quietanarchy

[quietanarchy]

native 101: how to write a native muse

this guide is for non-native roleplayers who want to write native characters respectfully and responsibly. if you’re not indigenous, you’re stepping into representation that’s not yours. this post isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a place to start.

i'm not the sole native voice in the rpc. if you'd like more clarification, please ask others in the community! if another native has a different idea than what i've listed below, that's fine! this is just to help those that don't know where to start try to understand things better.

naming your native muse

do not make up a "native-sounding" name for your character. names like "red thunder," "greyeyes," "whitefeather," etc. are often used by non-natives trying to signal indigeneity in the rpc, but they come from a very specific historical context.

these weren’t just aesthetic choices. many native people were forced to continue these names during colonization, often by government officials or missionaries, when forced to register for census, land allotments, boarding schools, etc. these names were often translations, misunderstandings, or simplifications of actual indigenous names or meanings. they were not chosen in the way settlers chose surnames. they became permanent family names through colonization, not by cultural tradition.

so when non-natives try to replicate that style, without knowing what the names mean, why they were given, or what community they come from, it’s shallow at best and disrespectful at worst.

what you should do instead: most often, native people today have common surnames just like anyone else (smith, johnson, etc.), or inherited names from the colonization period. best rule of thumb: pick a european name. of course, some natives have traditional names used within the community. if you're not native, don't try to replicate traditional names. it's not your place. for example, i have a kiowa gordon named joseph anderson. doesn't make him any less native to have a "european" name.

*also, try to stay away from "native sounding" words for names. i know non-natives can be named these things, but i always give a little side-eye to natives who are: sage, willow, river, storm, wolf, bear, echo, etc.

how much background should you include?

it’s important to say where your muse is from, what tribe or nation they belong to, what area they live in or grew up in, but you need to know your limits. don't info-dump cultural details unless you fully understand them, which, if you’re non-native, you probably don’t.

saying someone is diné (navajo), from arizona, and maybe was raised around certain customs or ceremonies? that’s fine. pretending you can describe those ceremonies or the “spiritual meaning” behind them? not fine. mentioning things to understand your character more is welcomed! we just don't want non-natives to write about the ceremony of a powwow in depth.

your native muse is more than trauma

one of the most harmful patterns non-native writers could fall into is making their indigenous character's entire identity revolve around suffering, pain, trauma, hurt, etc.

yes, native communities live with ongoing impacts of colonization; boarding schools, land loss, mmiw, racism, addiction, environmental harm, the foster system, and more. these are real, lived traumas. but reducing your muse to only these things strips them of their full humanity.

your muse should be more than what’s been done to them. they should laugh. they should have hobbies, bad habits, complicated family dynamics, love interests, favorite foods, weird dreams, inside jokes, petty opinions, and goals for the future. joy, humor, and resilience are central to indigenous life.

don’t write a tragedy with a face. write a person who exists, who happens to be native, whose life is shaped by history, but not defined only by it. again, having these things in a muses backstory / mentioning them does not necessarily mean it's a "bad" thing (i, for one, love fucked up tragic pasts) but give them more substance outside of that, too.

"native american" is not a culture

this should be obvious, but it’s often overlooked: there is no single native culture. there are 500+ federally recognized tribes in the u.s. alone, each with their own language, traditions, government, and worldview. if you're writing a native muse and just labeling them as “native american” without choosing a specific nation, you’re already off track.

"native american" is a broad political term. it’s not cultural shorthand. it doesn’t tell you where someone’s from, how they were raised, what language their family spoke, or what their values are. saying someone is "native" and stopping there is like saying someone is "european" and expecting people to know if they're french or romanian or english.

what to do instead: pick a specific tribe or nation, and do real research. if you’re not sure where to start, choose a region and look up federally recognized tribes in that area. don’t blend cultures. don’t invent one. specificity shows respect.

your muse is not a magical being

please don’t write your native muse as if they have innate spiritual powers, a mysterious connection to the earth, visions, or vague "ancestral wisdom" just because they’re indigenous. this is a colonial trope, built out of the "noble savage" stereotype, and it’s incredibly dehumanizing.

you might not think you’re doing it. but if your muse is always the one to deliver cryptic advice, commune with animals, feel the spirits in the air, or silently guide others with intuition, take a step back. are you writing a person, or are you writing an aesthetic?

native people have spiritual practices, yes. but those are specific, tribal, and usually not open to outsiders. spirituality isn’t a personality trait. it’s not something you can generalize or sprinkle in to make a character seem deep. if you wouldn’t do it with a character of another background, don’t do it here.

don’t box your muse into stereotypes

not every native muse has to be quiet, wise, brooding, or angry. let them be awkward. let them be funny. let them be annoying, overly ambitious, soft-hearted, selfish, bubbly, arrogant, flirtatious, whatever fits.

when all your ideas of indigeneity are rooted in solemnity or pain, you miss the huge spectrum of native personalities. native people are just people. some are loud. some are shy. some are deeply cultural, some are disconnected and trying to reconnect. some are traditional. some are queer. some are both.

don’t flatten your character into a type. don’t let their "nativeness" be their only character trait. and definitely don’t limit how they act because you’re afraid of getting it wrong. get curious. do the work. and write a full human being.

if you’re non-native, you’re writing from the outside. that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do with care, but it does mean you have to move slower, be willing to be corrected, and know when to back off.

respect begins with humility. you’re borrowing from someone else’s reality. treat it with the weight it deserves.

[quietanarchy]

[quietanarchy]

People who think that “this piece of media has gay characters” is an adequate summary of a work with no attempt at saying anything of substance do the same thing with race like it’s pathetic. 

“This media has a POC character” first of all POC is a noun and not an adjective, and secondly, that tells me nothing! What is the plot? What is the genre? I need more than “it has POC characters :)” because white people’s track record of recommending works with characters of colour is abysmal

[quietanarchy]

[quietanarchy]

* THANK YOU FOR 500+ NOTES !

hi, everyone !! recently i've noticed that always connected (full bundle) got 500 notes and i've decided to create a new template as a thank you.

introducing ... always connected (simplified)

a pay as you want social media template. below the read more, you'll find the specifications.

always connected ( simplified )  contains:

a notification pop-up;

an original image;

an instagram option (substitutes the original image);

a calendar with three possible events;

twitter;

search engine (optional, substitutes twitter);

pinterest;

spotify.

this is my third graphic available for for download, so i apologize if it's messy in any way. my inbox is open in case of any questions !

this template is only available for personal use.

you will need basic photoshop knowledge ! feel free to edit it however you want, but please don’t lift parts, re-upload or claim as yours.

credit is not necessary !

credits: adobe fonts fonts used: Baskerville URW, Cooper Std and Myriad Pro. download link in the source !

[quietanarchy]

seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors

[quietanarchy]

( 💌 ) simone ashley gif pack

by  clicking  on  the  source  link  below,  you  will  find  #261  gifs  of  simone  ashley  in  season  three  of  bridgerton  (  2024  ),  simone  is  indian  (  tamil  ),  and  was  born  in  1995  so  please  cast  accordingly.  all  gifs  were  made  by  me,  i  ask  you  read  +  follow  my  usage  rules  and  reblog  if  you  found  helpful  ! 

[quietanarchy]

I have written and rewritten this post so many times after taking time to really gather my thoughts and sit with everything that has transpired in the last two weeks. If I'm being honest.. what has transpired the last three years of running the FindRPs server. Under the cut if you want to read. Warning: it's really fucking long. Sorry about it.

God I don't even know where to start, okay.

I have always tried to do my best to remain neutral in most situations and show a face of calm collection when it came to matters in the server. As a leader there, I believed that being anything other than that would only show instability of myself and on the rest of the staff. I always tried to make it known that I was willing to hear people out, and ready to enact changes if it felt like the right thing to do for the collective.

I don't know if that was the right choice to make, but it certainly felt like it for me, so that's how I ran things.. that's how I encouraged the rest of staff to run things. I've already said this to the former staff, but I have nothing but the highest respect for the hard work they put into that server. All of us were running that place for free, but it felt like a full time job with the way people treated us both on the server and here on tumblr.

Our goal was to provide a space for various platforms to advertise their rp groups, post 1x1s, post their resources, ask for help from their community, and more. FindRPs all started because tumblr tags became notoriously unreliable, group rps weren't able to mass fill their queues, sideblogs were being shadowbanned and deleted left and right. Why not streamline it into one easy hub? Why not make a place for a community? I've seen it said a few times now that we should have learned our lesson and not had any general chat or allow conversation at all. How fucking sad is that? In a hobby where the whole purpose is writing a story together... collaborating.... and you all can't even handle or have the civility to have a general chat.

I don't claim to have made all the right decisions, or to have said the right thing in a moments time. But things could so very quickly go from zero to one hundred there. Within minutes people would be at each other's throats and god forbid anyone on staff have a real life and not take care of it within seconds. I can't count how many times I was at work, or a family function, or a doctors office, and I get the ping that something happened but I can't deal with it right then and there. The anxiety of knowing that it will be talked about in the tags, and that if I or another staff member isn't online to take care of it right that second, we will get shit for letting it happen.

Isn't that insane? That I couldn't go about my daily life and do normal things without thinking about you all having no decorum and going after one another like children?

I was getting anxiety from not looking at the server for more than an hour or two. I don't know how in the world I thought I was going to be able to handle having a newborn and focusing on something that is going to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life, knowing that all of this would be in the back of my mind. It wouldn't be fair to my kid... to my family. And yeah... maybe that's me taking it too seriously. But when you dedicate three years of your life to this, and have been in this community on tumblr for as long as I have.. you fear the loss of it.

Don't even get me started on the lack of communication. Any blog that decided to let anons and rumors come into play and pass judgement on us with lies or half the story over the course of the server's activity... you all are complicit. No one ever came to us with their opinions and issues — the first thing that was on anyone's mind was which rpt blog can I go to. So instead of handling things like adults, you all hid behind anon and let someone else post it for you.

Because why attempt to make an actual change by speaking to us when you can just judge and bully us instead? No one ever said maybe they need some help and I should offer to join the team. But why would you... when you could see how we were being treated. When you were the one treating us that way.

Anytime something happened in that server, my inbox would fill with anon messages of death threats or otherwise inflammatory and cruel statements against me. I always deleted them and gave them no merit because what is some fucking anon going to do to me in my real life? Nothing.

This time though.. I was simply done with it. I was looking at the server, at my own happiness, at my own life and where I was being led, and decided that it simply wasn't worth it to subject myself and the rest of the staff to it any longer. All of us were preparing major life changes and were having conversations about possibly stepping down and handing the server off. I'm sorry that a few people decided to ruin it for the rest of you who never did anything wrong. I would have loved to hand over the reins to someone else and let FindRPs live on as the needed resource it was, but you all can make your own servers as you've said many times that you want to do. You can spend three years growing it to nearly 3k members of all rp backgrounds and life backgrounds and you can make your rules exactly how you want them and to deal with things exactly how you want to deal with them... I sincerely hope it thrives for you.

I'm going to call out a few specific blogs from this situation because you are directly complicit in the spreading of this. JJ (galitzined), Nan (nanschman), Xan (jimiin), Jas (snoopdoggs), Veda (nosyrpt), and fluoresceins. All of you decided that it was okay to bully. Several of you decided to say that I was subjecting Hermie, a Palestinian mod, to coexisting with zionists knowingly.. when it has always been the case that if they made themselves known we would ban them and Hermie would be the one to do it. We realized too late that we missed one glaringly obvious one and Hermie got the satisfaction of banning them before FindRPs was deleted for good.

All of us in our real lives are putting in the work to make change, you know, where it matters the most. Personally for myself, I involve myself in local and state politics and actively ensure that I am voting for representatives that align with Palestine or at the very least is not interested in supporting Israel. I donate to fundraisers when I am able. Not that I ever owed any of you a list of what I am doing... but I have always stood with Palestine. I fucking hate JKR, and was a moderator who voted to ban it in the initial rule change. (Love that some of you are trying to say I've been extremely active in the HP RPC and have proof because.... bitch where?) But you know... you all will spin anything to fit your narrative.

I said it many times that everyone on staff, every single one of us, was part of a marginalized group one way or another. Half of us were trans, more than half were people of color, I think literally all of us are queer. So you all decided that the best thing to do was to hurt members of your own communities, hurt the people that you claim to stand up for... that's incredibly telling about the kind of people you are.

Mar made a post recently that I think all of you need to read and take to heart. Many of us are so disheartened by the lack of change that we are seeing in the real world that going hard within a small community like the one here is where you can get your satisfaction — because it seems simple in a smaller space where you can watch change happen in real time. Mar put it really well, better than I ever could, so here is a link for you to read it yourself.

We are actively driving people away from this community. Some of them are warranted, but a majority of it is over the most petty bullshit that could be solved if we weren't so catty and quick to jump to conclusions.

Shadow, I do want to apologize to you. You did not lead to the downfall of this server, it was a long time coming. And I agreed with all of the resources you gave, I agree with wanting to educate someone. What I failed to communicate effectively, and I do take responsibility for this, is that you didn't need to do it publicly. You could have DM'd Lumos and taken care of it outside of the server, which is really all we were trying to say in that statement we made: why in the world are we having these conversations in the general chat of a rp advertisement server when you can just... talk to the person directly. Or I don't know... use the block button. All of you need to learn how to use that more. And you did already apologize for necro-ing it... but I believe you knew what you were doing there. Even on a laptop you had to scroll up to see the interaction with Lumos and there was no way you missed the timestamps. It was not the first time you decided to use a public space in the server to be mean to someone, so, I don't believe that you didn't know what you were doing there. Regardless of being correct in the information you were spreading, you were an asshole. We gave you a warning that the behavior wouldn't be tolerated and yet you continued to harass Lumos so consequences of your actions were to be banned. Not because of what you said or how you went about it, but because you didn't know when to stop.

I don't think Lumos has tumblr to see all of this, and I literally deleted everything from the server — I have no logs of anything that happened anymore. But we did rail into them. We told them that what they were saying was fucked up and they should read into the resources. All of us were talking about banning them anyways, but we wanted to take the time to think things through, to step away and sit with it and decide. Once again, God Forbid we handle things like adults and have real lives and think before acting, especially with all of you shouting into the tags about how we were handling it. They were getting death threats, both in their dms and out in the open in the general chat. Like what the fuck. Who in their right mind thinks that's an okay thing to do?

Anyway, we tended to handle things there privately. We preferred it that way because no one needs their dirty laundry aired out in front of 3k people, and have them weigh in on it while we're trying to handle things. Just because you didn't see anything happening on your end, doesn't mean things weren't happening behind the scenes. And screenshots are always a thing; we have never feared someone taking them for their records. I sent the screenshots to JJ because Shadow left out an entire part of the conversation. I didn't send it to "make ourselves look better" as Nan so lovingly put it. I did it for transparency.

Maybe we could have been more transparent over certain things, I don't know. But also.. some situations are simply none of anyone's business.

Anyway. It's gone now. I mourn the loss of something that I truly put my heart, soul, and tears into. I helped to provide a resource for the community who does not deserve it for free for three years of my life. I met some of the most amazing writers in there that I never would have crossed paths with if not for the server.

It's time to move on from the greater rpc for me though. I don't know if I am going to continue to be on this blog. I really don't have a desire to at this time. I do know I will be writing with my rp group and continue keeping in touch with others on discord. That's really why I'm not afraid to post all of this and let you all pick it apart. I simply don't care anymore. I'm a week away from my due date, and ready to take the step into motherhood. I'm so excited for it. My blood pressure certainly thanks me.

I urge you all to take a good hard look at how you interact with this community. I want you all to take a look at the complaints that are made all the time and have been for years now — of groups not surviving, of no one writing, of people feeling hopeless, or judged. You actively create this space. You truly want to be the change? Do better for the rpc then. Be kind, and if you can't do that, block and move on. The people you don't like and you don't agree with are going to be around for as long as they want to be anyway.

Best, Maeve.

[quietanarchy]

SAVANNAH LEE SMITH        [    …   ]        #85 in  various interviews.   by  clicking  the  source  link,  you  will  be  taken  to  a  payhip  ( $0+  )  page.  all  were  made  by  me,  rules  in  the  payhip  link.  likes  &  reblogs  are  appreciated. 

[quietanarchy]

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

[quietanarchy]

ermmm ok anyway

remember to vote in canada’s federal election if ur eligible

[quietanarchy]

ermmm ok anyway

remember to vote in canada’s federal election if ur eligible

[quietanarchy]

And I know many of you might not be seeing much news updates coming from the occupied West Bank and that is because Palestinian journalists are being hunted down, their cameras confiscated, their footage erased, they are imprisoned, disappeared and killed at unprecedented rates. Israel is working very hard to suppress the truth. It is exactly why you should amplify the reporting coming from Palestine, from Gaza to Jenin, whenever you see it. These journalists are literally sacrificing their lives to keep you informed on Israel's crimes. Don't ever forget that. Everything that you know today about the genocide is due to their relentless commitment to the truth.

[quietanarchy]

weird as fuck living in a culture where it's considered more impolite to speak up and defend yourself against someone treating you unfairly than it is for someone to be rude to you in the first place

[quietanarchy]

☼ dewhq is an oc, town rp on tumblr for 21+ muns and 25+ charas, set in the teeny tiny town of stardew valley! this is inspired by the video game, though no knowledge is needed to join. our members are really welcoming and fun, so come join!

take me to the valley !

[quietanarchy]

what if i just rest my eyes for a second

[quietanarchy]

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content warning: body image, eating, kissing, drinking.

important note: please do not use my gifs if you were blocked by me, for sm*t situations, celebrity rp as themselves or ‘t*boo’ rps.

if you enjoy my work, considerbuying me a☕ or take a look at my commissions information.