nature is a personal problem.

You accuse me of not knowing Lucifer. Okay. I accuse you of mental laziness, of only recognizing a Lucifer that is black-and-white because you cannot stomach his contradictions.

I won't spend time trying to justify the legitimateness of my relationship with Lucifer to you, I actually think he would be annoyed with me if I did. Proving some imaginary threshold of legitimacy in the minds of strangers is not my responsibility or concern. The only opinion that matters to me is his, and he seems quite satisfied. Think whatever you want. No need to be sad.

[perseidlion]

There's a lot that has been made of the Cat King and whether he's "bad" or "problematic." Putting aside that's a silly conversation to have about a fictional character (who is there to add conflict and drive the story forward) it also misunderstands Cat's Whole Deal (TM.) Think of him like one of the fae. He's very decidedly not human, and although he isn't called a fae canonically (and I don't think he actually is) he is called a spirit. And there are some things he does that are decidedly fae-like.

He strikes bargains.

He protects his domain.

He punishes those who transgress his domain.

His punishment is a curse combined with a task.

He has aspects of a trickster figure which is common in fae mythology.

He has his own unspoken rules, but if you break them, you still need to be punished.

Edwin slights Cat by forcing his will on one of his subjects. In Cat's world, that is a crime that needs to be answered for. He offers sexual favours, which Edwin refuses, so he gives him another option. It isn't an impossible task, but it is an inconvenient one. In Cat's world, letting Edwin off with no punishment is simply not something he would do. So all the questions about whether he's problematic or that he violates consent are silly in this context. Of course if he was a real human man and he forced Edwin to stay somewhere against his will, that would be bad. But that's not what's happening here. He's a spirit with a domain and Edwin misstepped and had to pay the price as a result.

It is also important to keep in mind that he is an ANIMAL spirit who just happens to be able to take human form. That also explains some of his behaviour (including the horniness and the cowardice to some degree.)

This also makes the age gap discourse moot, too. It's the same kind of dynamic as a teenager and an ancient vampire. Except in this case, Edwin is not really a teenager and has existed for over 100 years.

I love Dead Boy Detectives but man, those characters are not teenagers. They don't act like teens, they don't look like teens and they run around, cross international borders and live on their own. They are at the very least out of high school, if not in their early twenties. It actually feels silly that the show keeps calling them kids when the story doesn't treat them that way.

BUT that is really neither here nor there and is a topic for another day! My point is just that it is silly to apply human morality to Cat and condemn him based on that.

If you just don't like him, and/or don't like him and Edwin, that's totally fine. But there's no need to condemn him/that dynamic based on how his behaviour would be interpreted in real life. That's frankly, pretty silly.

[balrogballs]

"#and don’t get me started about vague ‘islamicate’ aesthetics in diversity-fanart…#that is outright just SLB-bollywood core#aka biggest cultural export and one of the clearest methods of ‘erasing muslims while using sexy mughalcore aesthetics’"

hello sorry this is not directly relevant to your tags but i was wondering if you had any thoughts on like. (correct me if i am wrong) the indianisation of middle-eastern media (e.g. the 2019 live action aladdin and the casting of charithra chandran in one piece live action as the princess of a middle east/north africa inspired country) or if you had any leads on commentary about it!

OH BOY OH BOY THANK YOU FOR THE QUESTION, and apologies in advance that I have, as per, taken the opportunity to yap, and run… the comparison did have me Thinking A Lot on my train ride today so thank you for that as well, considering my commutes are normally very dreary…

Also before I actually start, a quick note re: my tags referring to fandom, I do want to note that it’s not that I’m calling these elements “problematic” or whatever, hell I often enjoy the spectacle, and have used these aesthetics myself. I also think Islamicate aesthetics do have progressive potential when done with a degree of self-awareness and used as a tool rather than a medium, especially in period-fantasy eg Tolkien (and not to blow smoke up my own ass but thinking about how Maglor and his musicality is introduced in Prayers via old-timey romantic ghazals and qawwalis before he starts singing about “waspfuckers”), or even in cinema itself as with the old Kamal Amrohi film Pakeezah, one of the best “queer death/anti-futurity” narratives that Indian cinema has come out with. 

It’s more that I see these aesthetics replicated so often as progressive in and of itself, “representative” of a culture, specifically, the South Asian subcontinent and India in particular, where said representation just directly echoes the dominant cultural narrative whilst framing itself as transgressive or antiracist… without such a framing, the aesthetics aren’t “regressive” in themselves. I see it kind of like, idk, making Tinkerbell wear a Wonder Woman leotard, where the leotard isn’t a problem and can be cool, but the intention of it is deeply uncool. Or to use a MENA example, a 2025 Iranian state production of LotR starring Ayatollah Elrond dealing out fatwas to Sauron Rushdie. But with both examples being called “progressive antiracist portrayals” that will decolonise fandom/cinema/literature/whatever. Each region or regime has its own nationalistic propaganda, but Bollywood and Hollywood have a much larger stake in global film culture so to speak, hence me focusing on them. Basically, less “this is bad and people shouldn’t do it” and more “this is what’s actually happening here”. 

I also have reading recommendations/reference list at the end because I don’t want to look like I’m talking out of my ass lol. 

So my (academic) background when it comes to film studies is more in the Indian popular cinema area since the cultural exports I worked on were from the subcontinent, in that I did a comparative study and Malayalam regional cinema read against Bombay-produced ‘cultural export’ films… And coming from that position, I’d say the ‘Indiafication’ of MENA aka Middle Eastern & North African identities in Anglophone cinema, primarily Hollywood, and the ‘Islamicate’ tropes of Bollywood cinema, are two manifestations of a very similar visual-political logic, but also that the former is proof of the latter’s relative “success”. 

By “visual-political logic”, I mean both speak to a similar selective appropriation & decontextualisation of Muslim cultures to serve dominant narratives, ethno/nationalism in the case of Indian popular cinema + cultural imperialism in the case of Hollywood/US cinema. However, the historical trajectories of said flattenings are very different, as Indian cinema actually used to portray Muslim subjects as far more complex and multifaceted (see: Garm Hava, Pakeezah or early Shyam Benegal films, or even current Malayalam middle cinema), but now either view them as romanticised, nostalgic ‘Islamicate’ relics (see: Umrao Jaan, Bajirao Mastani, Kalank) or walking, talking terror threat (see: Kerala Story, Uri: Surgical Strike) or both (see: Padmaavat). And with Hollywood, “Indian-humour” of the “haha they have stinky-lunchboxes” variety was widespread until, speaking loosely here, the late 2010s, when politics-of-representation entered the field.

So the "Islamicate" in Bollywood refers to cultural artefacts shaped by Islamic civilisation but divorced entirely from Indian Muslims: stuff like ornate calligraphy, Mughal courtly architecture, Urdu-inflected dialogue, sufistic motifs. These forms remain central to Bollywood’s visual economy, especially when drawing up a romanticised precolonial North India, yet detaches it from living Muslim presence in the country, which is seen as undesirable to the point that citizenship itself is withheld. And “real Muslims” are then demonised in the exact same film industry, while the aesthetics of precolonial Mughlai Islam is commodified… especially insidious when the “Indian Muslims are descendants of barbaric Mughal invaders” has not only been used to whitewash extreme acts of violence and brutality to said population, but is quite literally the official line taken by the nation-state. Essentially:

The ✨ Islamicate ✨ in Popular Cinema:

👿 Muslims 👿 in Popular Cinema:

The reason I mention this specific bifurcation or go into Islamicate cinema at all even though your question doesn’t relate to that, is because imo Bollywood’s selective aestheticisation and erasure of Muslim identity is mirrored in global cinema and one of the ways its done is through said Indiafication of Middle Eastern cultures and individuals. So in Anglophone films, especially post 9/11, actors of South Asian descent are often cast as generic Middle Eastern, Arab or “vaguely Muslim” characters without cultural specificity… like the Aladdin example you mention, where any racial/religious complexity is collapsed into this fungible “brownness”. On the surface level, it’s that South Asian, often Indian, bodies are used to stand-in for the Muslim ‘other’ in order to avoid using Arab/West Asian actors, who are considered more politically volatile. But further in, this kind of superficially diverse casting is also used to mask the persistent Orientalist tropes in US/UK cinema: an Arab Muslim is either a violent terrorist, an abject victim, a fully-assimilated patriot, or a liberal poster-child who disavows all aspects of his ethnic, religious or national identity aside from said vague “brownness”.

South Asian actors, especially Indian ones, are seen as more pliable: familiar to Western audiences through the global reach of Bollywood, and yet “brown” enough to evoke Muslim alterity without ever actually naming it. So Jack Shaheen talks about this very in depth in Reel Bad Arabs, but this kind of flattening isn’t just out of convenience or “they think we’re all the same”, it serves the ideological function of separating the viewer from “real Muslim lives” so that, say, imperial wars instigated by the States, or Britain’s surveillance regime (Prevent), can continue without a mass “hey aren’t those actual people?” awakening. And the use of Indian actors and “Bollywood” aesthetics in films or other visual productions that ostensibly depict the Middle East just reinscribes that racial hierarchy: India and Indians posited as a more acceptable, liberal, secular postcolony, while the Arab world can remain as the locus of danger, tribalism, and extremism. And the language of representation, ie, the well meaning and often diasporically originating “finally we Indians, nay, not just we but a super scrubbed down and regionally isolated performance of our culture, get to participate in a Hollywood that used to be super racist about us”, is used to couch that process, in order to tamp down protest against what is just straight up Orientalism II: Cinematic Boogaloo…

Also was chatting about this with @antlered-vixen and he mentioned the role of colourism and the catered-to audiences’ need for ontological signifiers for The Evil Muslim Other, and I think that’s definitely worth mentioning here, so a swift addition on the matter with these indented paragraphs:

Colourism absolutely impacts casting practices in both Bollywood and Hollywood, shapes which bodies are deemed visually “authentic”, and this is definitely a thing when it comes to villainous Scary Muslim Terrorist roles, or in period fantasy pieces, Jaffar-type Roles (and I think this is actually an area where both the PJackson films and RoP have shat the bed in). Darker-skinned South Asian actors are disproportionately hired to portray violent or extremist Muslim men because their appearance conforms to visual tropes that associate darkness with deviance and hypermasculinity, again thinking about that colonial visual economy, paper-bag ism etc. And global cinema, particularly post-9/11, these actors are frequently cast as undifferentiated “Middle Eastern” threats, signifying a generic, menacing brownness, eg Body of Lies or Homeland… and this logic comes from epidermalisation (Fanon term, iirc) ie. reduction of identity to skin where darkness = ontological threat.

+ crucially, this visual coding is gendered: darker Muslim men are not only racialised but also hypermasculinised, portrayed as aggressive, libidinal, and incapable of tenderness (again thinking about Prayers Maedhros who is deliberately said to have “white” facial features ie eye colour/hair colour combined with tanned skin, hypermasculine Muslim aesthetics and other external signifiers lol…).

But yes, this sort of thing ties easily into broader regimes of postcolonial masculinity, where the Muslim man becomes a symbolic antithesis to the secular, palatable, liberal subject. In Bollywood, you can see this (above) in Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat, whose deliberately darkened skin, “animalistic” sexuality, and violent excess mark him as both racially and morally “other” to the fair-skinned, dharmic Rajput hero. In both contexts, darker-skinned South Asian men are thus instrumentalised rather than “included”: their bodies used to enact a performance of dangerous Muslim masculinity that stabilises nationalist or imperialist narratives, whether it be Hindutva-inflected “secularism” in India or liberal multiculturalism in the West…

Overall, I guess my take on the matter is that these visual/casting economies aren’t just accidental or representational or unrelated, but ideological tools which uphold geopolitical power structures on a global basis. As such, US cinema’s Indiafication of the Middle East + Bollywood’s Islamicate aesthetic both serve Orientalism, aka romanticising + pathologising whatever iteration of The East is deemed to be the current threat. In the postcolonial and neoliberal movement this is mediated not just through journalistic or political propaganda but also circuits of soft power… hence Bollywood, as India’s most powerful cultural export, participates in a “theatrical articulation/performance of the nation”, where the country’s ostensible pluralism and diversity is marketed abroad even as religious minorities and the caste-oppressed face everything from precarity to state violence on the domestic front. And similar to that, Anglophone cinema’s substitution of Indian for Arab actors aligns with global capital's desire for de-risked diversity: South Asian actors are often seen as less politically fraught, less culturally resistant, and more easily integrated into Western liberal narratives. 

And in both instances, Muslim cultures are not represented but “managed”, aka converted into aesthetic forms that reinforce the mythologies of secular India and liberal Empire, while occluding the lived realities of exclusion, surveillance, and violence faced by people in the MENA region across national contexts, which includes both international occupation/threats but also regional ethno/religio-nationalist regimes, eg, Saudi Wahabbism, Ayatollah as heads of state in Iran, etc…

Hope that’s a decent chewing through? And just to swiftly swerve back to fandom but also with cinema in general, it’s less that I want to see ‘less’ of that specific aesthetic, and more that there are dozens and dozens of other ways to define ‘Indian-ness’ beyond Bollywood, or the kind of costuming and set-pieces used in these big-budget Bollywood films. Eg. looking beyond the UP-Delhi-Bombay belt gets you quite a lot of costuming room, and frankly I think creating an AU in which Maedhros and Maglor walk around in mundus should be referred to as my sexiest and most valuable contribution to the Silmarillion fandom…

Thank you so much again for the question, this was fun to think about, and I hope I didn't sound too dry because I feel like I can sometimes... and sorry for going on all these random tangents!

 And a reference/readings list, as promised... a couple of sources are academic-access, iirc the Alsultany one, but I've picked out WorldCat library links for the others!

Sunaina Maira - Youth, Citizenship & Empire After 9/11

Jack Shaheen - Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Evelyn Alsultany - Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11

Tejaswini Ganti - Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry

Mushirul Hasan - Legacy of a Divided Nation + Moderate or Militant

Marshall Hodgson - on the generally valuable debate around the term 'Islamicate' when used in wider-cultural terms, however, pretty uncontroversial when discussing Bollywood/cinema...

Christophe Jaffrelot - Modi's India - rise of an ethnic democracy

Priya Joshi - Bollywood's India: a Public Fantasy

[3kockeleda]

"smut", censorship & why we must defend the freedom to read

Every era polices its stories. Today, the battleground is digital: TikTok, Twitter, and Tumblr simmer with moral panics over “problematic” fiction. At the heart of this debate lies a paradox: in an age that champions individuality and free expression, why are readers—particularly women and queer communities—increasingly shamed for enjoying narratives labeled “dark romance,” “smut,” or “spicy”? These terms, weaponized as shorthand for “morally bankrupt,” obscure a deeper cultural anxiety: the fear of stories that center taboo desires, power dynamics, or unapologetic female agency. What begins as criticism of tropes often escalates into demands for censorship, blurring the line between discourse and dogma. The stakes here transcend genre—this is about who gets to control narratives, and why.

Censorship has always targeted the marginalized. In the 19th century, novels like Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were deemed “obscene” for depicting female desire outside patriarchal norms. By the mid-20th century, paperback romances adorned with shirtless heroes (think Fabio rescuing a swooning heroine) dominated bookstore racks. These novels were dismissed as frivolous “chick lit,” relegated to the realm of harmless escapism. Yet they sold millions, offering women a rare space to claim ownership of their fantasies.

Fast-forward to today. Their spiritual successors—stories exploring BDSM, morally gray relationships, or trauma—face a more insidious suppression: algorithmic shadow-banning, deplatforming, and viral callout campaigns that frame readers as complicit in harm. The shift from physical book burnings to digital erasure reflects a new puritanism, one couched in progressive language but rooted in the same paternalism: “These ideas are too dangerous for you.” Platforms like TikTok, which amplify outrage for engagement, reduce complex narratives to soundbite controversies. A single trope—a mafia romance’s nonconventional relationship, a bully romance’s power imbalance—is stripped of context, becoming fodder for hashtag activism. Lost in this frenzy is the distinction between depiction and endorsement, between art and advocacy.

Critics of dark romance often argue, “These stories normalize abuse!” Yet this concern is selectively applied. 

Consider:

Male-Centric Media: Films like Fight Club (domestic terrorism, toxic masculinity) and The Sopranos (misogyny, murder) are analyzed as “complex art.” Video games like Grand Theft Auto let players enact mass violence, yet their audiences aren’t accused of glorifying crime.

Queer and Feminist Narratives: Stories by marginalized authors—e.g., Carmilla (lesbian vampirism) or Tampa (female predator tropes)—face disproportionate scrutiny. Their themes are pathologized, their audiences interrogated.

This double standard reveals a cultural discomfort with women and queer people claiming narrative autonomy. Dark romance, often written by and for women, subverts the “pure heroine” archetype, allowing characters—and readers—to explore rage, desire, and imperfection. To dismiss these stories as “toxic” is to deny women the right to messy, multifaceted representation.

Fiction is a laboratory for the human experience. Psychologists argue that dark themes in art serve as simulations, letting readers safely confront fears, taboos, or repressed emotions. A 2019 study in Psychology of Aesthetics found that readers of transgressive fiction often engage in more ethical reasoning, not less, as they analyze characters’ choices.

Consider the appeal of dark romance:

Agency in Restriction: Heroines navigating oppressive worlds (e.g., mafia romances) often reclaim power within constraints, mirroring real struggles against systemic misogyny.

Catharsis Through Hyperbole: Exaggerated tropes (obsessive love, revenge plots) externalize internalized emotions, offering emotional release.

Censoring such works doesn’t protect readers—it infantilizes them, implying they can’t separate fiction from reality.

History shows that censorship rarely stops at “protecting” audiences. Once normalized, it expands to suppress dissent:

1980s “Satanic Panic”: Moral crusades against Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music targeted countercultural communities.

2020s Book Bans: U.S. schools have banned texts like Gender Queer and The Hate U Give, conflating LGBTQ+ and anti-racist narratives with “obscenity.”

Calls to censor smut follow the same playbook: frame subjective discomfort as objective harm, then demand removal “for the greater good.” But who decides what’s “harmful”? Algorithms? Politicians? Corporations? Amazon’s arbitrary delisting of LGBTQ+ romance novels in 2021 (“content violations”) proves corporate censorship is already here—and it’s arbitrary.

To censor “smut” is to endorse a world where stories are policed by the timid, the authoritarian, or the algorithm. It undermines foundational principles:

Freedom of Literature: Art is not a public service announcement. It must be free to provoke, unsettle, and challenge.

Reader Autonomy: Trust adults to choose their media. Advocacy for content warnings and nuanced critique is valid; eradication is not.

Media Pluralism: A free society requires diverse narratives—including those deemed uncomfortable, “immoral,” or politically inconvenient.

The fight against censorship isn’t about defending specific tropes; it’s about resisting the idea that any story is “too dangerous” to exist. As Salman Rushdie wrote, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” Let readers revel in their smut, their Shakespeare, their sapphic space operas. Let them dissect, debate, or devour stories without shame.

The alternative—a sanitized, homogeneous cultural landscape—is a far darker tale.

Defend the right to read. Defend the freedom to imagine. And never apologize for the stories that make us human.

[shiftandshade]

So OP has blocked me (which proves they knew how all along, shocker), deleted their post and restricted access to the callout list, and rebranded entirely. Unfortunately, the internet is forever.

This isn't a call to action or anything, I don't want people to harass this person. I just want to point out that the 'callout post' they made was a list of names with bullet points of alleged transgressions.

They did not offer any proof. Some of the accusations are abhorrent, some possibly criminal. Serious stuff to accuse people you don't know of, especially without proof. Maybe OP doesn't know the meaning of the word 'defamation', but I invite them to do some googling.

Don't do this crap. There is so much horrible stuff happening in the world, so many REAL problems that we could be pouring our energy into. Callout posts for clout and alarmism don't contribute anything, and the only people who care are going to be the other toxic people who think spreading hate and fear is the right way to express their discomfort with a subject. It's just a way to demonstrate that you think you have a moral high ground above other people in a community.

No one cares. We just know to avoid you from now on. The result of that btw is making yourself a pariah in the wider fandom space, because no one wants to end up with their name on your list. They're not going to stop doing whatever you think is problematic just because you whine about it, they're just going to block you like you should have done in the first place.

If you agree with this person and this kind of behavior, please seek help. I don't mean that as a jab; if your relationship with fandom content causes you to spend time and effort doing things like this, if you willingly sit and stew in angst and hate, please see a therapist or spend some time offline.

Fandom is supposed to be fun, a way for us to safely express ourselves and explore more complex themes. All of fiction is like this, it always has been. If you think what people do with their little fictional characters is so dire that you need to keep lists like this, then you're probably not having fun, so why are you here?