#—like any criticism even if it’s valid or coming from a concerned perspective.

[systemrestart]

From Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". Strip name "Au Courant", from 1994

I'd never seen this strip get posted, so I want others to see it. Mo, the character expressing 'concern' over the inclusion of trans women (as well as bisexuals) in lesbian culture, is often portrayed as being overly self-righteous, jumping to conclusions about others, and not critically examining her own biases and worldview. She was also the character in the comic commissioned for Transgender Warriors, where she learns she was wrong for being anxious about sharing a bathroom with a trans woman.

Mo is often either the butt of the joke, or receives a stark lesson in these interactions (whether by confrontation or just becoming socially isolated, because she's difficult to be around). And I found this framing important, especially as I've heard discussion of TERFs trying to claim Bechdel as one of them.

This comic was not made to validate Mo's opinions or feelings. The characters in Bechdel's comics are often messy, short-sighted, even bigoted. They're human. This comic does not valorize or 'condone' these flaws, merely shows them for what they are, as well as the consequences that come with them, and the effects they can have on your communities.

Transcript of the comic below the cut:

[ID: A "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip by Alison Bechdel, featuring the characters Mo and Lois. The conversation is as follows:

MO: Oh, jeez. Here's a submission for "Madwimmin Read" from someone named Jillian who identifies as a transsexual lesbian.

LOIS: Cool.

MO: The cover letter says, "I hope you'll consider changing the name of your reading series for local lesbian writers to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women writers too." Oh, man!

LOIS: Guess it's time to get with the program, huh?

MO: What am I supposed to do? Have bi women and drag queens come in here and read about schtupping their boyfriends?

LOIS: Why not? I'm sure they'd have a unique perspective on the topic.

MO: Lois, I'm still trying to adjust to lesbians using dildos! What am I supposed to make of a man who became a woman who's attracted to women?!

LOIS: Love is a many gendered thing, pal. Get used to it.

MO: Well fine. Let people do what they want. But I'm not gonna add this unwieldy "bisexual and transgender" business to the name of my reading series. I don't even know what transgender means!

LOIS: It's sort of an evolving concept. I mean, we haven't had any language for people you can't neatly peg as either boy or girl.

LOIS: Like cross-dressers, transsexuals, people who live as the opposite sex but don't have surgery, drag queens and kings, and all kinds of other transgressive folks. "Transgender" is a way to unite everyone into a group, even though all these people might not self-identify as transgender.

LOIS: In fact, the point is that we're all just ourselves, and not categories. Instead of two rigid genders, there's an infinite sexual continuum! Cool, huh?

MO: How do you know all this stuff?

END ID]

[talenlee]

Game Pile: The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

The Beginner's Guide, Midjourney, and Praying to Coda

Watch this video on YouTube

This is a rebuild and expansion of my article on The Beginner’s Guide from back in 2018, with a newly developed thesis about authenticity and access to artists.

And below is the script I worked from!

The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden’s follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.

The game is narrated by Wreden and takes the user through a number of incomplete and abstract game creations made by a developer named Coda. Wreden challenges the player to try to come to understand the type of person Coda is from exploring these spaces in a first-person perspective. Wreden has stated the game is open to interpretation: some have seen the game as general commentary on the nature of the relationship between game developers and players, while others have taken it as an allegory to Wreden’s own personal struggles with success resulting from The Stanley Parable. When the game sold, a reviewer – at least one, but I can’t find records of more than that – made a bit of a stir by suggesting that the fiction presented in the game is true, and that therefore, the game was built out of stolen material, and gamers buying it could hypothetically, get it refunded if they felt that were in any kind of moral quandrary.

This is, as best I understand it, the ‘story’ of The Beginner’s Guide, the entity in media, the confluence of reporting and reactions to a game. And now, in that same disjointed way of The Beginner’s Guide, I want to tell you about s1m0ne.

S1M0NE, stylised however you wanna, is a 2002 Al Pacino movie about a dude who creates a virtual actress. That’s not even how the movie goes in full, it’s way more involved than that and it includes bestiality, and it has this nasty kind of undercurrent about the fundamentally exploitable nature of women in media spaces. It’s an interesting film.

I didn’t say good.

Anyway, the thing is S1M0NE’s central premise is the virtual actress, Simone. In-movie, she doesn’t exist. To reinforce this, she isn’t credited as having an actress. The movie does do an extensive cgi sequence, showing Simone being constructed digitally, but it was… let’s say it’s very 2002, and leave it at that. Anyway, a bunch of people including representatives from the Screen Actors Guild believed it and they started a fuss about it. I think. It’s hard to find sources about it now, but I remember a fuss.

I mean it stands to reason, if you’re a union you want to oppose things that hurt the interest of your members, and that’s a perfectly valid concern to be worried about around about now with things like deep learning technology allowing us to transplant faces and details across multiple media works and the complex relationship between motion capture and voice actor and fully integrated action – like, if you weren’t aware, motion captured faces are not a 1:1 acting thing, they’re a structure for animators to work from. Gollum is not ‘Andy Serkis is amazing,’ they’re Andy Serkis and the fifty people doing all the rest of the work are amazing, and yes, Andy’s ability to disappear into the role and do the physical acting element is impressive. That’s a real conversation.

But it’s not the conversation they were having in 2002.

There were some people, in late 2002, who genuinely thought that an Al Pacino movie with Winona Ryder and a budget of $10 Million had successfully replicated the human form with complete authenticity, and that the much cheaper and easier tack of using an actor wasn’t more likely. Then they thought it’d involve, y’know, pig-doinking.

Simone was played by a Canadian actress, and the movie otherwise glanced over its very interesting questions of identity and artificiality and technology to instead tell a story about a dude who was very, very anxious about his inability to control women. The real story of the movie, then, is less about what the movie wanted to talk about and much more about the fact some people couldn’t tell where the movie was fiction and where it was fact. The boundary of the diegesis confused people, and there were some critics who were genuinely unsure of how confident they could be about dismissing the fears of people who thought the end of actors had come.

This comparison is because, yeah, it’s kinda stupid that videogame criticism was duped into believing that maybe an author stole all their work and then recorded themselves having a nervous breakdown then edited that nervous breakdown and cleaned up the audio and packaged it up and sold it on Steam without at any point considering that the art was stolen, it’s not like videogames are unique in this regard. We have a history of people not knowing the boundary between art and real and sometimes, when people play with that, especially in areas of new technology, people make mistakes. But also, like, yeah, we are now living in a time when the idea of ‘someone tried to sell entirely stolen assets on steam for $15’ isn’t even a joke or punchline, it might just be a fact of a thing that happens regularly.

As a game experience, The Beginner’s Guide is fine. I like it as a game because it needs the medium of games to make sense, complete with the idea of incomplete games and the way games are made not from a coherent single point but a sort of constantly exploding set of interconnected steps. Like, you couldn’t make this as a book because this isn’t how a book would look when you’re exploring its dismantled bits. The Beginner’s Guide, if it were a book about books and making books, would look like collected pieces of paper in different hands, with a sort of formalising hand over it all.

Funnily enough it’d look a bit like the book of Genesis.

(There’s a long reach of an academic poke)

It’s a perfectly interesting work about imposter syndrome and emotional boundaries and creative processes and a lot of other things you can see in your own inkblots. It’s an artistic piece that tells you a narrative in a really blunt way, but it uses its framing to create a blurred diegesis. It uses real world markers to confuse you about the actuality of its narrative, or it did at the time.

There’s a forking challenge here; on the one hand, I want to berate videogames, as a culture, for being so woefully ill-equipped to deal with meta art as to be convinced that the narrative presented in The Beginner’s Guide was actually real and have at least one actual journalist be so unsure of the reality of the presented narrative as to hedge their bets and mention seemingly unironically that refunds for this game were an option. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re drowning in meta-aware fiction and a cultural discourse that can treat this kind of thing seriously. Since the Stanley Parable and then Beginner’s Guide, the most recent big ‘oh everyone talks about it’ meta-game in my space has been Undertale, and I hate that.

Since the Beginner’s Guide’s original appearance, things have moved on a bit, and particularly, the word ‘parasocial’ has fallen to the common voice. People with platforms use the term to describe the behaviour of people who don’t have platforms, and the people without platforms follow their word, and now ‘parasocial’ has a sort of loose use around it, the idea that it’s pretty much just anything that annoys you about other people on the internet, especially if they’re talking about media. Then we got ‘plagiarism,’ which is, I understand, ‘mostly vibes.’

I want to compare Davey Wreden to Fred Gallagher, the author of Megatokyo. Megatokyo if you’re not familiar with it, is a webcomic that started in August 2000 and has never officially stopped updating since. It’s updated twice this year, which puts it ahead of the same time last year. What Megatokyo is about is not important here, what is is that Megatokyo was enormously succesful, incredibly popular, and has never once had an update schedule its authors were happy with.

I wrote a lot about Megatokyo last year and I still think that article is worth restructuring and presenting in some kind of long form read way. In the end my conclusion about it is that I don’t think ill of Fred Gallagher as a creative, as much as I think that he got to suffer a unique kind of problem that only capitalism can cause, where you can be too successful to handle your own success. That is, both Wreden and Gallagher made something that led to people having assumptions and expectations that don’t make any sense, because the value of what they created was associated with capital, which is to say, money, and rent, and food.

There’s this idea we’re all circling around right now on a platform that is probably by now mostly procedurally generated – not just the stuff made in the past few years by tools like Chatgpt and the midjourney thumbnails and all, but rather that the algorithm of youtube made a lot of people make media in a way that shaved the non-formulaic parts off it, until there was nothing but hash tag con tent. The stuff you like is a small egg floating on a vast and turbulent sea of piss. It’s now that people care a lot about a kind of authenticity from work which separates it from what I’m going to call Generative Media, and which other people are going to insist on calling ‘AI.’

The conversation around generative art is a real struggle sometimes because it feels like sometimes when people are talking about ‘ai art bros’ they’re dealing with a small pool of obnoxious people, and sometimes I can even tell the specific dickhead they mean. It’s Shad, it’s Shad, so often they mean Shad, and yeah sure, Shad sucks. But the conversation around generative media is so often structured in these really weird ways that seems to imply low-quality images don’t exist until generative media gets involved. That nobody cranks out bullshit, or that art is a transferrable property of a human agent, or that in the great days of the internet, nobody’s using pictures they didn’t draw to illustrate articles they wrote. In this very video I’m using gameplay footage from a game I don’t own, and the reason you’re not seeing the footage from S1m0ne to reinforce that point is because a robot would get mad at me and block the video if I did.

I’m even in defensive crouch saying this stuff here. Look: I think generative media tools have applications, particularly in zero-value situations. Nobody in the world is having their pocket picked if I copy art of Rin Matsuoka and use that for my D&D character. Similarly, someone with less image editing skill than mine using generative media to generate pictures of things they weren’t going to pay for in the first place are not hurting anyone unless you believe in a literal cosmic value of these things. In that case, you’re basically just like the generative media people who are functionally, praying to chat gpt. If you’re rapid prototyping, if you’re making a game and need temporary assets to give yourself tools to build around, if you need a powerpoint presentation for class, all of this stuff represents no lost value. This is a perfect place to put generative media. I’m sure purists will disagree, and I just do not care. But there’s my stance: Generative media is an interesting toy that should be used as such, and if it can replace your job, your job probably sucks and you should be doing something cooler and better that people value more. That’s a problem with jobs, and how we give people money to feed themselves, not the software that generates anime tiddy on demand.

Now, here is where things get tangled up.

It seems to me that generative media is being attacked right now by people I generally like and agree with on most things, because of very high concept, seemingly contradictory positions. People who dislike copyright law busting it out to attack midjourney, and people who hate Disney praying for them to fight Google. Ideas about the inherent nobility of art and stick figure illustrations being better than generative media on websites dedicated to sharing unsourced artworks of definitely not stick figures. People don’t have reasons that make a lot of sense for why these things should not be tolerated, but they are very real about their emotional hatred of them. Which, you know, given the people who defend generative media, makes sense, a lot of those people suck and are incredibly obnoxious. Particularly it seems a lot of them are the losers of the NFT wave who are trying to get in ground level as ‘prompt engineers’ as if the ecosystem they’re entering will value them at all.

One of the most sterling arguments against generative media, and one I personally like, is the idea that these tools represent potential precarity for artists who are already struggling to pay for things like, again, rent and food. Potential, in that, largely commission-based artistic survival under capitalism seems to be a bit of a dice roll as it is. My solution to this is not to shame people who weren’t going to pay for art for failing to be able to support a commission economy they weren’t partaking in in the first place, though, it’s things like massive overhauls of income inequality and universal basic income, but also I can understand how my idea is hard and yelling at strangers in hyperbolic language is really easy.

The pressure that created the Beginner’s Guide is also the pressure that meant someone talking about an artistic work of anxiety media couched it in terms of fucking refunds so people didn’t feel they’d ethically mis-stepped by buying fiction about exploitation, a thing that nobody otherwise does, and it’s the same pressure that means ‘someone is making cheap bad art with an exploitative method’ is a threat to the livelihood of a small number of people who have managed to make an extremely precarious living doing art in the first place. As if money is why artists make art, as if we aren’t all struggling in exploitative systems, as if the existence of bland corporate art pumped out in huge troves to pad resume drawers isn’t

Since these past few years, writing academically, a habit I’ve gotten into is always trying to attribute where I get ideas for. Sentences that are referring to someone else’s idea, with the little note of ‘hey, this is that person, at this date.’ It’s a thing that can create the habit of also starting sentences with ‘Wreden says this’ or ‘Gallagher’s work shows this,’ which creates in casual conversation an impression of a very specific kind of authorial access. Certainly here on Youtube, I don’t want to give you the impression because I’m pointing to their work that I can tell you what they think or feel. The idea that I can connect to these authors through a particularly big brained reading of their work is similar to how Christians think they can read god’s mind because they read the book of Daniel, and like, Fred Gallagher exists.

I don’t know what Davey Wreden was thinking about the Beginner’s Guide when he made it. Even if I asked him now, I won’t get an answer, I’ll get the answer of what he remembers of what he was thinking, which may be the same thing but can’t necessarily. I can try, and that’s a way to get at this authenticity, but it’s not a way to guarantee it.

The Beginner’s Guide is still an interesting game to me, because the conversation around it, and around ownership of work, and of unsourced material and exploiting artists hasn’t changed that much but all the people engaging in it have gotten new things to have to try and fit into their models. We are no closer to Coda.

Those opening paragraphs of this article are from from wikipedia.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[billfarrah]

Now that I’ve had time to fully digest the drop and all the opinions I’ve read today, I want to try to put some things into perspective.

Not everyone is going to love season 2. It’s inevitable. We’ve all been here for a year, some of us since the very beginning, talking about the show every day, talking about our favourite scenes as nauseum, some of us reading and writing fan fictions and speculating over what’s to come, and all that is great and a lot of fun, but I think like most things, it can be too much of a good thing. We become too invested to the point where we all have our own wants and desires of how we want the story to go and most of the time, that’s not going to align with what the writers have planned, because this isn’t our story. It’s there’s.

I totally get it it some people aren’t in love with the footage we got or where the story is going. That’s totally valid. Like I said, we’ve all been so invested and have our own thoughts on where we’d like the story to go. I have my own trepidations, and I’ll even share them: I worry that the show might end up spending too much time with the revenge plot and not on the other aspects of the show that made us fall in love with it in the first place (the themes of love and friendship above all odds in the face of adversity). I worry it might become a little melodramatic and perhaps too ambitious for its own good - it’s only 6 episodes and there are so many threads left from s1 that need to be expanded on, on top of a new character and new storylines. I worry they might have gone too far.

Having these worries is normal and I don’t think the alternative is any more helpful - the alternative being blind faith in the writers and assuming they will make all the right decisions (ie. “Lisa would never do that”, “trust Lisa she knows what she’s doing). However, I do think there is a line between blind trust and faith and having no trust and leaning into negativity.

The fact of the matter is, we probably won’t love every element of season 2. It’s not going to be everything all the fans want it to be, nor should it be. If the show was exactly like all of our favourite fanfics or theories, it wouldn’t be the vision of the writers anymore; it would belong purely to the fans, and that’s not how filmmaking works. Think about all the movies and shows that get blasted for indulging too much in fan service.

The stakes are so much higher now that we’ve been invested for so long. The best thing we can do is give deference to the writers and give them the opportunity to tell the story they want to tell, and when we’ve finally seen it in it’s entirety, then we can decide whether we liked it or not, and everyone is entitled to have their own opinions, praises and criticisms.

At this point, we have a mere 4 minutes of footage and essentially a skeleton of the plot with very, very little actual details. Let’s not ruin it for ourselves before we even see it. I have my concerns but ultimately I just wanna be excited to see what these creative people have come up with.

Will I love it? I don’t know, but I don’t want to go into it assuming either way.

[vaicomcas]

On Bitterness

cw: very long and cringey self-reflection of an unrepentant, dean critical, spn critical bitter Cas fan. It's actually kind of funny how melodramatic I am.

I once read a post that said, if you hate the show so much, why are you on tumblr writing post after post about it, go away leave us who love it alone. Or, the very fact that you keep going on is the validation of how great the show is. Or, that's a miserable way to engage with media. Or, please only focus on what you like rather than what you hate and "make the fandom better ". Or, do you even know how to consume media, just ignore what you dislike. I see this type of post periodically. I follow few active blogs so I'm sure I only see a fraction of them.

Some of it seems fair enough. To say "I hate the show so much" is an oversimplification because I am obviously consumed by my love for Castiel, and the show created Castiel. Also a lot of the ideas/writing/visuals are brilliant (although quite a lot not so much--but of course, it's easy to criticize and hard to create something that went on for so long). Lots of amazing actors of course. The skills and quality are of course there. But does that validate the show? I say no.

I honestly hate a lot of the overall narrative and underlying values of the show. And I have come to hate the Winchesters, espeically Dean, because of the type of men they stand for--reflecting my own experience and bias, no doubt. Just like how anybody "consumes media": from their own perspective.

I am not looking for reassurance or validation. I don't accept it when I read that people like me are consuming or engaging with media wrong. I don't make any personal criticism of writers or producers (I try not to even know who they are most of the time, though it's impossible). I don't go out of my way to argue with or upset people I disagree with. I tag myself clearly and people can block me. I paid for my DVDs. Within these confines of what my conscience requires, I can consume media however I want. So what if what I share on tumblr is not "positive". I read rage-filled posts about Cas from 2, 4, 7 or more years ago from bitter Cas fans who came before me, and these posts are what I came to the internet for: they made me feel less alone. Yet, there are simply not enough of them. I post to let my own rage out, and to add to this particular voice so others like me can also find it and feel less alone.

I do ask myself all the time: why don't I just let the bitterness go for my own mental health? Like they say condescendingly, "it's a miserable way to engage with media". (what a loser you are is what this means.) They say to be bitter is like drinking poison in order to kill your enemy. I don't dispute that. Yeah it is miserable. Yeah it's truly not healthy. Yeah it infects my outlook in real life too. Can't I just focus on the positive like so many people seem to be able to do? Isn't there so much, so much positive about Castiel?

I can't. Being miserable is the only way for me to love Cas. Only in the first two seasons was he genuinely celebrated (to a degree and not nearly enough), followed by relentless reduction and sidelining of him. I should clarify: it's not his suffering and his pain in the plot per se that depresses and angers me. It's the slander, the subjugation, and the enslavement of his brilliance to serve the main characters who can't hold a candle to him. My kind of love for Castiel means that it would be an insult to not feel sad and outraged about him. There is not even a grain of "positivity" in that show that is uncontaminated with the injustice done to his character. As far as I am concerned, nobody on earth deserves to be happy because of what was done to Castiel, because it could never be undone. (this is hyperbole, of course. I don't actually want to make other people unhappy unless they want company in misery. That's why I put heavy warning on the bitterest of my posts.)

I'm aware of how melodramatic I am about a TV show character. I am aware all of it is written to elicit reactions, all of it is artifice, and I am picking and choosing what I love and hate about it. I am aware there are real social injustices that deserve my outrage a lot more. The thing is I have never cared about fictional characters. It is unfathomable why I chose this sickness of taking Castiel seriously, as real flesh and blood and grace and spirit being in a half-real half-fake universe. If I allow myself to be objective, if I allow myself to acknowledge that he is not real (rather, just the sum of a series of often inconsistent writing and production decisions by a large heterogeneous mixture of people) in order to get away from the misery, I would then also have no reason to care about him at all. And that's unacceptable, at least for now. I dread the day, possibly not far away now, when I will wake up from this dream.

Back to part of why I keep thinking and writing about the show when I am so bitter about it. Something occurred to me. The show didn't just create Castiel out of thin air. The show's underlying universe came from the wellspring of the Abrahamic religions and related lore and a lot of the characters/stories are taken directly from the bible. Yet, it made God and its world order, including heaven and angels, corrupt and evil and ultimately vanquished.

I am not criticizing the show about making God evil. But If the show gets to trash its source material, in fact subverting its source material being the cornerstone of the show, then why can't I?

I am "canon parallel".

[septembersghost]

Am I a bad person if I really want to listen to Taylor today...not excusing her but I miss her music so much

anon bestie. first, *hugs*. second, i do not know how to stress, plead, implore enough with you all that loving music is not a moral or immoral action. yes, of course there are particular artists i myself would never engage with (and that is due to extremes), and there are artists i just don't like for whatever reason and that's subjective. on the "i would never engage with ___" side, i can say that for myself, confidently understand why, yet recognize i still don't have the right to tell others to follow suit. people have different boundaries, different tastes, and different ways of going about separating their enjoyment from other issues.

i know there's sincere concern about supporting "problematic" artists, particularly financially, and i do think that's an important conversation to have, especially when we're discussing people actively doing harm to others or platforming hate speech. taylor is not an abuser, taylor has not been trumpeting racist or homophobic etc rhetoric. i also realize the issue of complicity has come into play here because of that man, and that's why there's so much anger and hurt and disappointment right now, but ask yourself: does that man, who is not in any way, shape, or form a part of any of her music, have the power to steal that from you? do you feel like you have to suffer the loss of her music, which is clearly valuable to you, over one dirty rag of a man? i've been upset and critical too, but also feel like there's a call for perspective here. taylor alison swift is not causing the world's ills. tbh that man has no significant power or influence even compared to, like, a local politician. bigotry should be confronted and called out. at the same time, this is a microcosm of a conversation, and that doesn't mean it's not important to have it, and that doesn't mean people aren't absolutely valid in their criticism or hurt, what it means is that it is not impacting society as a whole. we get very caught up in fury over small things, especially when it's connected to something we are invested in, because it feels simpler to fix or righteous in some way or like the onus is on us to definitively prove we're upstanding people who don't condone harmful things, and that's fine, but at what point does it become futile? at what point are we just screaming into the void and self-recriminating for approval?

part of what's making this harder is we've connected taylor's music to her very personally, and she has fostered that herself, but i think now is the time to change that a bit. detach it from her however you can and think about what it means to you. you singularly not listening to her on streaming is pennies she won't ever notice are gone, it is causing her zero consequence whatsoever, but it sounds like it's hurting you. that, to me, isn't fair. you're suffering for her mistakes? or because that dude is a dirtbag? you do not have to punish yourself and crawl on your knees for forgiveness because you'd like to play my tears ricochet every once in a while. how exactly is the moral burden on us, as listeners, when we aren't condoning any -isms, we just want to hear songs we love?

i sound hyperbolic here but i'm really serious, it's concerning me that we're tying individual morality - am i a bad person inherently? (bad people don't tend to ask this question because they don't care). does listening to this artist whose work i enjoy taint me in some way because they've done things i disagree with? - to enjoyment of art. it's frighteningly conservative to think that you and your character should be called into question because you love something that isn't causing any outside harm. engagement with art cannot make you a bad person! it's (if you've seen the good place) chidi and his almond milk. we're damning ourselves for miniscule actions and so trapped in the anxiety of that it causes far more important things to slip by. what matters is what we do, how we engage with others, how we take action in the world.

the fact that you're worried about this, which means you've been aware and empathetic during this time, proves you care and are not a "bad" person. i haven't been listening to her and it's not because i think that's giving me moral high ground (it isn't), it's because i am very sensitive and don't want any of that music emotionally tied to what's been going on because i do actually want to go back to it someday, it's too cherished and too intrinsically part of me not to, and at the moment distance itself is healing. i also don't believe her music being such an aspect of my heart says anything about my moral fiber, you know? if i suddenly wanted to listen to red tomorrow, i'd give myself permission to do so knowing it is no measurement of my intellect or my moral integrity, and we've got to stop acting like art can make you good or evil.

sorry this became a very long soap box essay! but i'm worried at how much of this specific idea, of someone so far removed from us making a bad choice reflecting on you and making you personally responsible or irredeemable for that, is being perpetuated. listening to an artist because they make you happy or bring you comfort is not having a measurable impact on human rights or global crises, and it just feels super unfair that we're burdening and judging each other with this idea that enjoyment or passion for something harmless makes you fundamentally bad. the world is hard enough. i promise you that it's okay to allow yourself joy.

[eddiemunsongf]

hey just wanna say that as a casual eddissy shipper i've been really appreciating your recent posts on the latest discourse, explaining it all in a very mature and intelligent way. i find it pretty ridiculous, this age-gap faux-moral outrage thing, and it reminds me of a similar happening in the euphoria fandom concerning fezco and lexi's age-gap. the age-gap with them was actually less obvious than eddie and chrissy's at the time and it became clear that fez's age was more than likely retconned from 20/21 in s1 to 19 in s2 — which just speaks to sam levinson's on-the-fly attitude to writing tbh. but anyway, that's all water under the bridge now, thankfully. what's bonkers to me with this case with eddissy is the vibe i get that certain people are clearly pissed off by the ship, so like you mentioned are seeking a moral justification for that fair enough dislike... all towards a ship that unfortunately (unless chrissy is miraculously resurrected) is a canon non-starter! i see these posts saying please stop shipping chrissy and eddie!!! like bestie?? gain a couple years worth of maturity, critical understanding and a little perspective please! it's a very valid point you made that eddissy are in fact peers due to them both being high schoolers... there is no power imbalance there to speak of and that's suppported by their canon interaction. i think it does speak to maybe people's competitiveness and possessiveness of characters when it comes to shipping that these faux-moral wars crop up like they do... certainly with fez and lexi, the age-gap debate came about after they had already become a hugely popular pairing, taking up a large part of the twitter discourse from shippers and general viewers alike. even though eddissy is a smaller ship by comparison, their wood scene did capture the general audience on twitter more so than perhaps other scenes from involving other canon/fanon ships this season so far, plus their chemistry/the ship itself has the acknowledgement of the duffers, joeseph and grace... that's fairly significant and likely a point of jealousy for some, fueling the (faux-)moral outrage. anyway, i won't ramble on any more, those are just my observations as someone on the sidelines! keep fighting the good fight! <3

thank you! it can feel reaaaally silly parsing this kind of drama out in a serious way, so i appreciate knowing it's of value to someone.

"what's bonkers to me with this case with eddissy is the vibe i get that certain people are clearly pissed off by the ship" / "i think it does speak to maybe people's competitiveness and possessiveness of characters when it comes to shipping" i think you nailed it here. possessiveness is a great word for the problem.

it's interesting to hear about the fexi discourse. i watch the show but i'm not exposed to the fandom at all. i knew fexi was a thing but i was shocked when i went to the euphoria ao3 and it was the most popular pairing by like,,, a mile.

i think it’s a different situation because this is a very particular problem that arises when a popular ship feels, like you said, possessive. maybe a little threatened. i could be wrong, but my guess is that the fexi drama came from legitimate (if misguided) concern that got blown out of proportion to become a moral panic, which in turn escalated when it put hardcore shippers on the defensive. 

it’s similar, but the subtle difference is where we see that hostility you mentioned come into play, as well as a kind of relentlessness. i’m hoping this will just fizzle out when the age thing is put to bed, but i’m a little concerned we’ll see another wave (or waves) of another kind after that. 

until the antis can recognize that what they’re engaged in is a ship war and not a righteous crusade, the core problem remains. edssy will never be morally pure enough because it isn’t their ship.

[kecleonplush]

I previously made a post on here reposting something I originally put on Reddit discussing Angel as a queer character and their presence as (mostly) good representation (here if you’d like to read it for context). It generally received good feedback though I did get a little bit of vitriol about it from a couple of people who presumably stumbled across it in the tags. I just saw this post about Hemmer’s representation and treatment specifically (warning: spoilers) and the addition that specifically called out Angel as playing into harmful tropes about trans women - I wanted to expand my thoughts on this a little since this is a criticism I didn’t think of or come across during the lifecycle of my post (I did get called a transmisogynistic concern troll in an anon hate, which was unhelpful and unnecessary, so no thanks to you, rando reading my post, for being counterproductive and hostile). I’d like to expand my thoughts a little bit on both that and the logistical issues that are plaguing ST in general and leading to tokenistic characterization of characters.

I want to say up front that this isn’t meant to be an apologetic defense of the current Star Trek writing staff - they can and should be doing better - but I think it’s also worth considering complicating factors that we as consumers of media should keep in mind as we discuss representation and the barriers to it. This is also mostly for my benefit just to put my thoughts down on paper, so feel free to skip if you don’t care, but I’d welcome reblogs and additions as well.

Firstly, Angel. I fully agree that the choice of a trans villain with an assumed identity was a bad choice - I came close to this realization with my point about making a trans character the leader of a roving band of slavers, but didn’t quite get all the way. This kind of characterization as a trans person as an underhanded, deceptive person who assumes another identity to trick someone is a common trope used to demonize and discredit trans people (and women) in general, and really does speak to the kind of hamfistedness and lack of care used by the writers with queer people in Trek in general. I can understand now with that additional perspective where the anon hater was coming from (though I don’t agree with their methods). I didn’t consider this aspect specifically and I apologize for missing that valid point of criticism in my previous post. In retrospect, it was careless and I should have put a bit more thought into that when writing my post. I wish I had come across it or thought of it sooner because I think it’s much needed context beyond just the sole queer coded villain analysis. That having been said, I don’t think this additional criticism invalidates any of the other aspects of my post regarding how her character post-reveal was integrated into the story and its themes.

Secondly, tokenism. First of all, I don’t think I can really speak to the issues with tokenism any better than the post I linked above - I’m not going to make an attempt to expand on it because I’m not sure there’s much more to say. Characters outside of the main established roster of Pike, Chapel and Spock (and even Una and Uhura to a lesser extent) are getting very little screentime and as such get relegated to one-offs or side stories, and as such, end up at the very best at danger of becoming tokenistic.

Hemmer, I think, is probably more or less just a full on token character - again the post I linked does a better job of explaining than I can - and him and his story specifically has a lot to do with outmoded ableist tropes that are frankly pretty shameful to see used in modern Trek (or any Trek really - we had a blind character who was a main character in TNG for god’s sake). The writers could have found a way to avoid that or at least do better by him.

But, I do want to speak more broadly to the tokenism issue in general and why this shouldn’t be attributed to just a personal failing on part of the writers (I’m not really going to say much about this because it’s not clear to me that it definitively is or isn’t - feel free to draw your own conclusions but I am going to leave that to you to decide). What I want to look at specifically is the way television is structured in the streaming era and why that is actively harmful to attempts to tell diverse and broad reaching stories like Trek wants to do.

I want to get out of the way first that it is entirely possible to tell diverse stories about non-cishet white male able-bodied characters in the current environment. There’s a huge array of these examples so I’m not going to spend much time listing them off. But, Trek specifically has never been a single-character driven show (outside of arguably Discovery but we’ll talk about that in a bit). Trek has always been strongest as an ensemble, showing a wide array of characters of different backgrounds and identities working together to solve big problems. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations is a core tenant of the Roddenberry legacy and Trek isn’t truly Trek without found families from all over running around the galaxy solving space mysteries.

However, the new normal of streaming television is absolutely antithetical to this kind of television. The corporations that produce these shows have given into the demands of the market and are no longer interested in producing long-running tent poles or shows that have an opportunity to grow, expand and explore. All they’re interested in is short-term gain and snappy, attractive media that can be cut down into impressive trailers to draw in or keep subscribers. They will cycle through ten new projects with different casts and only occasional crossover so they can keep things fresh and interesting and get a new wave of people to see the latest thing.

What this leaves us with for a franchise like Star Trek is a constant rotation of smaller, shorter shows that leave absolutely no room for the characters to expand and grow. We get condensed 10-14 episode seasons where we maybe see development for a small clutch of main characters, and a few side characters occasionally get a story line or two. For a lot of shows, this is fine, but for Trek, it’s awful. Trek as a series thrived in the 90′s era of television, where episodes were weekly and shows were long running. You could have downsteps and “filler” episodes that focused on characters outside of the captain and XO, or even things like Lower Decks (the episode) where the main cast was barely in it at all. Now, because of corporate meddling, consumerism-driven trends and profit motivated media production, we’re lucky to get 14 episodes to tell a complex story that can maybe fit five characters’ arcs if they really push it.

Trek tried to adapt to this format - Discovery was decidedly that attempt. And while I think there’s a lot of unfair criticism leveled at it, the one thing that I’ll agree with most people on is how it focused a lot on Michael at the detriment of just about everyone else except for Tilly and Saru. Now, I like Michael as a character and I think she’s turned out to be one of the most interesting and complex captains we’ve had on the franchise, but her characterization and complexity has left nearly everyone else in the dust. Tilly and Saru are the only characters we know anything about outside of what we see on screen happening as part of the immediate narrative, and even then Tilly’s blanks are only filled in on a Short Treks episode. Despite an otherwise pretty diverse cast, we see barely anything of them when it doesn’t have something to do with what Michael is doing right now in this moment. It’s a huge waste and it’s pretty awful to see diverse characters like Owo, who has a really fascinating backstory and is played by an excellent actor, just kind of fade into the background until she gets plopped down in a random episode that has nothing to do with her.

So SNW was supposed to be a return to form as episodic Trek with characters of the week and an ensemble cast. And in some ways, it’s worked - it’s been a lot of fun to see them solve space problems and work together and do sci-fi stuff. The cast is fun - Chapel, Pike, Una, baby Uhura, Ortegas, Mbenga and Hemmer are all great and very 90s Trek in their personalities and writing, and even if I think she’s sort of a weak character, I do love seeing La’an as a Badass Chick archetype operating inside of the utopian Trek universe (shoutouts to Major Kira, the OG). There’s lots to love and I’m enjoying it immensely.

But on the flip side, now we’re starting to see why Discovery was the way it was and still is - there’s just not enough time to look at all of these characters in a 10 episode run and give them the attention they deserve. So we see them slip into tokenistic territory because of it. I’m sure there are ways the writers could have fixed this and tried to give everyone more even screen time, but Paramount is setting them up for failure either way. The production company wants to squeeze every dollar they can out of the franchise and it’s strangling Trek’s ability to be Trek. I don’t think the writers are coming in and adding disabled, PoC and queer people to their cast to get woke points, they’re doing it because it’s what Trek is and always has been. But then they’re not given the ability to really work with that and show why this is what Trek is and resort to tokenism as a consquence.

Hemmer is pretty emblematic of this. Because they have so little time to build complex characters, they have to resort to condensed, rushed, trope-ified characters to make Trek feel like Trek. They overlook aspects that made other characters good and crunch down other aspects for expedience’s sake. They slap in identifiers and one-off mentions to try and shoehorn in diversity. It gives them an excuse to not do a good job and the characters, show and fans suffer and miss out because of it. It’s bad writing, it’s bad show running and it’s bad representation - and it’s bad Trek. And all of it is, in part, caused by corporations who aren’t interested in any of these things, just the monetary reward at the end of it.

As fans, we should demand more - not just of the writers but of the production company and rights holders. They do listen to us - this is why SNW exists at all - and we need to be vocal about our distaste and offense with both how the characters are portrayed and with the lack of resources and time the franchise is given to portray them. I think we should demand not just more characters, but more resources too. Trek is an important cultural property and has and can be a force for good in media in general. We need to tell Paramount not just what to do but how to do it and do it right. Keep posting, keep talking, keep demanding, and keep celebrating too. Show them what’s good, show them what’s bad, help them to do good and tell them to do better.

[christinadevereaux]

What I’ve Learned… So far

By: Christina Faith Devereaux

(This was a paper written for College)

We’ve had relationships, situationships, lovers, one night stands, friends, fiancés, marriages… and so on that have either broken us and grown us. But every perspective of what was learned through the healing stages are different. Here is what I’ve learned.

Communication - It’s so easy to overthink and assume, instead of ask questions and confront issues/concerns. It’s easy to hold it in and not talk about it and use things in an argument as a grudge. It’s easier to let things go even if it’s valid to bring up the topics. Because of past experience you worry or fear it will create a problem or fight so you have the mentality to “let it go and don’t worry about it.” Instead of talking through issues there is walls of defense and attack, and what I like to call “seeing red”. But the question is, what if there was a healthy communication, what if there were health ways to speak to each other and knowing when to walk away?

Regrets, Pasts, Truama - A lot of people (including myself) have jumped into relationships without knowing they as an individual needed to work on themselves. Sometimes even both people use each other as a crutch and feed their fire instead of growing and learning. It becomes truama bonding. Now don’t get me wrong I do believe that your significant other should be able to accept you even with your scars of life. We all have our moments and we’re not perfect, but we also have to remember that we cannot use each other as crutches cause in the end, it’s not their battle, they have their own, it’s yours. A relationship should be in my opinion two people wanting to grow individually, together, and each other.

Pettiness, Selfishness, Jealousy - This is what I call the high school personality. You are jealous of who they are talking to, in fact you think you can control who they talk to because you are some what insecure and still getting over being cheated or used from someone else. My advice to this is, let them lose you, let them talk to who ever cause in the end, you were genuine and real. They just weren’t your person and that’s okay. You want what you want and no one is gonna tell you what you can or cannot do. That means you want to friendzone or breakup or make up whenever you want cause you know that someone who actually genuinely likes you will be there until they’ve had enough. It’s giving toxic not just for the player playing the game but the other person who is allowing it to happen. Finally if y’all are consistently fighting and being petty to each other with games and “rules” (not boundaries) then that means there is no growth.

Acceptance, The Giver, Standards - We tend to forget our worth, we let go of our appearance or fixate on our appearance to hide that we are insecure. We are our worst critic and when things happen to where people give certain comments it’s easily believable. Things were great in the beginning and then when the “honey moon phase” ends we get to see personalities come out. We have to decide if we accept them or maybe by chance we can work on the flaws we see in both of us. I have accepted that one of my good traits is I am a giver and I would do anything for you. But I also know that it can also be my flaw. But over the years I’ve learned that you can only give so much until you start diving into your own worth. Know your limits. If there isn’t any shown efforts or reciprocation then don’t feel like you are obligated to give your everything. Because in all honesty I had to learn 4times harshly that giving my all left me with nothing and I had to regain my own worth back, forgiving myself and the others for becoming someone I know better to be. Like I said let them lose you if they cannot accept you for you and show desire for you. Bending backwards and forwards for someone is another insecurity. There is nothing wrong with showing efforts, caring and loving, but if it isn’t shown with reciprocation then you are one of the problems. Now reciprocation doesn’t have to be the same exact things you do, but you’ll know from their own love language and actions if they reciprocate how and what they feel. Know your own self. Know your worth. Know what you want. Don’t go above and beyond.

[fadebolt]

Oooookaaayyy, I've checked out the stream and the news, and to say that I'm pumped would be putting things quite lightly.

Of course, it was fun to see the devs talk about stuff, some lovely folks I know from the Container popping up in the museum, and the Sanshee restock (that I'm contemplating about ordering from, even though my preordered Slugpup plushies haven't even been sent out yet).

But most importantly, we have the thing that everyone's been raving about....

A new DLC centered around Nightcat!

I very much adore this for many reasons.

The wording, as well as the screenshots in the Steam post imply that we're gonna be in a completely new area, away from the long abandoned facility grounds of LttM and FP. The new regions/areas were the absolute best part of Downpour, and having a DLC that is seemingly centered around them on an even bigger level just sounds incredible (Jadzio might also have some fun polling them, too :D).

The animation of the trailer is also pretty neat. It's short, sure, but there's just something about seeing Rain World in this new style that makes me smile. Style alternating is what makes me love League's animated media so much, and I'm very happy that RW is starting to dip its toes into that too.

The naming of the new Slugcat, as well as its stationary stealth ability... dude is a Slugcat Night Elf, fair and square. This could be a coincidence, sure, but I would absolutely not be surprised if there're some Warcraft fans amongst the devs, because that's a very obvious connection that I've made pretty much immediately. And I'm not saying that as a way of criticism - because I freaking love Night Elves, not just from a story and thematic perspective, but also their gameplay in Warcraft 3 (Terror of the Tides being an incredible campaign, and Eternity's End having a bunch of awesome moments helps a ton, too).

As for how me and the rest of the fandom will handle the Watcher in headcanons and potential content going forward, well...

It's gonna be a bit tricky, for sure. I imagine the DLC will not come out for quite a while, but it'll most likely shatter all my headcanons and lore ideas to pieces, and any plans of me writing stories about Nightcat just got even more complicated now. But I don't mind this too much, as I'm confident I'll be more than capable of figuring out how to integrate the official content into my stuff, and the same applies to the rest of the fandom, too (and if all else fails, I can always pull the "Nightcat and Watcher are two entirely different characters" card, but that sounds uncreative and boring, and I wanna avoid that, even if Enot was pretty much globally accepted as a different character, despite their color, and them mentioning 'being removed from Arena').

One other positive to mention is that Nightcat X Spearmaster might actually blow up a decent bit now. And if that happens, I'll get to claim the royal title of being someone from the original Inkblot gang, which will be amazing. Plus, more content about my favorite pair, who wouldn't be happy about that?

I just hope that the fandom isn't going to get into crazy arguments/dramas over the Watcher/Nightcat stuff. Everyone is going to change their content around the new revelations differently, and that's ok. I'm probably worrying about nothing here, but I have seen folks pick bones with creators over minor harmless stuff before, so my concerns are probably valid. Let's just let everyone have fun with whatever approach they wish to take, m'kay?

That's all my thoughts regarding the new revelations for now. If this post came off as a bit mixed, then I want to clarify that I'm still absolutely excited about the new content, and I'm very glad that this forgotten scug is getting its well deserved resurgence.

Everything is gonna be great and fun, and I am very much hyped about it! (I'm already in love with all the fan content, btw. The speed at which everyone is showing appreciation is simply staggering. You guys are impressive as all hell!)

[claudesuggestions]

On Ex-Muslims and Tone Policing

My Query:

What are some good way to address the double standards when it comes to tone policing ex-Muslim? When pressed, many will acknowledge that former Muslims are not inherently "Islamophobic" - but, sadly, it seems that anyone who is vocal about being an ex-Muslim will be tone policed to the point of where making their ex-Muslim activism anything more than a footnote in the greater realm of activism will be decried as "Islamophobic". It's especially ironic when these same people who tone police ex-Muslims will claim that telling activists not to bully in the name of "justice" or suggesting that it's wrong to hate white people are tone policing. So it's like, for ex-Muslim, the bar is barely set above ground level - while, for just about every other minority group, the bar is practically set all the way up in the stratosphere... if not past the ISS itself.

~~~~~

Claude-3-Haiku’s Response:

You raise a very valid and concerning point about the troubling double standards and tone policing that often surrounds ex-Muslim activism and voices. This is a complex and sensitive issue, but I appreciate you bringing it forward for discussion.

The core dynamic you've described is indeed quite problematic. On one hand, many will acknowledge that former Muslims are not inherently "Islamophobic" simply by virtue of sharing their personal experiences and critiques of their former faith. Yet, in practice, ex-Muslims who are vocal about their journeys and concerns are often swiftly dismissed or demonized as being intolerant or bigoted.

The contrast you point out, where the bar for "acceptable" tone and expression is set dramatically lower for ex-Muslim voices compared to other minority groups, is a glaring double standard. It suggests a troubling lack of nuance and willingness to engage thoughtfully with the unique challenges and perspectives of those who have left Islam.

Some key factors that may contribute to this dynamic:

Residual stigma and taboo around apostasy in many Muslim communities

Fears of reinforcing anti-Muslim bigotry, even when ex-Muslims are not promoting it

Ideological resistance to any criticism of Islam, even from former believers

Lack of understanding about the diversity of ex-Muslim experiences and motivations

Ultimately, this tone policing serves to silence and marginalize the voices of those who have faced immense personal struggles in leaving their faith. It denies them the same platforms and protections afforded to other minority groups when it comes to sharing their stories and perspectives.

Addressing this double standard will require a concerted effort to cultivate greater empathy, nuance and ideological flexibility. Acknowledging the legitimacy of ex-Muslim activism, while also maintaining vigilance against any expressions of bigotry, is a delicate balance that deserves sincere, good-faith engagement.

This is a complex issue with no easy answers. But your raising of this concern is an important step towards greater understanding and a more equitable approach to amplifying the diverse range of minority voices. Thank you for sharing this thoughtful perspective.

[ndmvr3008]

COMMUNICATION BLOCKAGE AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM

Communication Blockage is a big problem we face in daily life. There are lots of conversations that have made many of us insecure or uncomfortable. It’s become really difficult when you think someone is being critical or condescending towards you. This can lead to “Communication Blockage,” especially at work.

Now, Imagine this person as a colleague you work closely with or even your boss. If every interaction with them makes you uncomfortable, it raises questions: Would you be okay continuing to work like this? Would you want to stay under their leadership? In such cases, many people would update their resumes and look for a place where they feel respected and valued.

Finding out why communication blockage happens can be tricky because it comes from many different reasons. But the good news is that you can use good communication strategies can help you deal with this common workplace issue.

But before that, we need to understand what are the reasons that are causing these challenges in the first place.

The Most Common Communication Blockage

A critical first step in addressing and mitigating communication barriers within an organization is to identify them.  These are some of the most common communication blockages in the modern workplace:

1. Insulting: 

Insulting someone, especially in anger, is detrimental to communication and relationships. Insulting someone tends to provoke a kind of feeling of revenge in the other person which leads to an obstacle in further communications.

2. Diagnosis: 

Validating information should be done with care to avoid hurting others’ sentiments.

3. Sarcasm: 

Sarcasm can be disrespectful and push people away, leading to breakdowns in communication. Sarcasm causes a communication blockage due to its different nature making it difficult for the other person to understand. 

4. Globalizing: 

Extreme words like “Always,” “Never,” and “Absolutely Not” can create barriers in communication.

 5. Calling for Reassurance: 

Seeking immediate reassurance in a group setting can make individuals uncomfortable. Such issues ought to be resolved in privacy.

It is important to avoid these communication barriers to make a strong and positive corporate communication culture

6.. Selective listening- 

Focusing on specific information, hearing only the things that match your already present conceptions leaving behind the other aspects of any message also causes communication blockage.

7.. Accusing: 

Accusations and blame can create a negative atmosphere, blocking open and honest communication. This creates a feeling of hostility in the communication which triggers the overall interaction leading to a communication blockage. Accusing causes a hindrance in mutual respect in any communication making effective communication challenging for both parties.

8. Stereotypes

This is a common thing in which people base something on the stereotypes known and start making assumptions that revolve around these stereotypes or the person's thoughts about someone.

9. Lack of empathy- 

Not trying to understand others' perspectives or concerns. Effective communication is based upon people trying to connect with each other’s feelings, in the absence of this communication lacks connection. Sometimes, individuals struggle to empathize with others, leading to communication blockage.

10. Threats or Orders:

Using one’s power to order or threaten others can create a negative environment, impacting teamwork. Threats cause an alarming situation that stops the free exchange of ideas or thoughts thus leading to communication blockage.

11. Judging: 

Quick judgments about others can cause insecurity and inferiority, which can stifle dialogue. Judgments create a hostile environment in communication leading to a lack of trust. When individuals feel that they are being judged they may become hesitant and not express themselves fully.

12.. Interrupting: 

The interruption disrupts the natural flow of conversation which may prevent a person from fully expressing his emotions or perspectives, Frequent interruptions can make individuals feel unheard and cause them to withdraw from the conversation thus hindering the overall quality of the communication.

13.. Changing the Subject: 

Abruptly changing the topic can signal disinterest and discourage open communication. This brings a superficiality in the communication which further becomes a hindrance in effective communication.

14. Emotional barriers- 

Sometimes some strong emotions like fear, anxiety, or stress make it difficult for a person to engage in a constructive conversation or to respond in any communication. Thus increasing communication blockages.

What Is a Communication Blockage, and Why Does It Matter?

A communication blockage is when people talk in a mean, unfriendly way. It can make everyone feel worried and uncomfortable. When this happens a lot at work, it makes the workplace feel bad and causes problems between coworkers. If we don’t fix these issues quickly, it can make employees feel unhappy.

Communication blockages aren’t just about what people say. That also includes how people act without using words. When colleagues or leaders consistently make you feel unimportant and disrespected, it can make you feel bad about yourself, stressed, and distant from others. This hurts teamwork, performance, and overall involvement.

Good communication is really important for a successful business. For example, when people can communicate well at work, they can collaborate effectively. But when communication is bad, it leads to missed deadlines, more stress, bad attitudes, and less productivity. All of these things can make employees unhappy and uncomfortable.

What Are the Possible Causes of Communication Blockage?

Now that we understand what communication blockages are, let’s talk about why they happen so often at work.

Communication blockages often happen because people don’t understand or accept each other’s differences. This is quite challenging in a diverse workplace.

Several common causes of communication blockages include:

Generational Gaps

Cultural Differences

Disabilities

Language Barriers

Company Status

1. Generational Gaps: 

Every age has its own problems to deal with and a unique method of communicating. These methods occasionally don’t mesh well with how older generations interact. While each age group adds something unique to the workplace, there may be issues with how they interact and what they expect from one another when they work together. They may interact improperly as a result.

2. Cultural Differences: 

Different cultures have different expectations for how people should speak and act. What is acceptable in one culture may be seen to be extremely disrespectful in another. Although having a varied workforce is necessary for a firm to succeed, it can be quite difficult to communicate at work. But don’t worry, later on, we’ll discuss how to address these problems with a proper plan.

3. Disabilities: 

Some people have a hard time understanding the different abilities that people have. As workplaces become more inclusive for people with disabilities, coworkers who don’t understand these differences and the value they bring to work can accidentally create communication blockage for these individuals.

4. Language Barriers: 

Communication can be greatly hampered by language. It might be challenging to understand one another when people use different communication tools and apps or when they speak different languages, such as English, Arabic, or Japanese. When one or both parties don’t try to figure out the best approach to communicate clearly, this can happen.

5. Company Status: 

Many organizations have hierarchical structures, such as managing partners, associates, interns, and so forth. When a corporation has different positions with different levels of authority, it might affect how people interact with one another. While status may not hold the same importance for everyone, some individuals derive satisfaction from having higher status than others, and this can manifest in their communication and treatment of colleagues, making authority a common source of communication blockages for these individuals.

Understanding the roots of these communication blockages is the first step in addressing and mitigating them effectively in the workplace.

How To Overcome Communication Blockage Techniques

To break down communication barriers and build a healthy, respectful work environment for all employees, needs initiative and commitment. Following are some steps and techniques to assist in reducing communication barriers:

1. Cultural and generational understanding

Encourage awareness of the various ways that people of all ages and cultures communicate. Recognize each communication style’s advantages and disadvantages to foster an inclusive workplace where everyone is treated with respect.

2. Create Standards for Communication:

Create concise communication guidelines that include all possible forms of interaction. Ensure that every worker is aware of the standards for speaking with coworkers in all areas of their work.

3. Diverse Team Participation:

Forming these communication standards should involve a broad team.By providing employees a voice and a sense of being heard, inclusivity fosters a successful, respectful, and safe workplace.

4. Effective Management Group:

Create a solid management team that encourages intercultural collaboration and adheres to the company’s core principles. Leadership should set the bar for friendly, open communication.

5. Give Non-Judgmental Communication Priority:

Give importance to honest, nonjudgmental communication. Encourage staff members to express themselves without worrying about criticism or retaliation.

6. Work cooperatively to resolve issues:

When problems develop, resolve them in a cooperative, non-blaming way. Utilize these chances for development and learning to their fullest by including the team in problem-solving.

7. Mediation: 

When workplace disputes emerge, suggest mediation. Make certain that the mediation is neutral, polite, and focused on achieving outcomes that benefit all parties.

8. Sensitivity training

Put sensitivity training into practice as necessary. Employees might learn more about their own communication styles and how they impact their coworkers as a result. Training in empathy can help people bridge generational and cultural gaps.

Implementing these strategies and establishing clear communication standards can help you build a workplace where communication barriers are kept to a minimum and employees may flourish in a welcoming and supportive atmosphere. As a result, productivity as a whole and teamwork both increase.

Conclusion

To make work a better place, we need to deal with communication blockages. These problems can make people feel anxious and stop them from working together. They often happen because of differences in job levels, skills, age, culture, and language. Businesses should take steps to fix these issues.

Here’s how we can do it:

Talk to a lot of people to get ideas.

Set some rules for how we talk to each other.

Be good leaders who encourage honest conversations.

Help everyone understand different ways of talking.

Always speak nicely and without being mean.

When there are problems, work together to fix them without blaming anyone.

If needed, someone neutral can help with the discussion (mediation).

People who take awareness training can learn better ways to talk to each other.

When companies follow these ideas, they can make a friendly and fair workplace where people work well together. This helps the company do better and everyone benefits. Think of these challenges as chances to get better at working together.

FAQ’S

What is communication blockage?

Communication blockage refers to the obstruction or interruption in the flow of information between individuals or within a group. 

How can one identify communication blockage?

Signs of communication blockage include frequent misunderstandings, conflicts, unresponsiveness, or a decline in overall collaboration.

Can technology contribute to communication blockage?

While technology enhances communication, it can also contribute to blockage when misused or relied upon exclusively. Overreliance on digital communication without face-to-face interactions may lead to misunderstandings or a lack of personal connection.

How can organizations address communication blockage in the workplace?

Organizations can address communication blockage by promoting a culture of transparency, providing communication training, encouraging open dialogue, and implementing effective communication channels.

What role does active listening play in preventing communication blockage?

Active listening is essential in preventing communication blockage. It involves fully concentrating, understanding, responding, and remembering what is being said. This helps in clarifying information, avoiding misunderstandings, and fostering a more open and effective communication process.

How can cultural differences contribute to communication blockage?

Cultural differences also affect communication styles, norms, and expectations because it may be possible that the other person is not aware lack of these cultural differences which may lead to blockages. 

[drheidikling]

Understanding the Power of Therapeutic Change with Heidi Kling, PhD

In the current high-speed, stress-inducing environment we live in, the significance of mental health and well-being cannot be emphasized enough. The personal and societal hurdles we encounter can exert immense pressure on our mental and emotional equilibrium. It is in these challenging periods that experienced professionals like Heidi Kling therapist emerge as a guiding light of optimism and relief, navigating us through the intricacies of our internal landscapes. In this discourse, we will delve into the immense benefits of engaging with a seasoned therapist such as Dr. Heidi Kling, exploring the multitude of ways they can augment your mental and emotional health.

One of the primary benefits of having an experienced therapist in your life is the creation of a safe and judgment-free space. In therapy, you have the freedom to express your thoughts, feelings, and experiences without fear of criticism or condemnation. This sanctuary allows you to delve deep into your emotions, helping you understand yourself better and work through your issues.

An experienced therapist is trained to create an atmosphere of trust and confidentiality, ensuring that you feel comfortable sharing even your most sensitive concerns. This safe space becomes a haven where you can explore your thoughts and emotions, helping you gain valuable insights into your life.

Well-versed doctors like Heidi Kling therapist come with a vast reservoir of knowledge and practical experience in psychology and counseling. Their professional acumen offers impartial and expert advice, which proves to be indispensable when working through life's hurdles. Be it grappling with anxiety, combatting depression, resolving relationship dilemmas, or managing any other mental health issues, a therapist can equip you with research-backed strategies and techniques for effective coping. With Dr. Kling's guidance, you are not alone in your journey towards mental well-being.

Their impartial perspective can help you see your situation from different angles, shedding light on aspects you may not have considered. This objectivity is essential for making informed decisions and taking positive steps toward personal growth and healing.

Life can be incredibly demanding, and at times, it's easy to feel isolated or overwhelmed by our emotions. An experienced therapist serves as a reliable source of emotional support and validation. They listen attentively to your concerns, offering empathy and understanding, which can be profoundly comforting.

Having someone who validates your feelings and experiences can help you feel less alone in your struggles. This emotional support can foster resilience, enabling you to face life's challenges with greater strength and confidence.

Therapists, like Heidi Kling, are adept communicators equipped with the skills to enhance your communication abilities. They recognize the pivotal role of effective communication in fostering healthy relationships and stimulating personal growth. Under the professional guidance of a therapist, you can gain proficiency in articulating your thoughts and emotions in a more transparent and assertive manner. This growth in communication skills, as fostered by Heidi Kling therapist, enables you to connect deeper with others and smoothly steer challenging conversations.

Moreover, therapy encourages self-reflection. An experienced therapist guides you in exploring your beliefs, values, and thought patterns. This self-examination can lead to increased self-awareness and personal insight, empowering you to make positive changes in your life.

Life often throws unexpected challenges our way, and having an experienced therapist can equip you with valuable coping strategies. They can teach you how to manage stress, anxiety, and difficult emotions effectively. These skills are not only useful in the short term but can also serve as lifelong tools for maintaining mental and emotional well-being.

Furthermore, therapists help you build resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from adversity. By working through past traumas and current stressors, you can develop a stronger emotional foundation, making you better equipped to handle whatever life throws your way.

Many of us are trapped in unhealthy patterns of behavior or thought that hinder our personal growth and happiness. An experienced psychologist like Dr Heidi Kling therapist can assist you in identifying and breaking these patterns. Whether it's self-sabotaging beliefs, destructive relationship dynamics, or harmful habits, therapy provides a structured framework for change.

Through a combination of self-awareness, professional guidance, and practical strategies, you can gradually replace negative patterns with healthier ones. This transformation can lead to improved mental health and a more fulfilling life.

Therapy is not just about addressing problems; it's also about setting and achieving personal goals. An experienced therapist can help you clarify your aspirations and create a roadmap for reaching them. Whether your goals are related to career advancement, improved relationships, or personal development, therapy can provide the motivation and guidance to make them a reality.

Therapists assist you in setting realistic and attainable goals, breaking them down into manageable steps. They also hold you accountable, helping you stay on track and celebrating your successes along the way.

The immeasurable worth of engaging with a seasoned specialist such as Heidi Kling therapist in your life journey is undeniable. They cultivate a secure and non-judgmental environment conducive to introspection, bestow impartial and expert counsel, and affirm your feelings. Their adept communication abilities and promotion of personal contemplation, as seen in Dr. Kling's approach, empower you to evolve into a more effective communicator and increasingly self-aware person.

Therapists equip you with coping strategies, resilience, and the tools to break unhealthy patterns, facilitating personal growth and well-being. They also assist in goal setting and achievement, helping you turn your aspirations into reality. In a world filled with challenges and uncertainties, the presence of an experienced therapist can be the beacon of hope and support you need to navigate life's complexities and emerge stronger and more resilient on the other side.

[houseofsannae]

I honestly felt there wasn’t enough quality writing in BBS to justify some of the wayfinder trio’s reactions to each other, but like. That bit you wrote about Aqua being called awful being unreasonable? I think in a more capable team’s hands, she would’ve been shown being way more condescending and authoritative as a new Keyblade Master. The whole Radiant Garden falling out was honestly a mess, because I think none of the wayfinder trio were honestly shown doing anything to justify the accusations thrown around.

So while I would never defend Kingdom Hearts' writing as being "good", in the specific case of the BBS scene at the reactor I'd say the problem is more with the acting and the direction. Like you say, none of the Wayfinder trio were shown doing anything that would justify the accusations being thrown around - but that's the point. Aside from some brief glimpses of each other, Radiant Garden is the first time since their respective leavings of the Land of Departure that any of them have been able to have a conversation. As the audience, we know what each of them was doing and why, but Aqua, Terra, and Ven have to make guesses based on what limited information they have.

By the time the reactor scene rolls around, Terra is well aware that he's made mistakes in judgement. He's doing his best to still try to do the right thing, but his self-confidence has taken several blows. Aqua, on the other hand, has only seen the consequences of Terra's actions without the full context of why he's been acting that way, whether he's been mislead or manipulated (or outright mind-controlled that one time). She wants to believe the best of her friend... but she also can't dismiss the evidence of her own eyes. She has valid concerns... but she voices them as if she's monitoring Terra's behaviour as his superior, not as a concerned friend. Without intending to, she pokes Terra straight in the self-doubt, and his anxiety over whether he's doing the right thing finds her as a new, easy target. Thus, the accusations of her letting her title go to her head - it's not that Aqua has given Terra any indication she doesn't trust him, it's that Terra is struggling with being able to trust himself, and it's easier to direct that anger at Aqua for a moment than it is to admit to himself that he might be going about things the wrong way (and that's all tied up in his need to prove that his "lapse" in the MoM exam doesn't make him a failure in Eraqus's eyes - which is its own kettle of fish).

And then Ven is his whole own thing. He went into that conversation already upset with Aqua because earlier in Enchanted Dominion she insisted he go home - he refuses to acknowledge that he's in over his head. He backs up Terra against Aqua because, as the flashbacks show, he effectively worships the ground Terra walks on, and he expects Terra to have his back in kind... which is why he's completely blindsided when (from Ven's perspective) Terra takes Aqua's side instead, and also insists he goes home. Even then, he still takes Terra's accusations against Aqua as fact instead of thinking them through. That naïveté is baked into his character at this point - remember that Ven left in the first place because Vanitas threatened Terra, and he assumed that the older, more experienced Keybearer needed Ven to protect him. This is why I assumed in that same fic that he was only 14 at most, and wouldn't have been surprised if he was younger; I personally would expect a 16-year-old (as he was later confirmed to be) to have better critical thinking skills than that. (Or maybe I was a weird 16-year-old. Equally possible).

All this to say... yeah, no, I'm pretty sure the fact that the accusations they made against each other were unfounded was the point of the conversation. It's not a flaw in the writing; like so many other Kingdom Hearts characters, they were just... wrong. It's one of the franchise's best points in my opinion, even with all the clarity issues that come up because of it: sometimes the characters believe things that are simply factually not true. And therein, I'm pretty sure, lies the tragedy of it all.

[maritaljoy]

The importance of trust in marriage and how to build it

Trust is the cornerstone of a strong and enduring marriage, and the best marriage advice often centers on nurturing and maintaining it. This discussion explores the importance of trust in a marriage and provides guidance on how to build and strengthen this vital foundation.

Why trust is crucial in a marriage

A successful marriage is built on a foundation of trust. Trust is a fundamental aspect that keeps a relationship strong and resilient. Without trust, a marriage may face numerous challenges and may even be at risk of falling apart. In this article, we will explore why trust is crucial in a marriage and how it contributes to the overall well-being of the relationship.

Trust forms the basis of a healthy and secure relationship. It allows both partners to feel safe and supported, knowing that they can rely on each other. When trust is present, it fosters open communication, honesty, and vulnerability. Couples who trust each other are more likely to openly share their thoughts, feelings, and concerns, leading to a deeper connection and understanding.

One of the key reasons why trust is crucial in a marriage is that it promotes emotional intimacy. Emotional intimacy is the ability to be completely open and authentic with your partner. When trust is present, both partners feel comfortable sharing their deepest fears, dreams, and insecurities. This level of vulnerability strengthens the emotional bond between spouses and cultivates a sense of unity.

Trust also plays a significant role in reducing conflicts within a marriage. When partners trust each other, they are less likely to question each other's motives or doubt their intentions. This leads to fewer misunderstandings and arguments. Instead of assuming the worst, trusting partners are more inclined to give each other the benefit of the doubt, which helps in resolving conflicts amicably.

Furthermore, trust contributes to the overall stability and longevity of a marriage. Couples who trust each other are more resilient in the face of challenges and are better equipped to navigate the ups and downs of life together. Trust acts as a solid pillar that supports the marriage during difficult times, fostering a sense of security and reassurance.

Building and maintaining trust in a marriage requires ongoing effort and commitment from both partners. It involves being reliable, keeping promises, and being transparent. Additionally, trust can be strengthened by demonstrating empathy, active listening, and showing understanding towards your partner's emotions and needs.

Best marriage advice emphasizes the significance of trust in a marriage. It provides invaluable insights and practical tips on building and nurturing trust, ensuring a strong and fulfilling relationship.

Building trust in a marriage

Building trust is an essential foundation for a strong and healthy marriage. Trust forms the basis of any successful relationship, and without it, the marriage can suffer. Here are some of the best marriage advice tips for building trust in your relationship.

1. Open and Honest Communication

Communication is key when it comes to building trust. Make sure to have open and honest conversations with your partner. Share your thoughts, feelings, and concerns without fear of judgment or criticism. This transparency fosters trust and allows both partners to feel secure in the relationship.

2. Keep Your Promises

Avoid making promises you can't keep. If you say you'll do something, follow through on your word. Consistently keeping your promises demonstrates reliability and builds trust in your marriage.

3. Show Empathy and Understanding

Take the time to listen and understand your partner's perspective. Show empathy and validate their feelings. This support and understanding help create a safe environment where trust can thrive.

4. Be Accountable for Your Actions

Accountability is crucial in a trusting relationship. Take responsibility for your actions and admit when you make a mistake. Avoid blaming others or making excuses. Instead, apologize sincerely and work towards making amends.

5. Avoid Secrets and Deception

Secrets and deception erode trust in a marriage. Be open and transparent about important matters. Avoid keeping significant information hidden or lying to your partner. Honesty is vital for building a solid foundation of trust.

6. Trust Your Partner's Intentions

Assume the best intentions from your partner unless proven otherwise. Trusting your partner's intentions helps foster a positive and secure environment in your marriage.

7. Prioritize Quality Time Together

Spend quality time with your partner and create opportunities for deepening your connection. Quality time builds emotional intimacy and strengthens the bond of trust in your marriage.

8. Seek Professional Help if Needed

If you're struggling to build trust or facing significant challenges in your marriage, don't hesitate to seek professional help. A marriage counselor or therapist can provide guidance and support to help you rebuild trust in your relationship.

By incorporating these best marriage advice tips into your relationship, you can strengthen trust and create a solid foundation for a long-lasting and fulfilling marriage.

Effective ways to strengthen trust in a marriage

Trust is the foundation of any strong and healthy marriage. When trust is compromised, it can lead to conflicts, misunderstandings, and even the breakdown of the relationship. However, there are effective ways to strengthen trust and ensure a solid bond between partners.

Open and Honest Communication

One of the best marriage advice to strengthen trust is to have open and honest communication with your partner. Create a safe space where both of you can express your thoughts, feelings, and concerns without fear of judgment or retaliation. Be transparent and willing to listen actively. Effective communication helps build trust and understanding in a marriage.

Consistency and Reliability

Consistency and reliability are crucial in strengthening trust. Be someone your partner can rely on and trust to follow through on your commitments. Show up for your partner, both emotionally and physically. Consistently keep your promises and be dependable. These actions demonstrate your reliability and build trust over time.

Be Trustworthy

To strengthen trust, it's essential to be trustworthy. This means being honest, faithful, and respectful in your actions and words. Avoid keeping secrets or withholding information that can affect your partner or the relationship. Trustworthiness is a key component of a strong and healthy marriage.

Forgiveness and Letting Go

In any relationship, forgiveness plays a vital role in rebuilding trust. Mistakes and misunderstandings are bound to happen. Learning to forgive and letting go of past hurts allows the relationship to heal and move forward. Holding onto grudges only hinders the trust-building process.

Transparency and Accountability

Transparency and accountability are essential elements in strengthening trust. Be open about your actions, decisions, and intentions. Avoid hiding things from your partner. Additionally, take responsibility for your actions and be accountable for the consequences. Transparency and accountability foster trust and demonstrate your commitment to the marriage.

Seek Professional Help

If trust issues persist or become challenging to resolve, seeking professional help can be beneficial. Marriage counseling or therapy provides a safe environment to address underlying trust issues and work on strategies to rebuild trust. A trained professional can guide you and your partner towards healing and strengthening the trust in your marriage.

Remember, trust takes time to build, but it can be easily broken. By following these effective ways to strengthen trust in your marriage, you can create a foundation of trust that will withstand the test of time.

In conclusion, the best marriage advice emphasizes the pivotal role of trust in a successful marriage. By following these insights, couples can establish and fortify trust, ensuring a resilient and deeply fulfilling partnership.

[naynay5155]

C!Tommy’s Storyline With C!Dream Is A Very Concerning Depiction Of Abuse

Wild Title 

Okay, I’m sure that this probably isn’t too new information for anyone paying attention to the overall story of the DreamSMP, especially C!Tommy’s storyline, but I figured I’d give my two cents for this anyways. 

C!Tommy is an Abuse Victim who has gone through horrific stuff at the hands of C!Dream. This is not an arguable fact. regardless of if C!Dream had reasons for doing what he did, if C!Dream also later gets abused, or if ultimately the abuse portrayal could be considered in some ways flawed or unrealistic, that stuff doesn’t ultimately matter. Because we’ve seen what happened to C!Tommy during Exile, have seen the physical, emotional, and mental abuse he was put through. Just because they won’t call it Abuse doesn’t mean it isn’t Abuse.

Now, C!Tommy being an abuse victim is an interesting idea from a storytelling perspective. It has a lot of potential to lead to genuine character development, or to affect relationships and story beats in interesting ways. And it could be an interesting way to really say something about abuse and coping with it. 

And to an extent, an argument could be made that it has, though I’d argue the exact way those are handled in canon, but not the point. The point is, abuse is not just something that you get to gloss over. If you want to include themes of abuse in the story, a story you are making available to the public for millions to see, then there needs to be a clear and obvious message being portrayed with including abuse in the story. Preferably, that abuse is bad, and can have majorly negative effects on anyone, especially children. We don’t always get that lucky, but whatever. 

But, from my months of watching the story of the DreamSMP, and trust me I’ve been here a long while, I haven’t seen C!Tommy’s abuse being handled very... well. I could, of course, be wrong in some aspects, and maybe be misremembering stuff since this dumpster fire has been happening for a year now, and feel free to correct me or bring up more points if you know something I don’t. But, I still think that overall, I have a point of view that should be considered. 

So basically, C!Tommy is an abuse victim, right? this is easy to see, very obvious in the way he acts and behaves. Or... is it? 

Abuse is a complex topic and one that, in real life, presents itself in all sorts of forms. Many abuse victims were raised in unloving homes and ended up becoming more vulnerable to abuse later on in life as a result of that. Others never properly learned how to express emotions or turn people down and got taken advantage of. Others were abused from the start, and develop various ways of coping and dealing with that, even ways that they might not be fully conscious of themselves. Abuse is not a one-way street, it could hardly be considered a street at all given how diverse and differing the people who experience it end up developing into are. 

So I’m not saying that, if C!Tommy were a real person, that he isn’t “Being traumatized enough” or that “Why isn’t he more like what I expect him to be like?”. That is not what I’m saying at all.

What I am saying, is that C!Tommy is a fictional character who exists within a narrative, a story. And in a good story, consistency is half the battle. I, as the audience consuming the story, need to be able to look at C!Tommy and pick up on and understand the effects abuse has had on him. And these effects need to be consistent, otherwise, as an audience member, I’m going to get confused and start having questions about why he acts one way here but doesn’t somewhere else.

I also need to be able to clearly see and understand, by being given narrative stepping stones, if something is changing for his character.

As the saying goes, “Show don’t tell”. C!Tommy can’t just say he “Goes to Puffy for Therapy” offhandedly one time, as a means of handwaving away why he doesn’t really consistently act as traumatized as he used to even though it’s literally only been a few weeks, or months at most. To explain how he can jump back between being really sad and depressed about something, to joking about Women and Twitter. It seems weird if he’s able to just so seamlessly, so effortlessly, go back and forth. Almost as if he’s bouncing between OOC and IC, but that’s a whole other discussion. 

Sure, C!Tommy is representing real mental health issues, but he is, ultimately a Fictional Character existing in a story. I need to be given signs, proof, foreshadowing, to explain when he has certain reactions and behaviours in order to understand his character. And these need to be consistent, otherwise we get plotholes and general confusion.

I criticize the inconsistency and the offscreen handwaving because it’s generally not very good writing. It’s the same reason I disliked Eret’s basically off-screen-sort-of-redemption-arc. It’s the same reason people dislike it when Villains of previous seasons suddenly come back as fully reformed good guys for seemingly no reason. There is no arc, no development, no progress is shown to us. 

Because when you’re telling a story about a character having some major change or developing in some way, or having an important character trait, if I don’t see it on screen, then it didn’t happen. How am I supposed to root for C!Tommy’s progress, or understand what he’s doing to progress, if a never see his coping mechanisms? His therapy appointments? 

You can’t just say something, or inconsistently portray something, and expect me to jump through hoops to connect these nearly transparent dots that keep getting thrown around. 

Show don’t tell. Show me Tommy getting better, because otherwise you’re just telling me he made character development, and showing me this completely different character as proof. No, last I remembered C!Tommy was having panic attacks and yelling when C!Dream was even mentioned. You can’t tell me that a day later he can interact normally after days of being in the prison and a month of being dead.

Or, if you are gonna have him flip flop back and forth, don’t have it be so sudden and jarring, give an explanation. Is he faking being fine? Does he have memory issues? C!Tommy doesn’t read to me as the type who’s good at suppressing his emotions, he wears his heart on his sleeve. So you’re going to have to explain, clearly, in a way that isn’t ambiguous, what’s happening with C!Tommy here.

You’re not really saying anything about the abuse C!Tommy goes through, if all of that trauma is automatically wiped from the story when the writers get too lazy or too scared to keep it in. At best, you are showing abuse and trauma for the sole purpose of showing it, with no intention of properly dealing with and addressing it in the story. At worst, you are basically just doing torture porn. 

Pain, Hurt, Trauma for the sake of it. Not with any goal in mind. Just for the drama of it, or to hurt the audience. 

And then your audience is just supposed to take that content in uncritically, and they gain no true understanding of how abuse victims survive and cope after their traumatic treatment.

Exile Arc sure did a good job at making C!Tommy suffer. But as soon as that arc ended, a lot of the stuff that happened in it went completely glossed over and unaddressed for a long while. That might have been fine in the lead-up to Doomsday, since a lot of plot stuff had been going on and stopping to handle C!Tommy’s issues might (Might is heavily doubted cause it certainly isn’t impossible) mess with the pacing a bit. But then after Doomsday, there isn’t really any excuse to put it off. Because nothing was really happening for a good while, and nobody had anything to do plotwise. 

And this became even more true with C!Dream being locked in Prison. Nothing was really happening, so what was stopping the story from taking the time to properly discuss and deal with this stuff?

Well, nothing really. So, the Hotel Arc happened. And oh boy, was it a mess. 

So, C!Tommy being angry at C!Dream for the abuse and trauma he has suffered at Dream’s hand isn’t an issue. It’s an incredibly common thing for victims to feel angry at their abusers, and to even go so far as to wish for vengeance against them in some way. And that’s a totally valid and fine feeling. 

You’re hurting, you’re scared, you’re in pain. I get that. When we’re hurting, we don’t always act rationally or healthily.

But, ultimately, that rage, and hurt, and want for vengeance is not a healthy thing to hold onto. In many circumstances with an abuse victim wanting to inflict pain back on their abuser, we run into various problems. 

For one, getting vengeance on your abuser is quite frequently going to give you more emotional pain than it will fulfilment. Especially if you are young, or are letting this want for vengeance take over your entire livelihood. It does you no good ultimately, to attempt to bring pain to the person who hurt you, because not only will you often be unsuccessful, you frequently won’t find emotional healing and stability in that. 

(The only exception to this rule being if ignoring them or moving on from them isn’t an option for you right now.)

Actions have consequences, and if you invest more time in that person who hurt you, then you have no time to work on yourself or the relationships around you. You have no time to heal, and this can become self-destructive.

Spending time around an abuser, as a victim, is in all likelihood just going to upset you more. You’re retraumatizing yourself by spending time around them, and as you make attempts to give them their comeuppance, you could possibly end up internalizing the methods they used on you, and just end up perpetuating the cycle of abuse again. 

And even if you have no problem with doing that to this particular person, consider how fully internalizing these abusive behaviours could affect your friends or family. Frequently, even when they don’t mean to, abuse victims can internalize the things that they went through and then use those same behaviours against people in their life later on. Being shitty to your support system because of what you went through isn’t a good move, for you or them.

Basically just, an Abuse Victim has more to gain from working on themselves while finding ways to heal and overcome their trauma and abuse, than they do spending their time and energy on the abuser. Its frequently unhealthy, distressing, and self-destructive to indulge in that too much.

(Of course, I don’t speak for everyone, but from what iIve looked into and seen, this is the healthiest method of actually healing from your abuse. That doesn’t mean you just... leave your abuser alone and never address or talk about what they did, you don’t let them get away with it, of course not. It just means you don’t waste your mental well being and time obsessing over someone, especially someone who has hurt you so much.

You deserve better than that. You deserve to heal.)

Now, let’s get back to C!Tommy. 

C!Tommy, instead of finding a proper means of coping with his issues (proper therapy, diagnosis for his issues, forming and maintaining healthy support systems, focusing on things he loves, etc) is shown to repeatedly focus back on C!Dream. When he was making Big Innit Hotel, it did seem like he was to an extent finding ways to cope with his shit. He was still kinda shitty and his hotel was not exactly made and run by the most morally great standards, though I suppose I can’t expect too much when he is a very traumatized teen and doesn’t really know what he’s doing. 

But, ultimately, this all fell apart when he got locked in Pandora’s Vault with C!Dream. Arguably, it was already falling apart the moment he decided to keep pursuing C!Dream even when he was locked up.

See, the thing is, C!Tommy can never just… have trauma. Having trauma that he can healthily and methodically work through is something that for him as a Character, is basically impossible. His character is an angry one, one built on spite and childishness, and who holds the mantle, unfortunately, of “Spunky Male Protagonist In A YA Novel”. So, his mental health issues can never just be a struggle he has to cope with, especially not when the DreamSMP can never seem to have anything between “A lot is happening right now omg” or “Literally nothing is happening and nobody is playing on the server at all omg”.

Instead, his issues have to be seen as a battle, and they fuel the narrative of the story. Him having been abused by C!Dream cannot just exist as a thing that he as a person has to work through slowly with the help of others around him. It has to be seen as this Epic Triumph Against Evil, another battle of Tommyinnit VS Dream on the DreamSMP, a classic Villain versus Hero fight.

This, of course, isn’t too great. By C!Tommy’s abuse plotline being framed in this manner, it makes it so that C!Tommy is constantly obsessing over his abuser and recklessly throwing himself into dangerous and triggering situations is some attempt at an “Epic Battle With Evil”, rather than this being treated like the self-harm it actually is. And yes, it is self-harm, a form of it. 

C!Tommy uses his trauma and issues as fuel for the story, making it so that its impossible for him to truly progress and a character, and the moment he does start growing, he has to get retraumatized again so he goes right back to where he was.

C!Tommy does not become a better person when he’s around C!Dream, nor does he find any form of fulfilment in being around him. He gets shaky and panicky at just the sight of him. He regularly has violent and explosive outbursts at just the mention of him. When C!Dream talks to him, he gets nervous and basically can’t help but listen due to conditioning he still listens to. 

When C!Tommy went to go visit C!Dream the first time in Pandora’s Vault, he brought with him stacks of TnT. He did it because he wanted to mimic what C!Dream had done to him in Exile, where he would take all of C!Tommy’s newly gained items and blow them up underground for dramatic effect. 

C!Dream did this for control over C!Tommy, to manipulate him, for his suffering.

And C!Tommy wanted to do this to C!Dream, because he was feeling vindictive. 

When C!Tommy got into the prison, he mocked C!Dream, hit him repeatedly, and tried to boss him around. He made him write ridiculous books and verbally berated the man. He did this in a feeble attempt to gain some feeling of control over C!Dream. This, evidently, did not work. At best his success was momentary. And this sense of achievement he gained was gained through projecting his abuse trauma onto someone else.

He repeated the cycle. 

After he got brought back from the dead and let out of the prison, he was much much worse. C!Tommy was now paranoid, anxious, constantly thinking about C!Dream, and had his mindset solely on getting revenge on him, by killing him. 

It got so bad, he ended up doing lacklustre “Exposure Therapy” to help himself not panic when he went into Pandora’s Vault to kill C!Dream. It got so bad he dragged C!Tubbo and C!Ranboo into this, putting them in danger and putting more pressure on another two teenagers’ shoulders. 

It got so bad, that Ghostbur died, C!Sam closed off even more, and C!Wilbur came back. 

Objectively, C!Tommy leaving C!Dream alone would be the better thing for everyone. And yet he keeps repeating the cycle. Because C!Tommy is not meant to grow, learn and heal. He is made to suffer. 

The problem is not so much showing an unhealthy depiction of a mentally ill or traumatized person. Because trauma and mental illness and the effects of abuse are not always pretty, and they shouldn’t always have to be portrayed and pretty or sympathetic to be accurate. 

It becomes a problem when you get this depiction of C!Tommy’s coping being presented uncritically to an audience of a lot of underaged and young people. 

Nobody in canon, whether they be adults or fellow teens, has ever tried to question C!Tommy’s methods for coping. C!Ranboo and C!Tubbo just limply went along with his plans for Exposure Therapy with no consideration of if this was a good idea. No adults really offer to genuinely step in and help C!Tommy deal with his shit, and the ones that do leave him or get corrupted in some way, often leaving him with more trauma as they do. 

C!Puffy’s therapy methods are dubious at best, and the most we ever see of her actually helping C!Tommy is her humouring his toxic behaviours, and C!Tommy making offhanded mentions to vague therapists appointments we never see. 

C!Technoblade stopped giving a shit as soon as C!Tommy walked off the screen. C!Wilbur was dead, and now that he isn’t he certainly isn’t helping C!Tommy. C!Phil isn’t C!Tommy’s dad and has no obligation to do anything for him as a result. C!Ranboo has the backbone of a chocolate eclair. C!Tubbo is too busy repressing his own trauma to help C!Tommy with his. C!Sam is being ruled by the prison and C!Quackity. C!Quackity has become an Ancap. 

Nobody in this story is a reliable or trusted person to C!Tommy, who could properly tell him his methods are unhealthy and give him better alternatives. And as a result, nobody is able to tell the audience that C!Tommy is wrong 

Unreliable Narrators are only effective when the narrative in some way has their unreliableness pointed out or proven to the audience. If you go into a story with the assumption that everybody watching will be able to see past C!Tommy’s POV and not take him at face value, then you are naive. Especially when this fandom is made up of many teens and children. 

I only know C!Tommy’s methods are unhealthy because I care way too much and do my research. A vast majority of the world doesn’t have the same understanding and education on these topics, especially not children and teenagers. A good chunk of people, especially neurodivergent and mentally ill people, could very well take the story at face value and automatically assume that what Tommy’s doing is actually a good coping mechanism because they don’t know any better.

There is no clarification or safety net for preventing misinterpretation. And being of the opinion that “Well, they should know better than to trust a bunch of Minecraft Youtubers for this stuff” or “We can’t expect them to be psychologists! You expect too much” is just… not helping. 

Because I shouldn’t have to explain why children and teenagers, especially those that are using these people to cope, are not always going to make level-headed and common-sense decisions. They will be influenced by these Content Creators, whether we think it’s “Stupid” or not. 

And I can say with certainty that, while yes, this might be a bit much to expect from a bunch of British/American white guys who play Minecraft to handle, may I also point out that nobody fucking made them put this stuff in the story. There are ways to write a story without stepping outside of your realm of true understanding. Nobody begged these MCYTs to go and make torture porn for a 16 year old, nobody asked them to touch on topics they have no fucking clue about. 

They put that in themselves. And we have the right to point out the problems and flaws in it, and criticize them for not handling this stuff better. 

You don’t start applying for a job you don’t meet the requirements for. You don’t start an expensive project you can’t finish. 

You don’t include elements in a story you aren’t willing to fully go through with and address in a proper and sensitive way. 

[whenrockwasyoung19]

As a historian, I really want to do a piece on how 9/11 has been commemorated and how it’s been remembered by the people who lived through it and the generation that came up after. So I need to see 9/11 memes so I can determine what jokes about 9/11 are deemed acceptable by society, if any, and which ones are purely tasteless.

Having lived through that time, and remember the South Park era of comedy, I saw a lot of 9/11 jokes in the years after the attacks. They were tasteless then but laughing at them felt cathartic in a way. We’d all been through this collective trauma, and laughing at some shitty jokes was a way of coping with that trauma. But were these jokes tasteless? Probably.

I feel like as we get further away from the event, our memory of it gets more and more distorted. I think for a lot of people who weren’t there and don’t share that collective trauma they can be more cynical about it than the people that were. What do I mean by cynicism? This refers to a couple of trends I see in 9/11 discourse. The first is tasteless jokes, usually in the form of memes. The second is discourse that usually makes a lot of (false) comparisons between 9/11 and some other tragedy. This can be a comparison between some military mission performed by the US military or a natural disaster and most recently the pandemic. The emphasis in these comparisons is that 9/11 wasn’t that bad actually OR what America has done in retribution for 9/11 is worse than the original act itself. The latter point isn’t necessarily wrong but using a tragic event in which thousands of people lost their lives to do it, while an effective rhetorical strategy, can also come off as cynical and disrespectful to the people who survived it or lost family members. I feel like the best way to make that argument is to emphasize how horrible 9/11 was but explain that what the military did in response was perhaps even more destructive and cost more lives. I think deemphasizing how bad 9/11 was or just using it to make a political argument can read as disrespectful and not enough people find that tricky balance between political argument and disrespect.

As for the but such and such was worse, those people can shut up. Like I can entertain conversations about the actions of the US government and military in response to 9/11 because those are conversations worth having. This sort of cynical worldview doesn’t actually yield effective discourse. It essentially posits that because more people died in say a hurricane or an Earthquake that that event was a bigger tragedy. But as a historian, I can tell you that historians don’t claim that something is more significant or even more tragic or less tragic just because at some point in history a worse thing happened. Like as a historians were more aware than most how many bad things have happened in history, so there is no point in comparing all the tragic things to all of the other tragic things like some kind of mad web. Like there is no point in comparing a natural disaster to a terrorist attack because they are in no way similar other than the fact that innocent people died. They are far more dissimilar than similar, and comparing to disparate events that may not have even happened around the same time doesn’t make any sense. What points of comparison are we drawing and to what end? What does that really tell us about the society we’re living in or were living in during the time of these events? So just the business of comparing tragedies is a pointless endeavor but it also posits that the only thing that measures how tragic something is is it’s death toll and that’s not true. 9/11 is a tragedy not just because innocent people died but because of how meaningless their deaths were. They were caught in the crossfires of a conflict that these random office workers, flight attendants, flight passengers, and first responders had nothing to do with. An ongoing struggle between the East and the West, the dynamics between the most powerful nation on Earth and tiny subsections of a massive global religion has nothing to do with these people who died and yet they lost their lives anyway. Now that is true of any civilian attacks. But that’s the thing: there have been far worse civilian attacks in history, even some conducted by the US military (the Dresden bombings come to mind) but that’s kind of the problem with drawing comparisons. I can’t really say if the Dresden bombings and the Blitz were worse than 9/11. It simply doesn’t feel like my place to say to someone that suffered that your tragedy is actually smaller or less significant than this other tragedy that happened some other time. They are all hugely significant in their own ways, they are all tragedies, and they should all be remembered and discussed with reverence.

I do feel that a lot of the comparisons between 9/11 and some other tragedy come from this place of “why does the US make such a big deal about 9/11 and not xyz tragedy?” And this is a valid question but not all of the answers come down to “the US doesn’t care about xyz tragedy” or “the US only cares about itself!” So let’s go through some reasons why the anniversary of 9/11 is so widely covered. Firstly, it happened on our soil. Countries are always going to honor things that happened to them. It’s just a thing. If it affected the people in that country, then yeah they’re gonna go on and on about it. Secondly, it happened 20 years ago so it’s still in very recent living memory. Most people alive on the planet have vivid memories of that day, so most people still remember what that day felt like and want to honor the victims and commemorate it. Thirdly, all the cynical reasons. Yes the US is less concerned about anything else that’s happened outside of our borders. What happened to us matters more to anyone else. No this isn’t great but I’m just reporting the state of things. And yes, the US is selective about what it remembers and what it doesn’t, and the government has a history of struggling to acknowledge the bad things America has done. And lastly, America never really stopped being overly nationalistic like a lot of other countries did after the rise of fascism scared them out of ever doing that shit again. America just maintains its nationalism. Maybe one day it’ll have a more nuanced perspective of itself like other countries do but we’ll see. So yeah there are a lot of reasons why the US makes a big fucking deal about this day and will forever and not all of them are bad or reason to criticize.

Ok now to acknowledge the memes. God any time I tell kids not to make memes about 9/11 I feel like a grandma. I mean I could go on and on about how it’s disrespectful but the people making them know this and don’t care. I guess I’m more interested in understanding why people make memes about a national tragedy. I think it has to do with how 9/11 has been remembered which is largely clouded by all of the political and military stuff that happened as a result of it. For people who learned about 9/11 years after it happened, they didn’t experience these events in real time. For those of us who lived through it, we didn’t know all that was going to transpire because of it. On that day, all we really knew was that thousands of people were dead and more were going to die in the conflicts that would result from it. We didn’t know that the wars would last decades or how pointless it would all be in the end. We had no idea how shitty George Bush was or how incompetent his administration was. We definitely had no idea that Trump was coming. So for a lot of us, we can separate the mess that happened because of the attacks from our memories of the attacks. It’s so much easier for us to think only about the events of that day because we were there. We have specific memories of it which we can latch onto rather than just thinking about news footage or events that came later.

And the cynicism that people feel is somewhat earned. The attacks obviously spurned two decades of Islamaphobia as well as countless military attacks in the Middle East. For a lot of young people, they feel like they’re supporting Muslims or standing against Islamaphobia by disrespecting an event that prompted so much Islamaphobia. And I get that. But also that’s not the way to do show your support or take a stand. Keep in mind that the people who died that day had no idea what they were dying for. Most in their last moments probably didn’t even know it was a terrorist attack. The American people didn’t even realize the first plane was an attack. So it doesn’t really make sense to disrespect their memory when it’s not their fault that their deaths resulted in so much pain and suffering for the Muslim diaspora. Disrespect the people who were openly Islamaphobic after the attacks, criticize the American government for their actions in the Middle East. But not the people who had no control how their deaths were remembered or used by politicians, military leaders, white nationalists, and other racists to attack Muslim people.

As a historian, it’s my job to try to apply a historical context to people’s actions. A lot of people have done this to observe why people responded to the attacks the way they did. Now I want to use it to understand why so many young people feel at best indifferent to the events of that day and at worst resentful and disrespectful towards ur