comrade-emma

[comrade-emma]

I'm so upset over that Belarussian Zionist beating a two year old Afghan Iranian kid at the airport

[comrade-emma]

Honor Mosab's memory by donating to The Sameer Project.

[comrade-emma]

In honor of Yuri Day, here are my current yuri and lesbian ships:

[comrade-emma]

IT FUCKIN YURI DAAAAAAAAAAAY

[comrade-emma]

One terrible take I saw when watching a video on the Ultimate Kevin arc was from someone with a fucking Trump icon claiming UAF Ben was a Gary Stu who was too serious for no reason compared to Omniverse. They’re full on MAGA btw and admitted on their quora that they would report a trans woman to the police if they found out they were dating one which is the type of shit that gets them raped, abused and killed. I love the Ben 10 franchise but the fandom has an issue with reactionary dudebros who only care about powerscaling, only watch it because it’s an older show with a mainly cishet white cast and are hostile to anyone who makes LGBTQ or autism/adhd headcanons for any of the characters.

Regarding their take about UAF Ben, no, he was not too serious. Most hate UAF Ben for becoming arrogant in AF season 3 and for cheating on Julie with Eunice but not him being serious. He had to act that way because the stakes were much higher than the OS. Max went missing in the first arc of AF, the Highbreed wanted to wipe out all life in the universe, Aggregor kidnapped five aliens and tried absorb a baby celestialsapian, Kevin deformed himself to stop Aggregor and turned back into the monster from their childhood and the Dagon was a dimension warping Cthulhu that even Ultimate Waybig couldn’t defeat. I’m pretty sure most people would act serious in those situations because as 10 year old Ben in Forge of Creation said, “if we mess up this time, everybody could die”. Whether you think OV Ben is more relatable or not, UAF Ben wasn’t an edgelord who acted that way for no reason, he did so because he and his team were the only ones capable of beating whatever threat they encountered.

[comrade-emma]

"Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX" TV Anime special illustrations by final episode's animator YY Shibata

Yatabe Touko final episode' director

Mayumi Nakamura:

Source / source 2 / source 3

[comrade-emma]

My Unpopular OTP

Decided to write a more thought out essay on my OTP than the one I wrote last year with some additional thoughts on why I ship it, the way it’s perceived by the fandom and why it deserves more respect. Go around the internet and you’ll find people who will be quick to call the pairing incest and accuse its fans of having an Oedipal complex. On tumblr it’s often labeled “proship” and LGBTQ erasure because of the perceived incest and the popularity of Kawoshin. While some do ship it in a proship manner, I think you could make arguments, which the fandom has done for years, that it’s not incest or at least not an “incest for incest” sake ship like Pinecest or Madrigalcest.

I think people are quick to slap a sibling label onto Rei and Shinji’s dynamic because of her foreshadowed connection to Yui and ignore any nuance regarding their feelings. I had a discussion on the Reishin subreddit a while back and one person left an interesting response to argument that they are sibling coded:

“Reishin is sort of a litmus test for how you perceive the intricacies of relationships. If you’re a literal person you might be caught up on the implied familial connection, to the exclusion of any other interpretation of her and Shinji’s dynamic. You see it in how people tend to interpret a lot of the key moments between them as being driven by an underlying, subconscious recognition of their apparent genetic bond, and an outright rejection of there being any attraction between them.”

That was of course referring to the scene where Shinji compliments Rei by saying she’d make a good mother, in some translations it’s housewife. Fans are quick to view it as him saying she looks like Yui and not the alternative of him trying to connect with a friend and potential love interest. Rei is a very subtle character who is often written off as having no emotions when she’s really pessimistic and doesn’t feel the need to open up to others. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of her being a metaphor for escapism and a relationship between her and Shinji being a tradwife fantasy. Rei isn’t blindly submissive, she follows Gendo’s orders because she’s apathetic and it’s what she thinks benefits her and grows to accept that she is not his replacement for Yui in the EOE.

Regarding the incest debate, I’d like to add a few things. The rebuilds giving her a closer connection to Yui isn’t to sink the ship as much as it is to further the parallels between Shinji and Gendo, who represents his darker side. Shinji doesn’t view her as his sister either. In the alternate reality during episode 26, he imagines her as a transfer student with no relation to his family and she doesn’t view him as her brother. The argument about her being a clone can be countered by her not being an exact copy due to being part Angel and how much of Yui’s remains were found being unspecified. Fanfics like “Going Another Way” depicted her as being a distant relative at worst or having donors from multiple humans. Lastly, I’d like to address something about the manga and Sadamoto’s statements. Some point to Shinji saying he doesn’t like Rei in a “go out with her” way as proof their dynamic is familial but Sadamoto would later describe their relationship as being mutual love between a man and woman but never specified what type of love, leaving it up to interpretation with the manga giving evidence for all of Shinji’s relationships as to not cause further divide. Sadamoto is, unfortunately, very xenophobic towards Koreans so people are free to take his word on this or reject it.

I also think people don’t see LRS as having any romantic potential because it’s different from a typical anime romance. The romcom, tsundere style of romance that Asushin is more akin to, which isn’t to disparage Asushin or its fans. I actually happen to like it and would probably ship it if Rei didn’t exist and I do identify a bit with Asuka regarding her desire to be the best to get approval. Last year, I wrote an essay about how Makoto Shinkai’s iconic films, Your Name and Weathering With You do somewhat mirror the rival EVA ships. Asushin and YN being more of a romcom opposites attract story with elements of tragedy and hope whereas Reishin and WWY are a bit darker with a forbidden love aspect to them.

I grew to love LRS because it’s the story of two lonely outcasts helping each other grow up, which you could say about Asushin as well, but Shinji encourages Rei to break out of her shell and reject her role as Gendo’s doll and in turn, Rei calls out Shinji’s need for validation and reminds him that he’s not the only one who has it tough, pushing him to reject instrumentality and love himself. It’s a different kind of love story from your typical anime but a compelling one nonetheless with Shinji being further tied to Rei in the rebuilds, choosing not to run away in 2.22, accepting Rei Q is still Rei and creating a world without EVAs for her in 3.0+1.0. It isn’t fair to write it off as just an incest fetish when that’s not why those who like it ship it.

I find the way the ship is viewed by the fandom to be tragic. Barely anyone likes it or is willing to explore its potential because of the incest debate or the escapism interpretation. I don’t hate Kawoshin but I do dislike how it’s the only thing a lot of fans, especially on tumblr, talk about while ignoring the other pairings or female characters as well as Kaworu being propped up as the only valid partner for Shinji. LAS and LRS aren’t necessarily LGBTQ erasure just because some dudebros hate Kawoshin. People can interpret Rei or Asuka as queer too along with the bisexual and trans Shinji headcanons. Every ship, including Kawoshin, is messy in EVA and that’s the point. It’s a show about humanity, how far people can fall and accepting yourself as well as rejecting the idea of the perfect relationship or partner which doesn’t exist. I don’t think one can just slap a proship label on Asushin or Reishin without understanding the nuance of those ships by dumbing them down to just “incest” or the hospital scene. No one has to like or agree LRS if it’s not your cup of tea but I hope this will give people a greater appreciation of it.

[comrade-emma]

"we're at war with the middle east now" you never stopped being at war with the middle east you idiots.

[comrade-emma]

War criminals like Netanyahu aren't the core of the problem. They are products of systems that birth, nurture and maintain them. That's what is at the core of it. If Netanyahu disappears today, another version of him will appear in under 30 seconds. I'm not saying shift your focus from these war criminals, but understand them as products of these systems. Our emphasis must be to abolish these structures that make it possible for these criminals to kill and destroy the earth with complete impunity.

[comrade-emma]

Keep making up lies that put vulnerable people at risk so you can sleep at night and pretend there’s no genocide. You liberals go on preaching about charity because you want to look good without actually doing anything that actually helps people. Israel blocks aid and cannot be trusted to give Palestinians what they need. Since you people refuse to learn or listen to Palestinians who are not scammers or traffickers and write off anyone who vets or reaches out to those organizing the campaigns, I’ll leave these here:

Not to mention the only other people besides democrats and Zionists agreeing with you about them all being scams are literal Nazis like the one I screenshotted here:

Side note, you guys have no right to preach about scams while wasting your money on tumblr badges and AO3 donations.

You are not getting “harassed” for no reason. You continue to stick your head in the sand and make up lies. You preach about how gofundme doesn’t operate in Gaza while ignoring that we’ve explained these things and that family or friends in other countries are the ones organizing the campaigns. Just like how you refuse to accept that Biden is a terrible person who has made his career off the oppression of black and brown people and lied about calling for a ceasefire because “Trump is worse”. Palestinians did not support Biden or Harris and do not owe them any sympathy.

Leftists did not reject Harris because she was a black woman nor do we hate democrats because they are black. We also don’t treat the revolution like a Christian rapture we can start at anytime or firebomb Walmarts. You make up straw men so you can present yourself as reasonable. Harris refused to take a true stand on trans rights and moved to the right on immigration, preferring to chase after McCain voters than appeal to her base. Democrats have expressed willingness to throw trans people under the bus and you expect us to sit back and take it because they are the “lesser evil”? We don’t even like AOC or Bernie because they are the lightning rod that keeps radical ideas under your party’s thumb. Democrats have always co-opted radical ideas like BLM to derail them, same with Obama in 2008 or RFK in 1968.

The only one who is a vile ghoul beneath consideration is you. You have chosen not to learn and the only thing you liberals really care about is your stupid brunch or ability to go on without a care in the world as long as a democrat is in office. You have put Gazans at risk just like fascists such as Matt Walsh make up lies about trans kids. The only thing you do is talk down to and condescend to leftists when many of us are marginalized and already had it terrible under your heroes. You have no real philosophy or principles besides vibes and hating Cheeto man. You, not us, are the ones responsible for what’s happening and you want to act smug and preach “told you so” but act like the victim when getting pushback, just like evangelicals and republicans.

It is nice that when I check all the profiles of people telling me to kms or calling me a zio they all are posting the most obvious Gaza scams. Lets hope they lose all their money 😊

[comrade-emma]

wait, doesn't personality predate ideology? ideology doesn't create personality, right? (genuine question, i want to learn more)

"personality predates ideology" is a quirky little rhetorical sleight of hand that implies that: 1. people have an innate inclination toward certain or other aspects of personality, 2. ideologies form out of the emotional impulse of (a certain group of) people. what this boils down to then, if we sit down and analyze it, is that it implies certain people are naturally and innately predisposed to agree with particular ideologies, beliefs, etc. this is, to put it mildly, incredibly idealistic and very very dangerous.

this is a belief that's taken a lot of forms and different ways of being expressed, so specifically what i'm honing in on is the time famous gringo comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan said the quiet part out loud in an interview. quote: "people are not motivated by ideological codes, people are motivated by impulse and construct ideological codes to justify and rationalize what they were already going to do. [...] on the level of individuals and civilization, personality predates ideology, meaning that before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole." again, i think this is symptomatic of a larger, yes, ideological trend, and i don't take like, personal issue with the fact this one guy belives that. if anything i'm thankful, because him saying it this way makes the surrounding concept much more easy to analyze!

so let's move around the center thesis point and analyze the surrounding context. many ideologues have spoken at length about the fact that understanding fascism as some kind of catch-all badpersonist ideology is (to not use the also correct term "unserious") not just untrue, but detrimental to how we can study the material weight and implications of fascist ideologies, as opposed to other ideologies that are, frankly, equally as violent and reactionary. "bully" and "asshole" are terms that mean nothing other than like, a vague social idea of "person who other people find abrasive toward those disenfranchised in a setting of comradery" or really just "person who others don't like very much"! to claim that there are people who are fundamentally predisposed (from birth in some models, but really even without that) to being "bad people" as individuals, that then go and adopt the "ideology by and for bad people" is, well. calling it reactionary is genuinely lowballing it. and that kind of sets the tone for the idea, right?

to get really dialectical with it and get into the negative flipside of the idea, think of the common non-denominational leftist slogan of "i wasn't radicalized to the left, i just have empathy and care about people". it's kind of the flip-side to this belief, right? "i don't need a strong framework to inform my political conceptualization, all i need is hope and to #lovethyneighbor! that's true leftism!" but that's not really effective, is it? i don't make the allusion to christianity for no reason, many christians who live good, sinless, charitable lives, are also like, insanely reactionary in a lot of very particular topics! feelings are fickle, and often do not reflect material reality. and so is "personality", so is "belief", these are frameworks that reduce the human experience into the very point at the start, that flatten discursive knowledge, scientific analysis, etc., into being secondary (if even relevant!) against "impulse" and "instinct". personally, i think it's a bleak view!

the first line about "ideological codes" and "impulse" seems to think it's putting the cart squarely after the horse, but looking closer at it, it's doing the exact opposite. sure, a child is not birthed with a fully fledged ideological framework, but a child is not birthed with a fully charted path of "impulses", either. and this is because a child (and therefore all people!) does not exist in an empty vaccuum, their mind does not develop away from a historical context.

people are shaped by context, people interface with other people, and the people of the present grapple constantly with the weight of history. the weight of a history that, in fact, crystalizes ideology within those who live in it! people do not develop ideological frameworks by themselves, their ideological frameworks are shaped by their context. and the same goes for their personality, for their "impulses", for their "instinct". all of these things are built and trained, not innate. people are not, in fact, motivated squarely by an ideological dogma, but they aren't motivated by base impulse either! people are motivated by context, a context that includes both the interpersonal and the broader ideological machinations that have existed ever since society has.

now we circle back to the core phrase. "personality predates ideology", and to your question, which i'll translate for ease of answering into: "does ideology create personality?" both the ideas of "ideology" and "personality" are... very broad concepts, to say the least. at a glance, it definitely seems like a chicken and egg situation. but just like with the chicken and the egg, it's a solvable issue! it's just an answer that may seem unsatisfying without its context.

in short, neither is really true! personality, being the vague thing it is, can't be much argued to have a "starting point", if we define it by a particular set of social traits that form an "identity". what we can say is that the personality of one or multiple individuals did not give rise to the fact that ideological frameworks began to be created as society began to set. ideological frameworks are also messy to define, even if we limit ourselves to the idea of "political ideologies". but what's certain is that, in the thousands of years of human history, frameworks to define society were needed for the sake of, well, defining said society! and that had less to do with personality than it did with the material conditions that shaped societies, and therefore, the people in said societies.

think of the context of the world (geography, biology, every influencial factor on the first societies) as a line, from which the individual personalities of the people in that context split off. eventually the ideology that forms society splits off the same line of context too, and they almost immediately begin to weave together, like a single thread turning into a woven rope. the ideology of the society in which the individual is raised is influential in their personality, and as society develops, ideology too becomes part of the context that informs that individual development, that shapes the individual's personality. but ideology is now so natural in society, it's not able to be influenced by the individual, but rather, by history as a whole.

so, the answer is twofold. the personalities of each and every human individually in all of history were not informed by ideology, because ideology developed with society, and they're both vague terms to define when looking at such a long timeframe. but both those ancient personalities and ideologies were built by their context. and as generations grew within society, ideology became part of that very same context. and now, in the modern day, the ideologies of the world are so inextricably woven into the context of each individual's life, that claiming that ideology is not a major factor in the development of the individual's personality can only really be said if your idea of "personality" is an intrinsic characteristic of a person, and not something shaped by their context. for what i'd argue is basically all of human history, i'd say yes, personality is (mostly if not entirely) created by the ideological context of the individual.

(as an aside: it's also important to understand that even with this model, personality is not actually relevant to ideology! ideology stands without the necessity for an individual's personality, because it needs to be analyzed through the context of history, not the other way around!)

or in less complicated terms: read Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Iosef Stalin.

[comrade-emma]

Intro Post

For those who are new to this blog, I am a Korean transfem communist living in the hell that is Amerikkka. I block conservatives, racists, Zionists, “vote blue no matter who” liberals, Islamophobes and transmisogynists. I have been forced back into the closet for over the year because of my parents and live in a red state. I mainly post about communism, transmisogyny, Palestine, manga, anime and science fiction. I cannot afford to donate to many fundraisers but will boost when I can.

My current fandoms are A Wrinkle in Time, Ben 10, Haibane Renmei, Little Witch Academia, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Promised Neverland, PMMM, Planet of the Apes and the films of Mamoru Hosoda and Makoto Shinkai.

Essay Masterlist:

Ben and Gwen: Character Analysis

How EVA Helped Me Grow Up

My Unpopular OTP

Suzume and Tamaki: Character Analysis

Your Name vs WWY: Asushin and Reishin

Why I am Pro Palestine

[comrade-emma]

Links on Transmisogyny

A Primer on Transmisogyny by the Asheville Blade: X

Julia Serrano on Transmisogyny, the Denial of the Closet, and the societal idea of Predator vs Prey status of AMAB vs AFAB people: X X X

May Peterson on Transfeminized Debt: X

BMC Public Health Study on higher risk of Victimization experienced among AMAB GNC and Transgender students: X

Ashlee Marie Preston on Transmisogynoir: X

HRC on pay Gap among LGBTQ+ workers in the US: X

"[Gender Critical] feminists’ sex-essentialism doesn’t merely lead them to misgender us. Rather, because they view us as “men,” they imagine that male sexual “contamination” and “corruption” practically oozes out of us...We are the embodiment of sexual stigma in their minds. We are a contamination event that must be stopped at all costs." - Julia Serrano

[comrade-emma]

You all need to stop with that democrat dick riding bullshit. "I hope you know this is your fault for not voting for Harris 😤" okay and what you're telling me here is that you a) don't actually know any of her policies and stances or b) don't care either way because it is and always has been some tertiary goal to your primary objective of sucking off the Democrats in the most reactionary way possible

[comrade-emma]

[comrade-emma]

rakka sketch i'll refine more soon :>>