#Full Comprehension

[cultural-derealization]

☝️👌🔊👂

Fact, not opinion.

Actions vs Words.

[dragonqueenstormwitch]

received a comment today that someone was unhappy with the new covers of the soc (dregs edition) duology because kanej (predominantly featured on said covers) is ‘toxic’ and ‘underwhelming’.

calling kanej 'toxic' when kaz vehemently denies ownership over inej, liquidates all of his assets to pay off her indenture, begins to work on removing his armor and letting down his walls around her, buys her a ship so she can pursue her dream, and reunites her with her parents - i have to laugh.

and if i had to guess, the ‘underwhelming’ would reference the fact that kaz and inej do not have a physically intimate relationship that lives up to whatever expectations this person has for two incredibly traumatized teenagers.

all this to say, don’t speak on kanej if you don’t understand or respect their characters (disrespectfully)

[what-the-floofin]

Honestly I think way too much about my cervitaurs at all times so have this compilation of Notes about them

[camellcat]

school hard is my most rewatched episode by a mile and it always makes me forget how the fuck sprusilla could ever possibly break up. they're SO good they're perfect to me here. despite the fact dru clearly isn't doing well they still feel like equals. spike is choosing to take care of her because he loves her, he adores her, and it shows. dru loves his attentions and loves giving them right back as best she can

and hey I see the spuffy even this early on and I love the spuffy.... but without dru?? ur telling me dru leaves later??? there'll be no dru???? that's just wrong

[isabelguerra]

I always make an effort to look at paranatural through the ~2013 era lens it was conceptualized from, back when it was at it’s most subversive, in tandem alongside its contemporary lens. Because thats what Paranatural was, for those who aren’t aware — paranatural played off of & against the common shonen & cartoon tropes and character expectations that were prevalent in that age: the wise and just mentor, the prejudiced bully, the action girl implemented to pushback against sexism + the subversion of the action girl, the excited rare skilled selfless battleprone protagonist, etc.

most new fans will likely see the comic and take it at face value — why shouldn’t they? — when in reality there’s so much more of a dialogue happening underneath the hood. There is so much underlying, forgotten context that makes paranatural, paranatural

[lucitrius]

my gift for @hellscap3 for the @drv3giftexchangeclub summer exchange event!

they are playing codenames and shuichi / ouma are losing tehe

[kirkwallguy]

Idk if you've posted about it before and I missed it, but I saw ur tag mentioning you have a critique on datv's treatment of transness and I'd genuinely be interested in hearing about it :)

hi, yes i have but it's been a while since i last talked about it! i've been meaning to write a long essay on my issues for a while but it would require actually playing the game and i don't want to do that. here's a long rant that got away from me though:

i've complained sometimes about various stereotypes or missteps in the way specific trans characters are represented, but i'd be able to ignore that if it weren't for my main issue, which is that trans characters just aren't properly woven into the world, leaving them feeling alienated in a way queer characters in previous games never were.

it's very clear that the writers haven't broken down their own perceptions of gender and the various cultures surrounding it enough to say something insightful, which is fine because most people haven't, but when people defend the game on the sole basis that its depiction of transness is revolutionary i do have to take some issue. there are books from the 60s that take a more interesting approach to deconstructing gender lol. veilguard may feel progressive in the landscape of aaa video games but i don't think that means it should pass without critique and i don't think that we should have to settle for this when it's possible to do so much better.

the easiest and most frequently discussed example of not properly incorporating transness into thedas is the use of language in the game. you've probably seen the endless arguments about whether taash calling themself nonbinary is an anachronism, and though i'm sure some of the arguments are in bad faith i think people overestimate how many people (on here specifically) are arguing from that perspective. it's been extremely frustrating to be called transphobic by cis people over this when i'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who has actually studied shit like this.

this is a problem throughout the game but it's easier to examine codex entries for this post than go through entire scenes. i've talked about hating the language in this codex entry before, but it really annoys me so let me complain about it again lol.

acknowleding that trans as a prefix means "change" is actually a good start here and if wasn't for how this codex entry continues i'd just shrug and move on, but i really hate the absolutist way it uses the very modern "affirming" and "was always" narrative and language as though it's universally agreed upon. you can argue that this is subjective and what taash was told (though which shadow dragon is talking to them like a GIC psychologist lol?), but when the entire codex entry feels like an educational pamphlet for clueless cis people it just comes across as very odd.

and then the rest of the codex entry just abandons any attempt at making the words "work" etymologically and gives extremely bare-bones descriptions of them. some of these words are younger than me, i saw them being coined on various forums and corners of the internet. is it representation if you say the word and put absolutely no effort into representing or even discussing the agender/bigender/demigender/others experience? in another post i compared this to being like if they did a lord of the rings remake and confirmed legolas as being bisexual by making him wear a bi flag pin with no extra context - of course people TODAY use that flag to signal their experience with bisexuality and there's nothing wrong with that, but to link modern language/signals with an experience that has clearly existed since before either of those things were invented comes right back around to being oddly invalidating, as though these experiences wouldn't exist without modern english speaking understanding of them.

as for the argument about whether or not it's anachronistic: i don't personally think you need to adhere to a binary of modern / historically accurate language and culture to make queerness work in a medieval-ish fantasy setting. the previous games (for all their faults) managed a pretty established status quo where they didn't aim to portray a utopia with a widespread queer culture while also not being gratuitous with their homophobia. and as much as queer x-topias can be interesting when done well, i think this is a good thing for a big budget fantasy game - unless you're EXTREMELY in the know about gender roles and queer theory etc, how can you hope to portray a queer utopia? some people write books whose sole point is to portray a world without gender roles or homophobia and they still misstep, i don't think it's the casual inclusive background thing a lot of fantasy authors believe it to be. it would have gone the same way as origins' claim that men and women are treated the same; maybe you make queer people hold hands in the street without being questioned and nobody makes negative comments about your romance option, but do you subconsciously assign gender roles to jobs? do you portray the majority of npcs adhering to western cishet gender norms? what is the ratio of monogamous f/m relationships portrayed compared to other relationships? these are all things people just straight up don't think about when designing a world and they will accidentally create a society that is welcoming of queerness in THEORY while actually replicating our own cishet patriarchal values.

i don't think veilguard is attempting to be a utopia, i don't think it's attempting to be anything but a finished game, but i see people defending it on the BASIS of it being a utopia fairly often.

taash's arc is another pretty big example of this struggle to examine gender in real life beyond the writers' experiences, namely white canadian. it's a deeply racist attempt at a multucultural narrative where one culture (which has already been demonised throughout the series, including in veilguard) is portrayed as less welcoming of queer people while the other culture, which is still a society with binary gender roles despite being a matriarchy, is portrayed as being instantly and unquestionably accepting.

there's a LOT of potential in an arc for a character like taash if they'd been written by someone with actual interest (and probably experience) writing about the queer experience of existing within two very different cultures. the qunari ARE a culture who are fairly big on binaries but they have an established acceptance of transition that would make their understanding of gender fairly fluid, meanwhile the lords of fortune seem ideal on the surface but human/(our) culture has so many hidden binaries that you don't notice in everyday life unless you're the one being alienated by them.

this could have been a chance to slightly turn the racist Othering of the qunari on its head by showing our own society from the perspective of perhaps some aqun-athlok characters taash befriends, a codex entry about an aqun-athlok character from the past that taash finds and takes inspiration from (maybe they start out aqun-athlok then reject the gender binary entirely?), or even from shathann, perhaps as a character who has explored her gender in the past or decides to explore it as a result of taash. (imagine if shathann was actually aqun-athlok herself, having adopted taash, and some of her complicated feelings about the qun involved the fact that her identity was more accepted there. just SOMETHING to balance the scales a little.)

then again, not even rivain gets to be the fully "progressive" society and taash has to go to the shadow dragons for their gender education. i think it's funny that someone seemed to be projecting an ultra-progressive modern activist group image onto the shadow dragons, i think i've said before that they remind me of all the modern au fanfiction about les amis from les mis that i used to read as a teenager, when they're supposed to be a ruthless abolitionist group. i think this choice was largely to facilitate interaction between the factions but it does feel a little odd given the other racist elements in taash's arc.

there's also the issue of the actual topic of medical transition being avoided. we have tarquin and mae, two characters who have seemingly undergone some kind of medical transition. we have top surgery scars in cc. but there's no discussion of how this transition happens - is hrt magical as krem suggests and is that the only option? is surgery affordable? do different countries and cultures have different levels of advancement in medical transition? these are things i'd want to see written about in codex entries, not lists of various identities that anyone can find by googling a list of genders.

i'm a little disquieted by the avoidance of medical transition given everything happening irl, but it's maybe the issue i understand the thought process behind the most. it feels like a very safe attempt at not veering too far into what happened with krem / the decades of weird fascination with trans bodies. my feelings on this entirely hinge on whether or not the dragon king does actually have top surgery scars lol, for my sanity i'll say he doesn't.

anyway, this all sucks because i've seen SO many fans do better for casual oc posting or fanfic. i've seen so many amazing ways trans culture and hrt and surgery could work in thedas and it's depressing that the writers couldn't even attempt to do something interesting with it. i know there was a lot of crunch that impacted the quality of the writing but i do also think some of these issues would have persisted if they'd had all the time in the world.

[chefbeepo]

Me thinking abt the other lost light: wow scary they all died lol

Me thinking abt the other lost light for .1 second more: Brainstorms suitcase was open when Nautica and Night beat found it. He must've tried to use it to undo the horrific fate he accidentally created but clearly didn't make it in time, leaving him to die watching all his friends and crew mates die by his hand. All of which proven by his horrified expression on his dead body.

[fratercrucis]

thank god i watched the show with my brain otherwise I would've been unhappy and sad and desperate for a season 16 all the fucking time.

[selkielore]

when people hate wuthering heights bc the characters are bad people and i’m like so we don’t all love books about crazy bitches :(

[marokra]

something about movieverse Sage interests me. i’ve seen a lot of concepts, theories, and ideas thrown around and i adore every single one of them, but honestly i have to wonder why Sage would be created in the first place.

Both she and Stone are both driven by the same thing—loyalty, the only difference being that the former’s coding had that as it’s basis. fundementally, at least from movie 1 Robotnik’s point of view, they serve the same purpose, to protect him, to serve his whims and carry out orders to a tee. having two while only one worked perfectly fine would be redundant, again, from his pov, therefore there wouldn’t be any reason to pursue Sage’s creation. well, unless there was some sort of need.

maybe she was created to assist Robotnik on that mushroom planet, or as a post-sonic 3 thing with fix-it fic undertones.

maybe she was a years-old passion project, some scrapped lines of code he never had the time or purpose to pursue, as she wasn’t particularly needed. he didn’t need a hyperintelligent ai that was built purely to protect and aid him, as Stone did that job well enough already, despite being oh-so-painfully human. so that leads me to wonder which circumstances would drive Robotnik to pursue this dead end, to finish what he started.

there’s a lot of possibilities that could lead to it, honestly. mainly driven from the idea of separation, at least how i see it.

maybe he based her personality on Stone, just a little, most likely unintentionally. deriving from his loyalty, maybe a stray mannerism here and there. Sage, once sentient, once she gets introduced to him, i feel like she’d start to notice the little similarities within her code.

not much gets past an AI, really. she noticed the agent’s quirks, and upon doing a deep dive of her own code, she’d come to realize she had ended up adopting those same mannerisms, that unwavering loyalty towards her father, despite not having known the agent long enough for the mirroring to kick in. it intrigues her. what about the man would drive her father to allow her to mimic him? to deem those traits important enough to include in her code?

but as she kept observing, cataloguing even the simplest of things; like the way he made lattes, his thinly veiled distaste for humanity, and the way he looked at her father like he was the embodiment of the scorching, sharp, yet ever so radiant sun, was when the pieces started to fall into place.

noticing the things that her father loved about his assistant (even though he would deny it to hell and back if she brought up her hypothesis) answered her questions quite clearly.

she knew regular children take on the image of both of their parents. and if her theory was correct, maybe she would come to see Agent Stone as her father, too.

[voidedjuice]

ive got to say, i really dont like it when all the blame for what happened in hortus is laid purely on arturia, instead of like. the guy who specifically arrived at the scene in order to get all the monastery's sarkaz violently killed

[veal-exe]

your posts about afab oppression is interesting. you call it transandrophobia but most of it seems like misogyny? why give it a different name? does it need to be specified that it only affects people afab?

{I AM INTERSEX AND ENGLISH IS MY FOURTH LANGUAGE, MIND THIS POST BEFORE YOU GO OFF IF YOU SPEAK ENGLISH AS A FIRST OR SECOND LANGUAGE. LINGUISTIC NITPICKERS WILL BE BLOCKED. NO EXCEPTIONS. IF YOU NITPICK AND I BLOCK YOU AND YOU TRY TO GET ME TO UNBLOCK YOU, THE ANSWER IS NO, CONSIDER IT A LESSON IN MINDING YOUR INTERNALIZED XENOPHOBIA}

I feel like this is bait but I'm going to good faith it.

Transandrophobia is an intersectional concept, just like transmisogyny, it's not "a different thing" from misogyny or transphobia, it's what happens at the overlap. It names a specific set of patterns that emerge when transphobia intersects with the way people read and treat people assigned female at birth when they’re understood, wrongly or not, as "formerly girls" or "failed women."

A lot of the tropes I talk about are misogynistic. But they're also transandrophobic. They're both. That’s not a contradiction.

You wouldn’t look at a trans woman talking about transmisogyny and say “that just sounds like misogyny” as if that explains or negates anything. We (hopefully) understand by now that the way misogyny targets trans women is specific, and compounded by transphobia, so why pretend like the inverse isn’t true when it comes to trans men or transmascs?

Transandrophobia describes the unique way transphobia weaponizes misogyny against people AFAB especially when they’re visibly or vocally transmasc. It covers things like forced association with reproductive roles, denial of autonomy, hyperfixation on what we “used to be,” and a cultural narrative that punishes transmascs for “abandoning” womanhood. These aren’t just misogyny and they aren’t just transphobia, they’re the shape those things take when they blend together in a body people think they understand better than we do.

And the most important thing is that the entire point of the post was to respond to someone saying there are “no media tropes that hurt trans men.” So I gave examples of tropes. That hurt trans men.

So yes, I was specifically talking about trans people AFAB, because it was a response to a post saying no tropes exist that hurt Trans People AFAB. So yes. It needs to be specified. Because that was the entire point.

'does it need to be specified that it only affects people afab?'

Yes, because it was made in reply to a post, that said no tropes exist, that hurt trans people afab.

[hcnnibal]

between a2 and a1 do you have like a "favorite child" or do you love/hate them equally?

oh a2 is definitely my favorite

[robodove]

Oh!! I forgot!! I was gonna do a whole picture for today but. I got distracted and its.. no longer the day.

Anyways! YAY! 6 year anniversary of the Lego Ninjago movie!! One of my favorite movies ever, I adore it so much

[vingler-mirror]

If I had a nickle for every time a 5-star girlie who has a dreamy disposition and is thought to be mad makes a 4th wall breaking comment in her idle dialogue... I'd have two nickles.