#Butch lesbians are hated through and through and it pains me to know that poc women targeted more and get no apology either

[tovarishch-dyke]

Hey also forgot to mention that I am now too masculine looking to be considered a woman by t*rfs. Thanks for the gender affirmation, girls, I have now achieved the perfect butch look lol

[xgodlike]

    unpopular part 6 takes under cut because i don’t want people coming for me over my opinion

    jolyne: i wish there was more to her character, but she’s greatly reduced to being ‘jotaro’s daughter’, both in the manga & by the fandom. there wasn’t nearly enough exploration of her character & development left a lot to be desired. i overall dislike just how there’s such a lack of conflict regarding her father after hearing him say he has always cherished her. sure, it’s her father & all, but he’s also a stranger, & part of the reason she ended up the way she is. her rebellious nature is consequence of lacking the attention that a male / father figure didn’t give her, hence why she ends doing stupid stuff & involved with shitty men. after jotaro loses his disc, it feels as if jolyne’s struggle is tossed out of the window & it just becomes another quest for her.

     ermes: i have a lot of issues with ermes, but specially the way that the fandom handles her. she was poorly written, in my opinion, & almost felt like a rehash of polnareff by constantly getting into trouble & needing the protagonist to intervene, however, what pisses me the most is that her character is reduced to ‘butch lesbian’ ( when there’s no confirmation of this ), stripped from her femininity ( along with jolyne but i see this happening the most with ermes ), or having her race & skin colour changed altogether. representation is important, i understand, but by making her way darker than she is, or making her appear a different race, i can’t help but feel as if these people are saying she’s not ‘poc’ enough. & it irks me especially because i’m mexican. i’m on the lighter side, yet still not white. we do exist. just because she’s mexican or half mexican, doesn’t mean her skin tone has to be darker than what it is in the manga / game & now anime. want to talk about representation? how about touching on the fact that she was going to college in the 2011s as an immigrant because she didn’t want to end up roped in the family business? ( to which could be a big issue within mexican families ). i never see any of that being mentioned & it’s such a shame because there’s potential there. i wanted to like her, but the poor writing, though mostly the fandom’s take, has ruined it for me.

    f.f: not unpopular opinion here because she’s best gal. however, i don’t see why people think it’s necessary to change her physical form or to force ships on her. she’s plankton. plankton is asexual. also a microorganism & f.f’s body is a husk. let’s not sexualize that pls.

    jotaro: i will admit i’ve never liked jotaro as a character regardless the part. however, something that pisses me off about part 6, is just how easily he’s forgiven for what he’s done. i don’t care about his intentions or whether they were good or not. it takes more than ‘i’ve always cherished you’ for me to care, because he was aware beforehand that stand users attract each other. even if he didn’t know there were still some of DIO’s followers, he must’ve known that something, anything could happen, & still decided to get married & have a child, only for him to neglect both.

    emporio: don’t even get me started on this gremlin & how shitty & anticlimactic the end was because of him.

   weather report: i don’t get why he has become the uwu soft boi of part 6, considering he has no regards of personal space & is basically a blank slate. sure, he’s not to bad at the beginning, but later on? i don’t care what happened to him. he’s a complete dick with his memories back & has no guilt or remorse over killing innocent people for his amusement. also, his stand is ridiculously op in ways that makes no sense other than plot armour most of the time.

    anasui: i feel a great portion overlook the fact that anasui is not meant to be a ‘good’ guy. he’s not mentally well, either, & you could get that from his backstory, as short & vague as it was. he’s described to always have a mania to dissemble things. he showed no boundaries & it escalated to the point of doing just that with his neighbour’s car. yes, anasui is a killer. he’s selfish, he’s toxic, he’s many things that are bad, but even he shows some conflict when weather report acts out, because anasui didn’t kill ‘just because’.  as for his obsession with jolyne, i feel people forget the fact it’s stated that he thinks of himself as cursed, or to have lived in darkness. to him, jolyne was hope & reason enough for him to want to be better.

       also, stop just turning him into trans to only fetishize him in ships with weather report or jotaro.

     pucci: i don’t know if this is unpopular, but i consider him the best written villain in jojo series, followed by valentine. this is because i feel araki finally learned there had to be more than just world domination, & by showing pucci’s reasoning behind following DIO, & what he went through, along with his faith, he makes for a character you can empathize with, while also condemn. it pains me to see him being hated over the end of part 6, or greatly reduce to ‘lol he’s dio’s boyfriend’ because it greatly diminishes the strong bond that the two of them had.

    DIO: also not an unpopular one ( i think? ), but it’s the best rendition of him & how i wish he would’ve been for part 3. i absolutely love seeing him under a different a light & why there were people so devoted to him.

     as a plus, DIO’s kids deserve more love. not only rikiel, & i’m happy they all present attributes of the ‘old’ dio. they’re what giorno or even DIO himself, would’ve become without a goal in mind & their resolve.

[yelloskello]

i fucking hate the stag/doe - butch/femme thing. I hate it. I hate that we are explicitly told that we’re not allowed to use these terms, and for what? I went a’googling to see what lesbians were actually saying in regards to why they’re lesbian-exclusive, read the arguments straight from the horse’s mouth, and it amounts to this:

TERFs (and no, I do not mean lesbians = terfs, I mean it is TERFS who came up with this) straight-up believe that bi women and trans women just weren’t there in our history. They say that butch and femme carry the weight of a painful history and fighting for our rights in the words, and that when anybody but lesbians use the terms, they’re putting it on like a fancy dress and calling it an aesthetic.

As if bi women and trans women just straight-up weren’t there for that history, too.

They argue that ‘nobody fights men to use phrases like bear/otter/twink!’ and quite frankly, i’m pretty fuckin’ sure bisexual men and/or trans men can happily use those terms, too, so shitty argument there pal. 

So they kick us out of a history that we were actively a part of, and younger lesbians who want to do the right thing but don’t know the history of this argument latch onto it, and bisexual people... Within the last year... Create the terms stag/doe, since it’s evidently morally wrong to use terms that are part of our own history, but since we can experience the same kind of dynamics in our relationships, we need SOMETHING to describe them. And what do people say?

‘wtf this is so dumb/fucked up, this is just watered/down butch and femme, they’re literally the same thing, why would you make up new words to mean the same thing?’

because we experience the same goddamn thing, just because we like multiple genders doesn’t mean we always hop on “opposite” genders, we can have relationships with similar-gendered/nonbinary people, even outside of a relationship we are still part of the community, we still experience Gay Attraction, and it can still be part of our identity because we’re still LGBT+, but we’re not allowed to use those terms! We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

I hate the wave of separatism that we’ve gone through. I hate the idea that everything has to have shit exclusively for them, even if it has a history of being used by multiple sexualities. I hate that people think No Experiences Overlap Ever, when in truth, marginalized people (and I don’t mean just queer/LGBT+ people - I mean PoC, disabled folks, etc) have SO much more in common than anyone might ever think. Yes, some groups do have things that exclusively happen to them, as a white person i’m NEVER going to fully understand the struggle that brown and black people go through, there’s SO much i’m still ignorant to concerning that, i’ll never pretend all our experiences are exactly the same, but there are also at least some issues that I can strongly empathize with because I hear what they go through and can see similarities in the way i’m treated as an AFAB person or as a bi person or as a nonbinary person. A microaggression because you’re gay and a microaggression because you’re brown are both microaggressions, even if they’re presented in different ways, over different issues. Multiple groups are denied housing and jobs for their identities, even if it’s done quietly behind closed doors so the law doesn’t crack down on peoples’ bigotry. As a trans person I can feel the personal pain of my people being accosted in bathrooms by bigots, and I can look at how black people are assumed to be criminals by virtue of simply walking around in a store, and even though the issues are very different, I can see the similarities - we both are mistrusted by “””normal””” society based on hideous stereotypes - and I can feel for them, even if I don’t experience being assumed to be a criminal personally. I listen to them and I believe them not just because they’re fucking people who deserved to be listened to and believed, but because I have seen how general society treats people like me, so why should it be so hard to believe they could be treated like shit, too?

People think that our struggles are so fucking exclusive that they lose all empathy for other groups, thinking that the only people who have ever suffered are themselves. It’s always baffled me that LGBT+ people can be so fucking ignorant and racist and hateful when you think they’d be able to tap into their own hurt and understand that other people are being treated in similar ways because they’re ‘different’, too. But then again, LGBT+ people can barely understand how other subsets of LGBT+ people have struggled, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. I think of how ace people can write a laundry list of things they personally experience, and other subsets will scoff and say ‘yeah as if we don’t go through that too’, completely fucking ignoring what that overlap means. Thinking that since they go through that, anybody else who reports that they might, too, are just Faking, or trying to steal the spotlight. How can people so completely lack empathy? Why are we not there for each other? Why do we not care about anybody else? Why can’t we recognize the same fucking pain we’re all going through, even if that same pain comes in different flavors, and try to be there for each other because nobody should have to go through what we’re going through?

Like, it’s a complicated issue. Like I said, yeah, groups do have stuff that effects them exclusively, and it can be frustrating to express unhappiness with something exclusive to your group and have people who clearly aren’t actually understanding what you’re going through say they can relate. But denying that there are any similarities at all just drives us farther apart when right now marginalized people desperately need the support of one-another. 

(I was gonna give bi people’s Double Discrimination as an example of that exclusivity, unwanted by communities on either side of the fence, since obviously lesbians and gays don’t experience that... But y’know who probably can empathize? Mixed race folks. Or folks with invisible disabilities. Or ANYONE who’s caught between both communities, not x enough for one and not y enough for the other.)

Speaking only of communities that I am personally in: in LGBT+ circles, separatism breaks up the subsets and causes infighting. In circles concerning disability and mental/physical illness, it isolates its members, denies them support, makes them feel like nobody truly understands, even people dealing with the exact same disability or illness, because symptoms can be so widespread and varied. Hell, even when dealing with our oppressors, separatism fails to actually try and change the views of the people oppressing us: i’d much rather have narratives where men are gentle, kind, feminine, loving, supporting, open to their emotions, and respectful permeating our culture, teaching young boys how to be as they grow, than narratives where men are just evil.

There’s a lot of gray area. There are people who have been so hurt by oppression that I do not blame them one bit for prescribing to a separatist narrative. But I mean in a general sense... I don’t want separatism to be pervasive. I don’t want it to be the mindset people automatically turn to regardless of what they’ve gone through. I want sympathy and support for the people who have been hurt, and I want the groups that have been doing the hurting to change. I want people to recognize the similarities between each other and be unafraid of empathizing and sharing.

The butch/femme and doe/stag thing is a result of separatism, and I can see where they get the idea for it - basically pulling the ideas of appropriation from communities of PoC telling white people not to appropriate their stuff - but they’re lashing out at the wrong people. When a white person appropriates locs, they’re seen by the public eye as being carefree, trendy, and cool, while black folks are still punished for wearing the same look that occurs naturally for them. When a white person puts on a war bonnet, they’re seen as being high-fashion and ‘exotic~~~’, while literally desecrating a sacred part of a culture they don’t belong to in any way, shape, or form. When a bi person calls themselves butch, they’re a part of the community that shares the exact same history, their histories are literally interwoven, and experiences extremely similar dynamics, at the very least, as lesbians. These are two very different things. Tell cis/straight people not to appropriate the terms, but remember, other LGBT+/queer people aren’t fucking cis/straight.

anyways this got way longer than I was expecting but shit, I got like 60 followers, who gives a damn what I say, right? peace.

[oncewhenweweregods-blog]

Importance of Representation

Every statement that I make is from my own experience, and my own opinions. I do not believe that everything I am about to say is true for everyone, or even that it should be true for everyone.

***

When it came to my own sexuality, I was always confused as a kid. I grew up Catholic, and I would listen to priests and parishioners speak about how wrong it is to be gay, that it is a sin, blah blah blah.

Obviously, I believed it. I was gullible like that. If someone told me something, it had to be true.

Every show or movie I watched was the same: white, straight main cast. It was normal. It was constant. Still, I would look around at my friends, the ones who definitely were not white, the ones who spoke with accents from different countries, and I would think, where are they in the things I watch?

I do not remember much from my childhood (shoutout to repression of traumatic events, whoo!), but I do remember watching my favorite television shows and movies and not recognizing the characters in all of the people I interacted with on a daily basis.

Is television a lot different now than it was, say, fifteen years ago? Absolutely, and not at all.

When I was younger, I did question why there were not any main black characters, or any main Indian characters, or why all of them seemed to come from America. But I never really dug into those question - I never actually understood why I was questioning it.

As I got older, I recognized more and more the lack of racial representation in the media. It was pointed out to be by a friend of mine who had immigrated to the United States from Haiti. She was complaining one day, rightfully, that all of her favorite American shows lacked one important detail: non-white main characters.

She told me about her niece, who was only one years old, and her fear that she would never be able to relate to the characters in a television show because these shows would not demonstrate the things she would go through. The shows she would watch as a child would not tell her about racism, or about what she would deal with - they would only narrate the lives of the white main characters.

I feel incredibly under-qualified to speak more on this, as I am white, but I do understand the importance of representation of POC, and I also understand the representation of immigrants in the media.

My family came from Portugal, from a less-than-decent life there, and sought out opportunity in America that they did not find in Portugal. They came here for a better life for the next generations of our family, and not only did they struggle to make it here, but they struggled once they got here.

They struggled to learn the language, to be taken seriously with thick, foreign accents - to get jobs with foreign names. It was not until they changed their names to their “English versions” that they were actually called for interviews.

My aunt married a man, a doctor, who once told her that he throws away applications if he cannot pronounce the name.

Where is all of this leading to?

The fact that I don’t see enough of this shit in the media.

The fact that I can’t find enough shows about immigrants, about foreign people, or even just with foreign people in the main cast. 

The fact that maybe - just maybe - if my mother had watched an American show when she was seventeen and afraid that featured even just one main character that went through the same struggles as her, she would feel a little less alone.

People do not understand the importance of representation. I have complained about a television show not having enough POC, and I have been told, “there’s a black guy as the main character - how is that not enough?!”

Seriously? One main character is black, and that is somehow supposed to be enough?

How many POC do you think are in just America alone, and yet every character in a lot - if not most - shows/movies is somehow magically white? Because white people never interact and form bonds with POC and therefore they could not possible be a main character?

In response to that reply, I always think, what the actual fuck?

Of course, things are getting better. There are more POC as main characters in television shows, more shows and movies featuring people who came from other countries (has anyone watched One Day At A Time?), etc.

But until people are adding POC into shows and movies for the reasons that they should be added, and not just to “temporarily please” viewers, we will get nowhere.

Now, onto gay representation...

This is where I relate to the most. As said before, I struggled with my sexual orientation, like, A LOT. 

I hated myself. I hated everyone else. I was just angry all of the time as I fought with myself over being gay, over accepting that I was gay. 

I hid it from everyone until my Sophomore year of high school. What helped me accept myself and tell my mom via a game of hangman?

One of the gayest shows (in my opinion): Glee.

Before I even came out as gay, I earned myself the nickname Santana from some of my friends who had also seen the show. Was it because they viewed me as gay? No. It was because they viewed me as a bitch.

But that is probably what made it easier for me. The show did not focus on Santana as some super-butch, super out-there lesbian. They did not classify her under any stereotypes, and they certainly did not make her identity easy for her (I mean, it took her three years just to come out to her closest friend, and we all know she suffered with figuring herself out long before that).

They made her casual, and they made her angry. That was something I was definitely able to relate to (especially now, but that it an entirely different story which I will get to shortly, since apparently I am going to share every damn detail about my gayness with you).

When she came out, her grandmother turned away from her. But still, she found strength from the acceptance of her friends, and even though she still was not completely okay with everything, she moved forward.

Watching her story made me more comfortable. I saw someone like me - an angry, lost teenager refusing to accept something that she already knew was true until she was pushed by her friends.

So, I told my mom, and the rest is kind of history, although I regret coming out to my mother by playing hangman and making “Mom, I am gay” the words for her to guess.

(Three years later, though, it turned out my mom is gay, too! Holy shit!)

Anyway, my point of bringing up Glee is that I saw myself in a character. I was able to accept myself because of a gay character that was part of the main cast of a television show.

And there was so many shows and so many characters that help other people struggling with their identity. People will tell me sometimes, “I don’t see the point in adding so many gay characters everywhere - we know they exist, we don’t need to push it.”

Well, maybe “pushing it” is what kept little Jimmy from overdosing on pain pills he found when he was fourteen because he found out, from television, that there are people like him, that there are people going through the same issues as him.

(Yes, that is a true story about a friend of mine and, no, his name was not Jimmy.)

The last little bit of representation I am going to talk about here is neurodivergence. 

I grew up with a severe anxiety disorder, but that is not something I am going to get into, because I would much rather get into a personality disorder - specifically, antisocial personality disorder.

I asked all of my coworkers once what they thought of when they heard the term “sociopath” (I would have used the term ‘antisocial personality disorder’, but as you will see from their response, the media has left everyone uneducated on the topic). Almost everyone replied with things like “murderers” or “psychos”, except for one of my managers who majored in psychology and actually understood the disorder.

Something I do not discuss often is my issue with lack of empathy and a seemingly “inability” to connect with or care about most people. I do not experience empathy. I experience sympathy only when around the few people I actually care about.

I was “unofficially” diagnosed with ASPD (professionally, but “unofficially” as in it was one session, I was classified as a non-threat, and I was told that I did not have to pursue therapy as treatment because I was fine with my diagnosis, and therefore I did not see that psychiatrist again). How this psychiatrist was able to “diagnose” me in one session, I am not sure (well, I may be, but that is not something I am going to get into).

Anyway, that short-lived therapy session was about two years ago.

What did I think after it?

Holy shit, I am going to end up killing someone. I am a fucking psychopath.

Was I actually going to kill someone? No, what the fuck? Was I a psychopath? By definition, no. 

But I was afraid of what I believed I would “turn into” because of everything I had seen in the media. I was led to believe that because I was being grouped in with people who were diagnosed with ASPD, I would grow up (even though, technically, I was already “grown up” - but let’s be real, eighteen is not grown up to most people) to be some horrible serial killer, even though I had never even thought of killing someone.

(Also, fun fact: loving animals and being empathetic towards animals apparently does not “count” according to the psychiatrist I saw.)

ANYWAY, fast forward to about six months later. My dad and I are talking and he mentions some show called Person of Interest. I look it up, read the description, and think, Sounds gay, no thanks.

Fast forward two more months. I am on Tumblr and find a list of shows with gay main protagonists. I see Person of Interest listed, with the character name Sameen Shaw. 

Being the gay asshole I am, I put the show on Netflix, but only started on the first episode that Shaw makes her appearance.

Axis II personality disorder? Am I watching what I think I am watching? A character with a personality disorder that is otherwise labelled as violent?

Okay, so maybe Root and Shaw are incredibly violent during the show, but I am ignoring that part while I write this.

They both, like me, suffer from issues with empathy. Of course, Shaw is a bit “higher” on the spectrum, a bit more “broken” if that is how you want to word it, but the fact of the matter? They both lack empathy one way or another.

And yet, they are the heroes. They are the ones that save lives. They are not the enemy, they use violence because it is necessary (for Root, let’s assume we are talking about when she starts actually working with the team, not when she was an assassin). 

The show never gives them “redemption” from their personality disorders. The writers do not have some character arc where Shaw seeks forgiveness for having ASPD, where she thinks that she is completely broken from it, and that she needs to be fixed, and Root even says it.

The show gave me something that made me feel safer about myself, that made me realize the stigma surrounding people with ASPD is mostly wrong, and there are so many other disorders (anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, just to name a few) that deserve this kind of beautiful representation, because people with these disorders DESERVE to see main characters that they can relate to, that they can find strength from.

Representation is not something that show creators/writers should consider a “gift” to their viewers.

Representation should not even be representation at all. It should just be.

Because the real people are POC, LGBT+, and neurodivergent.

Shows are not meant to be real, obviously, but the characters should be. The characters should reflect the people that watch them.

Representation is important because it gives the viewers someone to relate to, because it makes the characters real. 

I feel as though this goes without saying, but this is obviously the same for all types of media - novels, comic books, movies, etc.

And this is why I will make damn sure that whenever I write, I will include characters that people can find themselves in, because I have experienced firsthand just how important that is.