#I don't know hot take but bigotry is bad

[fromtheseventhhell]

I know I'm stating the obvious here, but it says a lot that the Stansas love the xenophobic, racist show ending and think it will be book canon whereas Key Five stans and other normal fans actually listen to GRRM saying the books ending will be different. Which would explain why Stansas originally hated the Ramsay plot in the show until they realized it could make her more important to Jon than Arya and they could use it to say Sansa is more victimized than Arya and Dany.

What gets me about the show is that there's just...no overall story being told. There are no overarching themes or points made, just us watching a series of events unfolding with no cohesiveness. There were plot points that went absolutely nowhere and no inconsistent characterization. Which makes sense, considering D&D's views on storytelling:

The story lines move forward and dig deeper as the episodes progress but rarely circle back and almost never pause for reflection. When I asked Benioff and Weiss if it was possible to infer any overall intentionality to the upcoming 10 episodes, they sneered. “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports,” Benioff told me.

They literally did not know or think about an overarching story. What gets me though is that all of the material was there in the books, they simply had to adapt it. Instead, we have them completely ignoring all of the book's themes for the entire show and then trying, poorly, to pretend like they cared at the end. The forced conversations about wanting to break the wheel and caring about the smallfolk were absolutely laughable. We had the one character who did the most to fight for the smallfolk, who was actually for systemic change, become a victim of character assassination. Then we had characters who actually show care and concern for the smallfolk in the books having that part of their character completely erased. They just wanted to shallowly trot out "cares about smallfolk" to make the characters they liked look better. Nothing actually ends up changing. The system doesn't get reformed and the people with the most power have never shown any indication of wanting to change the system. That's why people in this fandom praise conformity and demonize those who fight against the system. The only way their faves look "special" is if the staus quo ends up preserved. People will outright justify and defend classism because their favorite character is classist, and that's just where we are in terms of comprehension skills in this fandom.

[queerlyhalloween]

moonblade-mary⚔️ follow

Guys, can we stop with the "all hunters are bad" rhetoric please? Yeah, I know there are a lot of hunters who got into the art due to bigotry (and I hate them as much as you do!) but TRUE hunters kill with honour.

FANGSforthememories🧛 follow

"not all hunters are bad" oh okay, I mean I did have a problem with being potentially STAKED for WHO I AM, but since you'd be killing me "WitH HOnOuR" then I guess I'll get over it 🙄 typical hunter victim complex.

moonblade-mary⚔️ follow

See, this is exactly what I mean. I wouldn't stake you because you are cognizant and in control, but next time one of your thralls goes into blood frenzy and kills a family of five maybe I won't swiftly put them out of their misery, because SOMEBODY didn't feel like taking responsibility for their blood children. 😒

Pawsforthought🐺 follow

Erm, I get where you're coming from but I have a problem with the whole "cognizant and in control" part...

FANGSforthememories🧛 follow

You're wasting your time, pup. Hunters are bigots by default. @moonblade-mary⚔️ so you think I'm a terrible parent just because I'm a vampire? 🤔 Interesting

moonblade-mary⚔️ follow

No, don't twist my words.

I KNOW you're a terrible parent because you've turned THREE thralls this year (three!!!) because they were, and I quote, "smoking hot" (yeah, careful which taverns you neck a bottle of red in by the way...) only to abandon them when you get bored!!

NO teaching them how to feed responsibly. NO passing on techniques to combat bloodlust. NO support from their master! It's irresponsible!

You just pay me under the table to OFF them when they lose their goddamn marbles then bash hunters online!! I'm sick of it! I won't keep quiet about it anymore!

The village folk have started sharpening their pitchforks again! Would you rather have ME or THEM?!

FANGSforthememories🧛 follow

Didn't see you complaining when you bought yourself those nice new leather boots 🧛🍷💅

GR3GS-H0NKIN-HOMEST3AD🧙 follow

GOT SOME FIRE GRASS 🌿 WE'RE TALKING SHR00MS PICKED FROM THE FAE'S RING 🍄💯🔥 ORDER QUICK (new number) THE FAIRY QUEEN IS AFTER ME 🧚🤬 120G FOR 10GRAMS 💰 OR YOUR FIRST-BORN CHILD 👶

moonblade-mary⚔️ follow

Not now, Greg.

[itsm3m00n]

so i started reading Marionetta on Webtoon (very good btw) but one of my main issues is Julia and how the fanbase excuses her extreme bigotry and obsessive friendship.

they constantly bring up "oh she died for Kamille!" not intentionally! both Kamille and Julia have gone through hell in their own ways. Kamille is not responsible for Julia's death and she should not be grateful for Julia dying on her own accord.

both Kamille and Julia are extremely flawed. Kamille has certainly been a bad friend. she forgot Julias birthday, and spent less time with her. However, there were so many people willing to help Julia through her tough times, but she instead decided to be racist and horrible to them all.

the majority of the fanbase is completely overlooking this, probably because Kamille isn't the protagonist. Webtoon has had a lot of instances where the female Protagonist has been deeply flawed, but can do no wrong in the fandoms eyes because "everyone has problems" but then they go and hate on the secondary female character for having a life.

Julia has had extreme trauma, from dying and from having to kill Tonny. But there have been so many people trying to help, and instead she chooses to obsess over her friend who's only dream was to not be forced into an arranged marriage. Kamille is her own person and her life should not have to revolve around Julia's.

when Julia arrives at the circus, she immediately tries to drag her away and escape, without listening to a word Kamille says. it takes Kamille literally pushing her out a window for Julia to actually listen to her, and even then she doesnt respect her friends wishes. for nearly the entire comic Julia keeps trying to get Kamille out of the Circus, despite Kamille expressing multiple times that she is happy there and doesnt want to go back to her terrible home.

Now to address the Rainah and Sahed situation. They are big factors in both characters stories. Kamille's slightly obsessive crush on Rainah is one of her flaws, bacause she is allowed to be in love, however she completely abandons her friend for it.

On Julia's part, however, she is being severely manipulated by Sahed (i could write a novel on why that ship is extremely toxic). this is not her fault. Sahed is incredibly hot. however, when Kamille tells Julia about how she's in love with Rainah, Julia doesn't let her finish and immediately assumes Kamille is in love with Sahed.

Julia then goes on to completely destroy Kamille's and Rainah's friendship and doesn't apologize for it. Good job Julia. I might also add for those who don't already know, Kamille is a queer woman of color. now you may understand why the fanbase hates her so much. of course, no one says this out loud, they instead constantly blame Kamille for Julias bad descisions and say that Kamille is a terrible friend.

at the base of their problems is the fact that they don't communicate. Julia never expresses her concerns and never tells Kamille about what she's going throuh, instead she bottles it up and then explodes, blaming Kamille. Kamille doesnt tell julia about her issues and why she ran away.

Both Kamille and Julia are extremely flawed and they are both bad friends. My point is, Kamille should not under any circumstances be hated more than Julia for being a bad friend when Julia was Racist, Bigoted, and refused to be nice to literally anybody.

[actual-changeling]

Awwww, The Last of Us II. I haven't thought about that burning pile of shit in a hot second.

You wanna get into that? Sure. I'm feeling generous. Disclaimer that I have played the entire thing and some parts even several times. So I know what I'm talking about, I've gone through the emotional torture.

"Toxic" and "bad faith" wanna be more specific? What exactly is your problem with my opinions?

The fact that they wrote their characters in part 2 in such a direct contrast to part 1 they were barely the same characters anymore? The absolute disrespect for mental illness and trauma? The blatant favouritism towards Abby? The violent transphobia towards Lev? The thinly veiled homophobia hidden in the game?

Do you want to talk about the fact that the plot for part 2 is held together by tape and glue and revolves around mindless suffering and more mindless suffering only?

They kill Joel, violently, vividly, graphically, for no reason.

They blow up Shimmer and never acknowledge it again.

Jesse gets shot in the face, dies, and is never mentioned again.

Tommy gets shot in the head, gets his knee broken and fucked up, ends up half blind and with a limb and it's never addressed again.

Ellie gets so many injuries she shouldn't be alive anymore.

It's a miracle Dina didn't lose the baby and survived the pregnancy.

Ellie's biggest fear in part 1 was ending up alone. The game takes every single thing she loves, violates her, starves her, makes her go literally insane, and then takes her fingers and the last connection she had to Joel - playing the guitar.

Abby does everything Joel & Ellie did and worse and faces no consequences. She gets to walk away alive and with the person she loves. She gets to live. Ellie doesn't.

And let me be clear, anon, who will absolutely get blocked after this, because this is my blog and if you hate my opinions so much please do fuck off.

The game itself is good. The game mechanics are fucking amazing and yes, I enjoy playing Ellie's seattle days! It is a genuinely fun game with good ideas and amazing execution.

The plot, however, is an on-fire garbage can. The writing is atrocious. I could tear it apart line by line but I won't because it is exhausting and triggering, and I enjoy it the way I want to and I do not have to justify that.

So yes, it was for me. I love the bare-bones game. The writing is just offensive, ableist, torture porn, and if you enjoy that and think it's "good" something is deeply wrong with you. I don't mind people disagreeing with my, I love it. Let's have a conversation! But I draw the line at trying to excuse bigotry and I refuse to engage with more part 2 content that does exactly that,

[gloriousmonsters]

@whittertwitter the key to happy relationships is to find two people roughly as morally bankrupt and mentally ill as you (and, most importantly, as hot as you) and enable/check each other's issues to the extent where you all function remarkably well, considering how all your other relationships went! Agreed on the rough timeline thing, her dying in the 00s sounds right for sure (assuming that the show starts around where the pilot was released, that gives her a bit of time in Hell but still makes her obnoxiously new on the scene compared to other Overlords).

That said, a summation of Vox and Val's daddy issues (cw for abuse, suicide mentioned)

Vox:

I still need to flesh out details/timeline of Vox's childhood, but I know that his dad was distant to the point of seeming to forget about his existence, sarcastic and emotionally cruel--primarily to Vox's mother, but the kid would occasionally come in for some--when he did remember he lived with other people, and was overall just an. intensely negative person, like sucks-all-the-energy-out-of-a-room vibes. (vox's mom was also emotionally neglectful and uncaring, but not ''''abusive-abusive''', if you get my point). He then proceeded to have an 'accident while cleaning a gun' when Vox was a young teenager, which Vox overheard his mother talking about the truth of--that it was suicide--with a friend. probably with a side helping of 'i can't believe he would be so weak/do something that shameful'.

I think his mother probably remarried very quickly, and Vox developed some auxiliary issues around not being able to become Man of the House when he was like, fourteen (although he would have hated it, he and his mom just did not like each other lol). But his relationship with the new guy was more just teeth-gritted tolerance, helping Vox build up his fake-ass geniality--his dad left him with some of the deep shit. Always be on guard, always control what you can. Power is cruel--and it might make people hate you, so hide it behind a smile, but even so it's better to be hated than weak. Being ignored is starvation, being judged and found wanting is a gut wound.

this mainly manifests in the intense desire to be needed and appreciated and affirmed in image whilst having behavioral patterns that mean only people who don't know you will like you

also there's just like, the bigotry and sexism he soaked up, but that's on his surrounding environment as much as his dad

Valentino (his mom is also heavily involved in Issues, so this is partly about her)

extremely physically and verbally abusive father, solely focused on his mother when Val was very young, but turning to include Val the moment he got old enough you could look at him and go 'something vaguely queer about this kid' + he could be judged as not being sufficiently cowed and respectful, which only got worse over time bc Val could not avoid making him angry and so usually gave up on even trying

his mother only managed to get away when Val was around 13, partly spurred to desperation by his father injuring him badly enough she was terrified Val might actually get killed if she stayed any longer (said event caused a concussion that left Val with vision/memory problems and headaches his entire life)

due to things getting that bad and the health issues that were clearly left over from it, his mom was intensely guilty for not being able to protect him/get out sooner, and compensated by investing herself completely in him; babying him physically and emotionally, never setting proper boundaries, taking his side in literally everything, etc etc. this lasted until she finally hit a limit and tried to point out he had anger issues (Kind Of Like Someone We Knew) when he was in his mid-20s

output: mother is cruel? mother is unyielding? i must leave for California i can no longer thrive in this environment

but seriously, anger issues + downplaying of said issues because he's not like his dad, he gets angry for legitimate reasons, and he can be so nice! all he wants is unconditional love, loyalty and commitment that doesn't waver or END like SOME PEOPLE who are apparently just waiting to ABANDON YOU

[kitkatopinions]

I always think it's a little funny when people are like "why can't you guys give this story/writers the benefit of the doubt? Why do you think x is bad instead of trying to come up with a not bad explanation? Why don't you take the most generous view possible?" And then the thing they're trying to get you to be super generous to and give a constant benefit of the doubt to or come up with only the most innocent best possible explanations for... Was like created by people with a history of bigotry or who have endless red flags made by a horrible abusive company and with several bigoted people involved in the making of it.

Like I can say "In the first season of RWBY an older adult man flirts with a very uncomfortable underage student and yet is held up by the show as a heroic mentor-ish figure who later is invited to her father's house to laugh about old times (or specifically, laugh at the idea of a man wearing a skirt) and the student is portrayed as completely okay with that and his inappropriate behavior." And then people would come into my comment section and ask box to tell me that a grown men saying "Huntsmen" in a normal voice and then flirtingly adding on "hUnTresses" before clicking his tongue and sort of winking at a seventeen year old who is clearly uncomfortable wasn't actually flirting or inappropriate and that since Yang (a bunch of pixels with lines written at the time by a group of men) didn't care much, it clearly wasn't bad, and that it's wrong for me to 'take the worst possible interpretation' and 'judge the writers' and that I'm unfair and that they decided sexism doesn't even exist in the world of rwby, and the writers' probably didn't even realize it would 'come across as flirting to some people' and didn't have time to delve into a minor background role like a teacher anyway even if they had realized the totally innocent moment of jokey mentor-ship that Yang actually liked was being misconstrude as inappropriate, they probably didn't have time to make it clear that Port was actually the furthest thing from sexist.

And meanwhile I'm sitting there just thinking about how the creator of rwby was reportedly 'very interested in animating Yang's boobs late at night' and watched as the creator of rwby then showed off the jiggling boobs animation of the seventeen-year-old Yang to a crowd of leering laughing fanboys, while Miles Luna one of the leading minds behind rwby and a writer for all nine seasons has a wide history of misogyny and was photographed with a body pillow of an at the time sixteen year old Ruby and the photo was tweeted with the caption 'careful Miles she's still only sixteen,' while the guy who voiced the teacher Peter Port turned out to be a sex-pest who was fired for sexual misconduct and *allegedly* groomed, assaulted, and raped a minor, and the company rwby is made under has produced bigoted content before including what I believe was one of the founders telling stories on a let's play about purposefully following around young - very young - women in a car with his friend repeatedly as a game to try to 'make each other look like pedophiles,' and the girl who voiced Yang said 'I get that' while they were defending their story about following women around in cars by saying that hot women want to be looked at and compared it to women in bikinis 'inviting people to look.' So like, no, I don't feel like giving that scene where Port flirts with an underage student a 'generous interpretation.'

Like, no, I don't feel like giving anything in rwby a 'generous interpretation' when 'crwby' and 'rooster teeth' can't fully be separated and one of the masterminds behind rwby is Miles "video games for your girlfriend" Luna. I don't feel like giving rwby the show the benefit of the doubt when I still don't know if the trans woman who voiced May Marigold has been properly paid for her work after having to deal with being given the f-slur as a nickname. I think more people should be willing to critically examine rwby, because if the writers/creators/directors/producers/several voice actors involved in this product have histories of bigotry, that's going to leak into the actual show itself no matter how hard they're trying to make it a 'progressive girl power' show, and if the company they're under is horrible and abusive and mistreats their queer employees and their employees of color and there's no reason to believe rwby is the exception to that, than it's going to leak into the show whether or not the show features girls kissing. I'm not going to be generous and give the benefit of the doubt and wrack my brain trying to come up with innocent reasons for blatantly bad shit in rwby, and frankly I think it's wild that anyone else is doing that.

[bi-harrymort]

Hi!

A few words about me and this blog.

[but before we go any further... even though this is a blog dedicated to Voldemort and Harrymort, I don't support Rowling or her views; hate and bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated here.]

I've been a fan of the Harry Potter series since I was a kid, but I've never interacted with the fandom actively - I never created any fanart, posts, fanfics etc., I only consumed and shared them. So, this is my first attempt at sharing my own theories and any other weird little thoughts I may have on the subject.

Even though I am open to different interpretations and opinions, I know that many may not share this view and may not want to follow me because of it (righfully so), so I'm going to write some of my hot (or maybe not so hot) takes that are my primary headcanons and/or interpratations of the text.

I'm not a fan of the movies. I think the changes made in them distort the characters, the plot and the overall story.

I don't believe Voldemort is insane and/or badly written. I may write a charcter analysis based on the books one day when I'll have the time and energy... and if anyone will be interested in reading it, of course.

At the same time I don't think that HP and its characters (including Voldemort) are great and with no faults. I love the concept of the series and the world created, but I will also be the first to critique it and point out its faults.

Lord Voldemort is Lord Voldemort. Confusing, I know. What I mean by that is that I don't like differentiating between Voldemort (the insane bad one) and Tom Riddle (the brilliant good one). Recently, I started to become disconnected from the trend in the fandom of treating Tom Riddle and Voldemort as separate entities. At the same time, I'm not gonna go around telling people to stop characterizing them, or thinking about them, in whatever way they like! It's just something that I became sensitive to and don't subscribe to anymore. 

Harrymort is the only pairing I am single-minded about. Any other ship (that doesn't involve Harry or Voldemort) I'm very neutral about.

I am a fan of female Harry, but only because of one particular fic - the Historical Importance of Runic War Warding in the British Isles by samvelg. It's my all-time favourite fanfic, and I have as much, if not more, headcanons and thoughts about this particular HP AU rather than the original HP. (At the same time, I am aware why genderbending is disliked by fandoms, and I do agree that many genderbent stories are not great. Many of them erase the lgbt+ represantation, which is what I am not at all about.)

I don't have a set gender identity headcanon for Harrymort (trans, cis, female, male, nonbinary... they are all very much appreciated).

However, my preferred sexuality headcanon for both Harry and Voldemort is either bisexual, pansexual or asexual.

I am firmly a bi-racial/having Indian ancestry Harry headcanon fan.

Recently I started falling in love with Arabic, and a headcanon of bi-racial/having Arab ancestry Voldemort has began to cristalize in my mind. I've had this thought after reading this one post about how Harry is changed in fics but Voldemort stays almost always the same when it comes to ethnicity/race.

I have plenty of different AU ideas about this pairing (many modelled more as an AU of the Historical Importance AU) and would like to realise them at some point, but I'd like for my first posted work to be an original idea.

The reason I'm creating this account now is because Tomarrymort stories are some of the best I've ever read. No matter how much time passes, I always come back to them. I am a slow-burn hoe (slow burns and long fics are like… 90% of my fanfic consumption), and I appreciate the vast variety of themes and motifs that these stories are capable of getting into.

On a final note, I'd like to make a disclosure.

Any opinions I have are simply that - opinions. I don't think that they are the best or the most accurate or that they should be imposed on other people. Everyone has a right to like whatever they want to like, and to think whatever they want to think, as long as that does not evolve into attacking actual human beings.

It's fiction. It's fun. I appreciate people with different opinions so long as we stay mature and respectful to each other about exchanging them.

[lionmythflower]

lmao not me rewatching the nutcracker and the four realms.

But I actually can't stop laughing.

"That diabolical little mouse!"

"We just have to ask you some questions princess" "this is ridiculous"

"How do u describe ur sympathies towards rodents in general?" "........ Well-" "thank you, good, alright"

"My mother, she.... She died." *dramatic gasps*

Miss sugar plum Fairy stop lying ma'am

I'm gonna slap her

*weird giggling* ".... She doesn't know" HELP

"She tried to take control of the other realms" what bullshit. I can't remember shit of what happens I know damn well that miss sugar plum aint the good one here

HOW DID THEY MAKE MAKE THOSE DRESSES SO FAST I MEAN I KNOW THEIR MAGIC WHAT WHAT THE FUCK

"Do u like it?" "I love it" who are u lying to that hair looks so bad

Miss sugar plum needs to stfu her voice is giving me a headache

Ooooh ballet

Oh it's abt the story of the four realms ok...

I actually can't remember anything from this movie

was the hot air balloon from that one version of wizard of oz rlly necessary

I promise I actually do like this movie I js love hating on movies no matter how much I love them (another example is

"Beastly women. There's nothing motherly abt her" OKAY U KNOW WHAT U CAN SHUT UP THANKS

OH I REMEMBER SOME OF IT NOW. THERE'S SMTH TO DO W THE ENGINES

AND WHAT'S HER NAME THE MAIN CHARACTER GIRL FIXES THE MACHINE OR AT LEAST FINDS THE KEY AND THEN SHE REALISES THAT SUGAR PLUM IS EVIL AND THEN SMTH HAPPENS I THINK SHE JOINS MOTHER GINGERS SIDE OR SMTH IDK

Sugar plum speaking French is annoying me sm. Like ok I get ur the pretty fairy women but fuck off please-

Oh the girl is named Clara

Bro crows are scary as fuck

Someone get this girl a pantsuit why is she always running around in dresses

Clara: gets pulled into a dark hole.

Captain: GOES IN AFTER HER

what the fuck

What in the name of Russian dolls-

OMG MOTHER GINGER

we love her

She looks so badass

Help not captain js struggling w the puppet things

Mother Ginger is the only sensible one here

I actually can't remember what the egg thing does

That owl is fucking everywhere

Also we love captain

And hate sugar plum

CLARA DON'T BE AN IDIOTS PLS

CAPTAIN

CAPTAIN PLS U KNOW THIS IS A BAD IDEA

HELPPPP

CLARA PLS

CLARA

CLARA ITS A TRAP YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN

alr miss sugar plum u can go die actually

Omg the mouse

Oh look they're in the dungeon

Help not her yelling at captain like he didn't nothing to you 😭😭

HELP WAIT HE ACTUALLY HAS A NAME????

Phillip omg

Guys no I need another snack to deal with this women absolutely not

Okie I got some chocolates we're good now

Bro I still have like 33 minutes left in this movie

Thank god she's actually calling him by his name now

HELP PHILLIP AND THE MOUSE ARE SO FUNNY

Oh damn careful there CLARA

Hun ur dress is ummm a bit dirty...

WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE ADS.

guys we pay for Disney + and we still have ads what the fuck. This is bigotry at it's worst

Poor mother ginger her face is fucking cracked bro

YES KNOCK OVER THOSE SOLDIERS

SHOOT.

CLARA RUN

oh boy

YES CLARA FIGHT THOSE TOY SOLDIERS

if any of y'all hurt phillip I will be coming after u

Omg mouse tower yes we love them

I HATE SUGAR PLUM SO MUCH

CLARA PLS

CLARA FIGURE SMTH OUT

PHILLIP IF U DIE ISTG

SUGAR PLUM BRO LITERALLY JUST UGHHHH

die.

NO NO NO NO

OMG NO

HAHAHA

OMG YES

damn she's a doll now

I don't feel bad

If phillip and clara kiss I'mma cry

Omg we love the mouse and phillip

Oh dear

No. No no no

DON'T YOU DARE

Oh damn actually that's crazy

Omg the one movie where the girl and the guy who are friends don't actually have to kiss at the end thank god

Bro did a double take when her dad said I'm sorry

The father daughter relationship between them is crazy 😐 (im envious. I don't have a good relationship like that w either of my parents)

Damn the movie's over

[thecurioustale]

Let's GLORIFY OBESITY: Why Fat Liberation Is Way More Important and Timely Than You Think

(If you enjoy this essay, please share it!)

I'm quite certain that one of my most controversial convictions is that fat people are awesome. Not just valid and worthy of dignity and rights and access to society—that's a given and not open for discussion—but actively incredible and awesome.

Now, of course, this isn't unconditionally true: There are always bad eggs in any basket. Don't take away from this essay the idea that I am saying that fatness gives someone an excuse to be horrible.

But what I do mean is that fatness does not inherently detract from a person's intelligence, personality, beauty, vibrancy, ambition, etc. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I also mean that:

Recognizing the integrity and awesomeness of fatness, fat people, and fat bodies isn't something you have to fake.

You can appreciate fat bodies for their own sake. You can dig the softness, the heft, the squish, the jiggle, the warmth, the "fluffiness." You can admire the aesthetics of fat bodies in motion and at rest. You can perceive the world differently through the firsthand or secondhand experience of fatness, much like how learning a second language or having a disability enables you to see things in our society that you were blind to before. You can draw from the wellspring of power and jubilance that is the lifestyle of a body that does not pathologically reject and ration food—the sharing of meals, the ecstasy of eating, the exultation in fullness. You can even let yourself see fatness as a badge of character, for no fat person goes through life on Easy Mode when they are a member of a persecuted class, so if someone is fat it means they're like a war veteran: They've seen some shit, and probably dealt with no shortage of dark pathways in their own minds.( Such is the power of internalizing a societal bigotry.)

There are so many ways to dig fatness. And doing any of these things—admiring fatness in any way—is an important polarization against injustice.

I'm into fat people, myself. It's an orientation in my sexual identity. I like being fat. I like fat partners. I like seeing fat people in daily life. Fat people are hot! However, I say that fat people are awesome, and I live that philosophy in my life, not only because fatness is a part of my own sexual orientation, which was how I first got introduced to the wider world of fat admiration and fat liberation, but because doing so is a preemptive attack against the bigotry and dehumanization that is marshalled against fatness. If you're fat or know someone who is, then you know the horrible things that so many people say about fat people and do to fat people—including about and to themselves if they happen to be fat personally. Some of the worst anti-fat bigots are fat people and ex-fat people! 😢

Anti-Fat Bigotry Transcends Partisan Alignments

I often judge a person's character by their attitude toward fatness, because anti-fat bigotry is not in the national discourse and is not politically aligned. While fat liberation and fat admiration do have their intellectual home on the political left, and the fat community composition is significantly more liberal than conservative, it's still a very niche community, and doesn't attract allies and supporters from the broader mainstream left the way that social justice movements against sexism and racism and classism do. In fact, anti-fat bigotry is one of the most powerful bigotries in the world where mainstream progressivism still hasn't yet identified the bigotry as bigotry, and therefore doesn't recognize it as an injustice. We still have tons of left-wingers sounding like straight-up fascists when they talk about how fat people are diseased and need to be legally penalized and societally erased. Hence the usefulness of a person's attitude toward fatness as a judge of character.

By the way, this exercise of judging character isn't just useful in advancing fat liberation or in knowing who your allies and enemies are on a personal level. When you find a progressive like this, who hates fat people, you know that they are an unreliable ally and don't actually understand the reasons that left-wing issues are valid and important. You know this is someone to learn from and be wary of as an example of those who are at high risk of betraying the movement down the road and doing great harm to liberal causes from within.

Fat is not a traditional partisan issue. Across the political spectrum and beyond it, there is a widespread failure to empathize with fat people regardless of how one identifies politically. We expect proud, gleeful hatred toward innocent groups of people from fascists, but it's very disappointing when it comes from liberals—and it makes their language about inclusiveness, humanization, and peaceful coexistence sound hollow and sanctimonious when these same mouths spout hateful lies and slander and violent rhetoric against fat people.

By the same token, you sometimes see fat acceptance coming from people on the right—perhaps an indicator that one is ripe for deradicalization and deconversion out of the right-wing worldview.

The Bigotry Itself

In my experience, almost everyone—including among fat liberation activists, let alone the general population—suffers from a great deal of internalized fatphobia and holds prejudiced views against fat people. Most people still regard fatness as both inherently bad and a voluntary choice, and from that ethical boondoggle of a combination most people proceed to grade fat people as reprobates who should be punished for their ethical crimes by being cut off from society: no disability accommodations or healthcare except whatever a fat person can pay out of pocket; no right or even a reasonable expectation of gainful employment, romance and love, and meritorious social standing. Fat people are written off as unworthy in every respect, and are often disparaged as ugly, stupid, smelly, selfish, wasteful, greedy, and so and so forth.

Thereby does the bigotry reveal itself: The state of being fat doesn't inherently tell another person any of those things. All of these judgments are pre-judgements, or rather prejudices, and are all done without actually meeting the fat folk in question, saying hello to them, getting to know them a little bit, and learning the first damn thing about their actual lives.

And so the anti-fat bigot, or anyone who is under the spell of fatphobia, misapplies to fat people the same ethical condemnation as we would rightly impose upon fascists and murderers and traffickers. Most of the time, the rhetoric about fat people is that they are subhuman, and it carries the implicit or sometimes even explicit desire for fat people to die. That's another dead giveaway that we're not dealing with a rational hatred: Fat people as a group haven't done anything remotely deserving of the death penalty.

Most anti-fat bigots don't see their view of fat people as problematic. Unsurprising: Most bigots never see their bigotry for what it is. And when we fail to empathize with others, we seldom recognize that we are failing. We don't recognize that there's even something there to be failed!

And I hate to break this to you, Gentle Reader, so gird yourself and turn off your auto-defensiveness reaction. But if you are seeing this, you are almost certainly a part of the problem. Because virtually everyone who isn't an ardent fat liberation activist—and even many of those who are—is a part of the problem. You have learning and self-realization and empathizing and personal growth ahead of you.

A (Brief) Rebuttal of the 4 Main Arguments Against Fatness

There is nothing wrong with being fat.

No, stop: I can see you disagreeing already. Just stop. There is nothing wrong with being fat.

I know what you want to say: It's bad for a person's health. It's a drain on the economy. It's destructive to the environment. It's a sign of poor character.

These are the four classical arguments against fatness. In one form or another, almost every anti-fat slur and condemnation comes from at least one of those four sources.

I'm not here today to do battle with these arguments. Ultimately, the stance I am laying out today is that even if all four arguments were completely true it still wouldn't matter: Anti-fat bigotry would still be wrong. It's a red herring to spend time and energy debunking these arguments. The haters are never moved by reason or evidence, and the rest of us don't need to waste time on the sideshow of invalidating the illogic of their hate.

Yet there is something in the human spirit which has a knack for recognizing elephants in the room, and I think if I didn't address these arguments at all it would be interpreted by many people as a sign that the anti-fat bigots actually have the truth on their side. So, here is my very quick crack at it:

All four of the arguments against fatness possess elements of truth, but are imprecise to the point of being functionally false. And while a whole book's worth of rebuttals could be written on each of these four arguments, I'll just deliver the bottom lines:

Health

"Health" is complicated, and the intersection of fatness and health is much more ambiguous in the medical literature than we popularly believe it to be. Many fatphobic and fat-bigoted professionals within the academic community and healthcare sector obscure this fact further by abusing their authority to conduct unsound or unethical research or misrepresent valid research on the basis of their warped worldview.

If you delve into the research literature—and I have looked at hundreds of studies in my lifetime—you see a few consistent themes emerge, and for convenience I will contextualize these as I go:

Most research suffers from poor variable control and/or poor survey setup or experiment design, and therefore can't tell you what it is really saying. In other words, it isn't necessarily saying anything. (This is a problem across science, not just on this issue.) And when this happens, you'd be amazed at how much a ubiquitous societal prejudice can skew the data. You might think "Individual studies may be bad but they can't ALL be bad, right?" And you'd be forgiven for thinking that, but in fact, when prejudice is concerned, they absolutely can be systematically bad (if not universally bad down to the very last study).

Anti-fat bigotry in the medical and scientific establishment absolutely does corrupt a lot of research. For instance, there were a number of studies that came out during the pandemic pointing out that overweight and obese people made up most COVID hospital patients in the US—roughly 78%. That's such a bad number that they listed obesity as one of the major risk factors for COVID complications. Except for one little thing: The incidence of overweightness and obesity in the US is about 73%. If fatness had no bearing on COVID complications whatsoever, we should expect 73% of hospitalizations to be among overweight and obese people. So 78% isn't far off. And when you factor in that hospitalizations overwhelmingly skewed older, and that older adults on average are heavier than younger adults, the relationship is actually inverse! Being overweight or obese meant you were slightly LESS statistically likely to be hospitalized! But no one reported on that, and no one in the medical establishment seemed to notice it. Instead we got the narrative that COVID will kill yer fat ass dead.

When you ignore the media coverage, and the studies' own titles and abstracts, and look at the data themselves, the data do not generally support the claim that "Being fat harms your health." The claim that they actually support is "Being fat is generally associated with health problems at a higher rate than not being fat is." This isn't semantics; this is a critical distinction. It's like the difference between claiming that "Being black makes you a criminal" versus "Being black is generally associated with higher rates of criminality." The latter phrasing—which is what the research literature can actually support—opens up a whole world of epiphanies when it comes to wrapping our minds around the fact that the societal prejudice against fatness has completely distorted how we see and interpret fatness in our society. This is a very deep topic, but the bottom line is that we are oversimplifying both the concept of fatness and the concept of health, as well as severely underestimating the sociological dimension present. The true interaction between fatness and health is very complex in ways that substantively bear on how we should conceive of the issue.

One notable exception to the above is that the research literature does seem to suggest pretty persuasively that fatness itself—adipose tissue in the body—produces hormonal outputs that exacerbate inflammation in our bloodstreams. And this exception is a great example of the rule I was just laying out: Here we have a case where fatness, itself, directly harms people's health. Except it doesn't! It's not the fat. It's the inflammation in the blood stream caused via the hormonal products that fat cells produce. You see what I mean? Anti-fat bigotry defines "fatness" qualitatively as an essentialist, fundamental aspect of a fat person's identity. But it's not. Fatness is just the top-line label we give to a much more complex system of biochemistry and biomechanical phenomena. And the reason this is important is that, given that weight-loss diets are so ineffective and life is better anyway if you're able to eat well, it's a lot easier to imagine "Let's do something about those hormones or about the inflammation directly" than it is to imagine "Let's 'solve' fatness itself." We already know this works: Controlling for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, for instance—which are associated with fatness—drastically reduce the health problems that are also associated with fatness, all without actually changing the fact that the person is still fat. Advances in medicine and equitable healthcare can go a very long way toward treating the health problems associated with fatness without actually forcing fat people get thin and stay thin.

The actual health penalties that are associated with (if not actually caused by) fatness are not nearly as significant as commonly believed. The data show that if you're 20 or 50 or even 100 pounds "overweight" by normative standards, you're still likely to live more or less a full natural lifespan and have more or less the same use of your body that you would have otherwise. The losses to both lifespan and "health" more broadly are marginal. Age, not fatness, is the great predictor of health problems. And that's not surprising: Our bodies literally fall apart as we get old. That's what they've evolved to do. Also, while there is an argument to be made that losing even one year of life, or one year's worth of mobility, is no small thing, not only is some of this recoverable through other health management measures (such as physical activity and good nutritional intake and the reduction of life stressors), but it's also not what anti-fat bigots are claiming. They're not saying "Oh, you're gonna die at 71 instead 72." They're saying, of perfectly healthy 30-year-olds, "Yep, that person's got 5 years left max." Even the very fattest people, the ones who get dragged through the mud the worst of all by the haters, don't fit the stupid delusional worldview of the haters. Extremely fat people, 500, 600, 700 pounds, are still a lot healthier and live a lot longer than we generally believe—especially if any health conditions they do have are well-managed and they have a good social support system and access to good healthcare. Same as for anyone! And, for the record, the percentage of people who actually weigh that much is vanishingly small. Most "obese" people are in the high 100s and low-to-mid 200s.

Fatness is also associated with numerous positive health effects. By the same logic, we can't read too much into this without getting deep in the weeds, but don't think it's a strictly one-way street. Fatness exists in the first place as an evolutionary adaptation, and evolution is famous for piggybacking multiple benefits onto a given physical trait. Fatness does more than just feed us in lean times and keep us warm in the cold and cushion us from rocks. To some extent it potentially has protective influences on our joints and organs, on our bones, and even on our mental acuity and mood. Haters love to point out that being fat increases your risk for other types of cancer (or, we should say, "is associated with an increased risk"), but there are other types of cancers where the trend is reversed!

I personally do think that it's likely that having a moderate amount of excess fatness in some people, and having a massive amount of excess fatness in most people, does cumulatively "use up" the body faster. Not much faster, not unless you're really, really big or have underlying health issues that would have given you problems even if you'd been thin. But a little bit faster. And to that I say: So what? Like, really: Whose business is it but yours? We mustn't fall into the puritanical trap of valuing the state of being alive over the quality of life and our freedom to be true to ourselves.

The bottom line: All of the above is a red herring because one's health status has no bearing on their worth as individuals or on their right to expect equal treatment in society.

Economics

The basis of this argument is that being fat costs the economy a lot of money. If you look at sensationalist studies, that number is positively goofy, usually in the hundreds of billions or sometimes even trillions of dollars annually in the US alone. This is despite the average American adult weighing only 25 or so pounds above the top of their "optimal BMI" (ugh) range, and the total of all healthcare spending in the US being estimated around $4.3 trillion. Doesn't add up, does it?

The economic costs of fatness, to the extent they actually exist—and this is almost certainly far lower of a number than the ludicrous ones that are commonly cited—are often incurred not in the way that bigots think. What bigots think is that fat people are getting sick all the time and therein missing work and needing more healthcare. I'm sure this does happen, almost certainly not nearly to the extent the haters believe. For one thing, fat people get sick for reasons that have nothing to do with being fat, and once they enter the healthcare pipeline they are exposed to higher costs at every turn.

Systemic injustice is expensive in all the ways that are so well-documented with other persecuted groups, in terms of the mental anguish of community and institutional discrimination; the economic exclusion of discrimination in hiring and the workplace; and the mistreatment of fat people by healthcare professionals and stigmatization of fat people by society, such that fat people often put off their healthcare needs until those needs are more severe and thus more expensive, only to then be screwed with by their healthcare providers leading to further costs and delays in their proper treatment (if you're fat you've probably experienced what it's like to come in for a bad flu and be told that what you really need is to lose a few pounds).

Fat people have a harder time attracting clientele, venture capital, performance bonuses, and yadda yadda we've heard this before for queer people, female folk, people of color, and so on. And fat people are marginalized more often and more readily, again with results very familiar to us from other marginalized groups.

The economic argument also has a headwind to fight in the macroeconomic perspective. To the extent fat people do consume more, they are drivers of the economy, not drains on it. If they're going out to eat more, that's a lot of jobs created.

One of my favorite examples of anti-fat bigotry in the economic context is the tale of airplane seats. We've all heard this story: Some hater comes along and is like "I had to sit next to a FAT person and they were flowing all over me and took up half my seat! Fat people should have to pay for two seats!"

First of all, that's already the policy of most airlines: If there isn't an empty seat immediately available, fat people will usually be rebooked on another flight or asked to purchase a second ticket.

But second of all: Do you know what I say to people who tell that story: "You should thank fat people, because they are subsidizing the cost of your plane ticket."

It's true. Airliners shrink seats to ghastly dimensions, as small as they can realistically get away with, in order to maximize the number of passengers they can carry per flight. This allows for tickets to be sold at a lower price. But by literally squeezing some people out, and forcing those people to have to buy two seats, what the airlines are doing is setting airfares artificially low at the expense of fat passengers.

You can't morally censure your customer base; that's not capitalistic. Your customers are your customers, and if they're fat then they're fat. By designing seats too small for a great many of them, you're making fat people pay for a percentage of other people's tickets every time they are forced to buy a second ticket for themselves.

Of the four arguments, I think the economic one is probably the stupidest of the lot, because no matter how you look at it, it just doesn't add up. Any economic drain that does exist is basically just a reflection of anti-fat bigotry against people at a societal scale.

Hater: "Look at how expensive fat people are for society!"

Me: "Look at how expensive society makes it to be fat!"

The bottom line: Fat people work. The whole schtick about them being slovenly and lazy is a slanderous lie. Fat people go to work, put in their hours, and come home. Even many fat people who are too fat to do most jobs still usually find jobs to do, at rates comparable to that of the general population. We work, we pay in, and we demand our due.

Environment

"How can you eat that cheeseburger when there's a climate crisis on?! Didn't you know that cows are the leading cause of global warming!?!?!?!"

Ah, the environmental argument...perhaps the most disingenuous of the four arguments.

As an advocate for affordable access to meat that is raised with at least a modicum of humaneness, I often come across the anti-fat argument in the context of meat's impact on the environment. That's a topic for another day, though I will say that meat is not as bad for the environment as you probably think, because that point is relevant here.

The core of the environmental argument against fatness is that fat people consume more food and food production is bad for the environment. Both of these statements are generally true! What isn't true is the conclusion that anti-fat bigots draw: Therefore, fat people are bad for the environment.

This is because it's a matter of absolute scale and of lifestyle priorities. If fatness is harmful to the environment then everything we do beyond bare subsistence is harmful to the environment. The key question is "How do we manage and mitigate our footprint?" Environmental stewardship is critical, but there will always be a cost to our presence here on Earth.

Using computers and phones, or driving cars, or having children, or keeping pets, or playing video games, or buying local food (with all of its environmental inefficiencies), or using hot water...all of these things put strain on the environment.

You can't with a straight face say that fatness is environmentally wasteful and then go about your life drinking wine and petting your dog and flying on airplanes to spend weekends at ski resorts. If you do, you're both an idiot and a shitty person.

In the grand scheme of people's ecological footprints, there is actually relatively little wastefulness in the extra calories that fat people typically consume and the extra clothing fabric and other goods that fat people typically go through as a result of their size. We do far more harm to the environment by throwing away food that we let go bad than we do by fat people eating more food than thin people.

I say this often because I find it so compelling, but one of the very first things that people do when they are coming out of third-world poverty due to economic development or immigration is buy more and better food. Of all the things they could do with their money, more and better food is consistently one of the very first things.

That says a lot to me about what humans really, truly need in their lives. It is a horrifying line of thinking to imagine that humans should deprive themselves to the barest level of subsistence on something like food. That is no way to exist, and the people who call for it are usually not good people.

The bottom line: Is there room for us to be more environmentally-friendly concerning our food consumption patterns? Sure! But that's irrelevant. The environmental argument by the haters is not that thin people are bad for the environment. It's that fat people are bad for the environment. And that argument is crap. No we're not. On the list of things that humans do that are bad for the environment, "being fat" is way, WAY down the list.

Character

Lastly, anti-fat bigots will often attack fatness as an inherent character flaw, and will usually associate it with other traits like being dumb, lazy, smelly, etc.

Let me give this argument the consideration it deserves: Hate is hate. And anyone who makes this argument is a hater. And that's the end of the story.

There is no credible argument here. The one kernel of truth to it is that, yes, some fat people are horrible. Because some people are horrible. Fat or thin, there are always bad people out there. And sure, in some people their horribleness can manifest in the form of fatness among other things. But it's not particularly common—and certainly not on the level that you typically see in works of fiction, where fatness is often a stand-in for villainy. There's nothing about liking to eat that really plugs closely into a failure mode of character.

In my experience in the fat liberation and fat admiration worlds, some of the fat people there are horrible. But it's not because they're fat. It's because they were horrible people to begin with, and in that community are able to use their fatness to achieve power and attention and authority. They often have a lot of internalized fatphobia, leading them to be particularly cruel to those who are close to them. But that's not a blight on fatness: That's just the tragedy of the human species.

The bottom line: Being fat doesn't say anything about a person's character.

We Need to Glorify Obesity

So, once more with feeling: There is nothing wrong with being fat. Unless, I suppose, you want to argue that humanity itself is a blight on the planet and we should all be exterminated, in which case you're probably even worse of a person than if you had just stuck to being an anti-fat bigot.

Like I said before, I come into the fat liberation movement by way of sexual identity: I think fat people are sexy. I enjoy being fat, and I have always preferred fat partners. A significant minority of humanity feels the same way; that's diversity for you. You don't have to be into it yourself, but liking fatness is a valid identity to have. And there are all kinds of non-sexual reasons for liking fatness too, which I mentioned earlier.

Yet on the subject of fat sexuality, I have seen bigots compare liking fatness to liking cancer. I have seen it characterized as slowly committing murder, or of growing fat oneself as slowly committing suicide. And on top of that, whenever anyone says that they think fat is sexy, they are invariably and immediately lumped together in the minds of bigots with those occasional lunatics who we see on the news who use fatness as a pathway of abuse in their relationships—as if abuse never occurs if fat people are not involved, or as if one bad egg in a group means that every egg is bad. The fallacy and stupidity of these illogical mindsets speak for themselves. There are definitely abusers and criminals who are into fat. Just like there are abusers and criminals who aren't. But fatness—including the celebration of fatness and the pursuit of overeating and/or weight gain—are perfectly normal and healthy in the context of a mutually respectful and consenting relationship. It's not the subject of this essay, but let no one say otherwise.

The actual reason I mention my own background here is that most fat liberation activists aren't fighting for anything positive. They're mostly female fat folk who've been worn down their whole lives at the intersection of being fat and female, and just want fair treatment and to be left alone, and maybe even occasionally be called beautiful when they put on a nice new outfit. Most of them are not actually pro-fat and in fact harbor a great deal of self-loathing and internalized fatphobia—as shown by how derisive many of them behave toward other fat people, and how hateful some of them become if they do manage to lose weight. Most of them have no love of fatness whatsoever, and are merely forced into it by virtue of being unable to readily lose the weight, and are fighting not for the advancement of a cause but rather to break free of the hate and prejudice inflicted upon them.

That's no way to center a movement. Sexual equality doesn't come by chanting "Women aren't horrible!" Racial equality doesn't come by chanting "Black and brown people aren't horrible!" Fat people, it shouldn't have to be said, aren't horrible! And, obviously, the voices of victims and survivors of anti-fat bigotry need to be heard and prioritized as a central pillar of the fat liberation movement. But "We're not horrible"! is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it, and the testimony of survivors isn't sufficient in itself to lift us beyond the negative: We need fat pride, fat acceptance. We need, as the bigots are always morally panicking about, to glorify obesity!

And for that we need to hear from the people of all sizes who have good things to say about fatness: good things to say about people who happen to be fat (many of whom live rich and full lives and whose fatness is often a reflection of that or even an active factor in achieving the good life); good things to say about fatness itself (the softness, heft, warmth, comfort, and size); good things to say about particular fat bodies (fat bodies can be strong, attractive, powerful, majestic); and good things to say about the experience of life as a fat person ("I'm here and I take up space, and I'm a pretty cool person!").

Once again, a broader movement has essentially failed female folk by forcing most of the work onto them. Fat liberation isn't just for female-bodied or feminine-presenting fat people. Fat liberation is for EVERYBODY: all sexes and genders, all races, but more importantly all shapes, abilities, sizes, and weights. Thin people need fat liberation too, just like males need sexual equality and white people need racial justice. Whenever prejudice persists, we all get hurt, both directly and collaterally and through seeing the people we care about get hurt.

What Can You Personally Do?

This essay isn't a screed and it's not meant to just be an interesting curio for reading. I would hope you contemplate these ideas and take some of them with you into your daily life. Here are some things you can do to advance fat liberation and fat admiration.

Pride

Let's start by talking about "pride." I can already hear many of you saying: "But I don't want to be proud of being fat. Being fat isn't something that one should be proud of."

To which I would reply: In the long term, I hope we can deprogram you of that. Because being fat is definitely a valid thing to be proud of! Think of it like hair: A great big head of hair, lovingly grown and groomed, is absolutely something for others to be proud of in themselves and admiring of in others, even if you personally don't like long hair and wouldn't want to have lots of hair yourself.

And in the more immediate term, you don't have to pretend to be proud if that's not where you're at. One is not required to be proud of their fat.

But what you can do is not get in the way of other people's fat pride. If you engage at all in fat pride discourses, be a signal booster and not a signal jammer.

Also, spreading fat pride has another benefit besides the pride itself: It disrupts bigotry channels. It's like community activists singing over the voices of fascists at a Neo-Nazi parade and drowning them out. If the claim of anti-fat bigots is that one can't be proud of being fat, then pride neutralizes their rhetoric on the spot. It also normalizes fatness and the celebration of fatness among impressionable young people whose minds are still coalescing into a worldview. Will they learn to hate their bodies and spend their whole lives at war against themselves, or will they learn that their bodies are an immense source of strength and satisfaction?

Fat pride is about more than letting your belly spill out of a bathing suit at the beach. It's about setting an example to others of what is possible and what life has the potential to look like.

Support Fat People in Public

Praise, compliment, and support fat people in all the ways you would do if they were thin. In practice, this often involves fat people's clothing and their willingness to "put themselves out there" in public.

Encourage fat people to do things that they would otherwise want to do if they were thin but don't because they are ashamed of being fat. Life is too short not to be true to yourself! Go on that bike ride. Go to that beach party. Go to that buffet. Assuming the logistics are workable—i.e. that they're not going to be institutionally excluded by things like seats that don't fit—be an ally and champion for fat people in public. And when there is institutional fat discrimination at work, do what you can to find out about it in advance and find workarounds so that your fat friends, fat family members, or fat self won't be excluded from events on a functional basis.

If you are dating a fat person, I cannot stress how important it is to be proud of them in public, and to be for them and supportive of them. The top complaint of fat people about their romantic partners is that their partners are embarrassed to be seen with them; this is especially true in mixed weight relationships where the female partner is the only fat one. Don't you dare be embarrassed to be seen with your love in public. Pride the shit out of that! This is someone you love; they are more important than the sneers and jeers of a thousand random strangers. And don't put the onus on your partner to stand up for themselves: Be a partner in legitimizing their existence in public spaces.

Don't do anything that is going to feed into a fat person's internalized fatphobia or their fear of social backlash. Instead, provide solidarity. If you're at a party or a dinner and they want more food, then have more food together with them. If they're afraid to be seen in their bathing suit because it's too revealing, then make sure your bathing suit is revealing too.

Gatekeeping

Treat people on a case-by-case basis first and foremost, but here are some general rules of thumb, especially for how you interact with strangers, casual acquaintances, family members, and colleagues:

Don't treat fat people like they have to pay for admittance into the community. Don't check fat people's health, diet, or lifestyle. It doesn't matter if they eat nothing but salads or nothing but Twinkies. It doesn't matter if they run five miles a day or can't even walk across their own house. Don't validate the prejudice that the only good fat is "healthy" fat. Fat people are allowed to be unhealthy at no penalty to their community standing or their value as individuals.

Don't call foods or dietary habits "healthy" or "unhealthy"; that's all a bunch of normative bullshit that is so inaccurate as to be useless. All foods are healthy in the right context, and all foods are unhealthy in the right context. And fatness and weight gain are not inherently unhealthy.

Don't question people's movies or reasons for being fat, staying fat, or getting fat.

Don't try to exploit new or existing fatness in people's bodies as a deviation that makes them unworthy of belonging and acceptance.

Don't ask people their weight. Don't attach people's real or perceived weight loss to compliments on their appearance. Don't ask people who've gained weight if they are pregnant.

Don't validate diet culture or weight loss rhetoric. Diets do not work; more than 90% of people who lose weight eventually gain it back. Sure, if you live in a country with an active famine, then there's nothing you can do; you don't have a choice. And if you're in the military or the fire department, or if you're a marathon runner, then sure, it's probably worth trying to maintain a lower-body weight for the time being. But these are the exceptions. Weight loss is not a valid solution for most people; stop treating it like one.

Don't celebrate or glorify weight loss. Don't antagonize it either—it's their body, and if they lose weight that's their business—but don't reinforce unethical social norms that value thinness over fatness. Don't participate in that.

There are a lot of don'ts here, and that's not a coincidence: The rule for gatekeeping in general is "Don't." Let people be as they are. Find something to judge in them that's actually worth judging, like their political views or their participation in community-building.

Fat-Shaming

Most of all—this is the most important thing—shut down anti-fat language and stereotypes. "Diet talk," "self-fat-shaming," "food shaming," anything that validates the prejudices against fatness. Shut it down. Don't just refuse to participate in it: CALL IT OUT. Shut it down.

We all know fat-shaming when we see it. It can take courage—and sometimes the battle is not worth fighting; I get it; but don't let "sometimes" be "all the time." Be present as a pro-fat force; be a shield and ally to others. And be harsh in your judgments of fat-shaming speech and behavior. When you hold back, the haters win.

Discrimination retreats when haters fear that they are outnumbered and unpopular.

Fat Positivity

One of the easiest and most affirmative things you can do to support fat liberation and fat admiration is to to cultivate positivity in your life surrounding fatness.

I've long called myself a "tummy elemental." I love tummies; I think they are impossibly cute. I tend to like all the same things about tummies that most people hate about them. And because of my consistency and flamboyance about it, my friends all know that I am the person to turn to when they have pro-tummy sentiments that they want to share.

There's a lot you can do to cultivate fat positivity in your life. You can make mealtimes a no-shame zone, and deliberately eat till you are content and encourage others to do the same. You can boost fat voices and messaging in your social media circles. You can (with a little common sense and restraint) compliment fat people in public when they're looking great or doing cool things. Basically, any negativity vector surrounding fatness has an opportunity to become a positivity vector.

Look in the Mirror

Last of all, if you're fat, and you struggle with self-acceptance, all of the above applies not only to your treatment of others, but to how you treat yourself.

It's not a lie, or fake, to treat yourself like a human being. If you have a fat body, that's your body. It's YOUR body. All the power and personality you will ever have, all the beautiful ideas and moments, will all travel through your body. Your body is YOU. We don't actually have separate souls living off in La La Land. Our bodies are 100% of who we are. And if your body has a lot of extra fat on it, or just a little bit, then your relationship with your fatness is really just a proxy for your relationship with yourself. Do you love yourself? Or do you hate yourself?

Many people are meant to be fat, perhaps even most people. In lieu of food scarcity and intense physical toil, our bodies naturally grow an abundance of flesh and hang onto it. In this case, your fatness says that you are living in good times. That's not a bad thing! And for everyone else, for the people who aren't meant to be fat: If you remove the stressors and hate from your life, the excess fatness will probably mostly go away on its own. You can't do that through dieting and make it stick, but if fatness is your body's response to hardships in your life, then stop treating your fat like it is personally responsible for all that. Focus on making life improvements elsewhere, and the fat will take care of itself. And don't hold it against the people who are supposed to be fat for continuing to be fat.

We all have our bad days. The days where we wake up and feel ugly. Those are unavoidable. But the rest of the time, you're gonna have to learn how to look at your fat body and think that it's one of the most beautiful sights in the world, and treat it with love and respect. Because to not do so is nihilistic and desolate. Your body is you. Your fat is you.

Support Fat Perspectives and Representation in Fiction!

Some of you reading this may not know that I am an author! I write science fiction and fantasy. You can learn more about it here.

I am primarily here on Tumblr to build enthusiasm for my creative work, and if you enjoyed this essay I would love it if you checked out some of my other posts, which usually aren't so overtly political, and if you were to stick around if you like what you see.

I try, very hard I do, in my fiction to be a voice for bringing fat liberation and fat pride into focus. Fat issues are almost completely absent from our science fiction and fantasy. I raise these issues from many different angles in many different lights, and I incorporate a great many fat characters into my work, some of them quite prominently. I don't try to speak for anyone else on this Earth who has their own experience to share, but I do serve as a cheerleader for fatness and as a scourge of the bigots who for too long have been able to get away with their vile hatred with no accountability. And fiction is a powerful way to do this. I don't write "pro-fat fiction" per se; I write "fiction written by a pro-fat person." Fatness isn't what the plotlines of my stories turn on. But it is just quietly, beautifully there, challenging assumptions and breaking down preconceptions.

I am also mindful of the fact that there are not enough male voices in this space. Like I was just saying, fat liberation is increasingly seen as a "women's" issue. It's not; it's a human issue that also happens to intersect with misogyny. We are all caught up in it. We all have a responsibility to do something about it.

I may be agender, so I can't actually help to make fat liberation a men's issue from within the masculine world, but I am male-bodied and am taken for a man whenever I am seen, and that's close enough. If you're a man or male-bodied, know that your voice in this can carry far.

Whatever your sex or gender, fat liberation and fat pride are a cause you can join. If you're a progressive and believe in justice for all, then it's a cause you are ethically compelled to join, whether or not you have a single nice thing to say about fatness. And if you are just a decent human being who wants to alleviate the suffering and injustice inflicted upon others, fat lib and fat pride are also worth your attention. Anti-fat bigotry doesn't usually get counted among the world's biggest prejudices, but it absolutely is. The harm it causes is very widespread, and wounds very deep in the people it strikes.

It is so hard, I have learned, for most people to take a principled stand on the right side of history, because in day-to-day life people are motivated by their vehement tribal affiliations and their desperate need for belonging. If you are capable of reading this and parsing what I am saying, you are already well ahead of the general population. You have an opportunity to rectify your failure to empathize. You can question your beliefs, confront your biases, deprogram your prejudices. The cause is always worthy and it isn't going anywhere. But you can help speed it along.

And in addition to standing up in real life, you can support artists like myself who work to advance justice through the realm of fiction. So forgive me a shameless Patreon plug; I am not rich and every little bit of support helps.

[lady-asteria]

Blossick is transfem4transfem,Boomubbles is transmasc4transfem and Butchercup is transmasc4transmasc <3 It's equal rights!!

Finally! Someone who gets it!

...Do you mind headcanon time? For both gender and sexuality?

But also, I'm totally biased bc both Bubbles and Butch use they/them pronouns and BC is genderfluid (mainly he/they)

So meanwhile Brick keeps her name bc she choose it, BC wanted to change it bc it never feel theirs. He still wanted to follow the B and so go for BC bc if feels better.

Both Bubbles and Butch are nb and use they/them pronouns. Their fisrt friendly interaction was them complaining about their misgender bc they know how they presence themselves, bc Bubbles loves pretty and colour clothes, such as dress and makeup and Butch (who also loves makeup) is tall and has muscles, sadly, the "expression = gender" mind of Townsville is used to invalidate their identity, but they get their new bff- So they eat ice-cream, complain and become besties

They definetely change their group names to genderless words (first kids and later teens)

Was Brick Blossom's lesbian awaking? Well, actually, she had crush in other girls but didn't see them as such bc "compulsory heterosexuality" However, she made her realized it (I have a fanfic about it but basically is "Oh, don't be silly, I don't like bad boy....Wait- I don't like boys...I like girls... I like bad girls.... *looks at Brick* A very specific bad girl!"

Talking about this: Blossom is a lesbian, Bubbles is pan and BC is bi. Butch is bi too, Brick is ace-panromantic and Boomer is demi.

Meanwhile the puffs actually had a easy transition and actually had a, relative, easy acceptance (specially a self-accept, the acception of their siblings, father and friends) the ruffs had a more hard time. The toxic masculine and villain life they suffered (not necesarry from HIM or Mojo but from the society) made them doubt about open and being themselves around each other

Brick wasn't sure her sibling will accept her as leader, Butch was scared bc their siblings won't see their identity as valid and Boomer had a phase of toxic masculinty "I must to be the most boy ever bc if not, will they see me as one?" The three of them were scare bc "What if they think there is something wrong with me?"

Of course, they support each other bc nobody but them annoy the other two!

This helped Boomer to go out the toxic masculinity mentality and enjoy the things he likes even if they weren't traditional boy things- Knowing certain blue puff also helped bc "Who cares about gender roles? You're a boy regardless of what you like!"

They started to get along a Boomer fell in love very easy

Butch had always admired BC as a fighter (not that they would addmit it) so it was relative easy to them to respect the other and bond- Their feeling were a natural progression until someday they were like "holy shit, he's hot- Wait, they have always been hot, he's more than that" And become flustered

BC just kiss them bc their team won and he was so happy they had to express it somehow- And they realize

Mojo Jojo and Him were very supportive with their kids, not when they decide stop being villains and be "normal teenagers" but they were almost in retirement so, ok (them dating the puffs was shocking too)

To be fair, lot of people were...doubful, villains see them as traitors and the city started to distrust the puffs. (Also, some people where total assholes)

The puffs just take the shit out of them bc a hate crime is still a crime ❤ (wish I could)

But like, they start to know about the others and discover they, actually, get along! Basically, the ruffs learn to appreciate the goodness in the world and how, yes, it's hard but it's worth it (they don't fight against the crime in the way the puffs do, but if they see someone being a bully or a bigotry...Violence is in their nature.) and the puffs learns that they don't need to sacrife their happiness or lives for the sake of others, (they are still heroes, but they start to ask for better laboral conditions)

I'm Blossick biased so- Be ready

They were flirting intentional at the same totally oblivious to the other's flirt (bc so smart, so dumb)

Hard pining but they are so sure they are good at hiding it...Until one day is like "Are you flirting too?" Took their time-

Brick isn't a villain anymore, but she's mean, she's sarcastic and she's soft for her girlfriend (And she steals her clothes)

Blossom has the need of being perfect bc if she isn't "How could she be seen as a leader? A heroine? Would they even like her?" But with Brick she can forget about it, laugh hard and complain about the people she dislikes (Brick thinks she should just destroy something and let her burn them)

Some people told them not to mess with political stuff, but not taking a side was taking a side- so they figth againts conservative laws bc they care about the future of lgbtq+ kids (and adults)

They. Get. Their. Happy. Ending.

[sketchy-scribs-n-doods]

ughh ty for ur amazing tags it was so disgusting how they were 1. telling on themselves claiming poc and fat people aren't attractive and 2. wishing racism and body shaming on an actor in the name of justice(??). not that im surprised anyway their crowd was the one that demonized lucas and ignored caleb for years. one of my favorite characters is patrick and he wasn't allowed even a nightmare sequence he was just forgotten by the narrative and brushed off. a Black victim of abuse not even given a voice, just forcibly suppressed and used to move the plot along to fuel jason's satanic bullshit. he is ignored by the large majority of the fandom that focuses all their attention on white boy of the week but think hating billy is enough to compensate for their favouritism and racism. i hate how poc are treated in this show but its not enough for ppl to just direct all their performative criticism on a character they want actual racist harassment directed at them too. so disgusting.

i don't normally beef on the internet (i much prefer throwing hands irl actually, but ppl seem to enjoy hiding their shit behind a screen lol), but i really did such a hard double take at those tags.

i really can't fathom tearing down another character because your fav gets shit. i fully understand that characters like lucas and argyle don't get a lot of attention and that's likely a combination of a) the duffer's own bias sidelining those characters, and b) fans' bias in ignoring poc. that doesn't mean i'm gonna throw hands with your average eddie or steve stan or whatever, i don't find that productive. i'd rather engage with fans that already enjoy my fav or are open to consuming content about them and encourage (in this long winded example) eddie stans to enjoy argyle content without making them feel guilty about their blorbo.

same goes for every time i see someone thinking that if they kick down billy it will elevate nancy or lucas or max or eddie or steve. it's petty, it doesn't work, and the only things that result from it are a) an echo chambers where all your fellow salty mutuals will yes man you, or b) ppl who like what you just talked shit about are gonna roll up asking what your damage is. lo and behold.

even putting all of the dumb nancy vs billy nonsense aside (and for the record i think the duffers badly wrote both characters in different ways), those fucking tags were just. SUCH an accidental slip reveal of what that person really thinks. i don't think they're a horrible person or whatever but they're definitely a dick and think that as long as they hate the right character they're correct and good.

like you said, wishing bigotry on a person/character just because you don't like them is a weird fucking thing to say. at that point i barely care what the context of the post was. can you imagine saying that out loud in a room full of fat ppl/poc? i don't think any of them are gonna come to the conclusion that you mean it as a roundabouts insult against a popular hot white actor/character and go 'oh yes haha you're so right i totally think fans hating him for being brown/fat is preferable'. i personally would have torn down whoever said that shit to me irl, that's some white ass performative activism i don't have time for, but it seems like ppl don't think about how the shit they say would sound out loud irl to the very ppl they seem to be trying to support

nevermind that any given piece of billy fanfiction and an awful lot of fanart explores the trauma billy has gone through more than it goes 'ah yes blonde boy hot'. we can have tho conversations without being pricks saying shit in bad faith about it. like, most billy fans i see are huge fans of patrick and mourn his lost potential. because we know how the duffers treat their abused characters.

this shit isn't a contest, but often the shit you say about a character affects ppl who are similar to/identity with that character. if in your pursuit to hate and spit about a character, you say shitty things that make poc, fat ppl, abuse victims, etc., feel like you're insulting them or just using them as props for your wokeness, then you need to take a step back and ask yourself if maybe you needa chill and reevaluate what you're doing. it's not a good look, and neither is the mindset that revenge and punitive 'justice' should be prioritized above healing, growth, and connection.

(like c'mon we can redeem fictional war criminals but we can't let an 18 year old being abused by his dad work through his racial biases? like the latter isn't a much more common situation that happens irl to real abused teens with bigoted parents? alright)

anyway, i'm glad you appreciated my tag rambles, i really was just word vomiting in a fury lol

if you love patrick and enjoy the idea of patrick and billy interacting, i have a # patrick mcckinley tag and a # kingr*ve tag for each respectively (i lump all my patrick and billy stuff under their ship whether platonic or romantic bc patrick stuff is scarce enough as it is). cheers!

[la-pheacienne]

The fact there are actually people, adult people, whose sole involvement in the House of the Dragon fanbase is based on them thirsting after Daemon's butt and Aegon's cock is fine by me. I don't mind it, I find it entertaining and I endorse in it sometimes.

The fact that the very same people believe that, just because they, personally, care solely for Daemon's butt and Aegon's cock, that means that the story is just a "dragon soap opera where psychos with platinum wigs fuck and kill eachother lmao" is a step further, but ok, I swallowed that too. If you ignore/don't care about the actual story being told here that's fine. Still problematic that you think that just because you personally have a limited understanding/investment on the story, then that means that the story has nothing else to say. That's a red flag, but I accepted it and didn't criticise it on a personal level.

The fact that the very same people -who run thirst blogs and reduce the entire story to a dragon fairy land so that they can thirst after basically every character (which is again their main goal here)- come at me and tell me that I'm wrong in my takes, a fanatic and a bigot for having actual opinions on the story and for criticising the people who are making the adaptation is a step too far. These people -who, again only care about Daemon's butt and Aegon's cock- have reduced 700 pages of narrative to a dragon fairy land of hot dudes with wigs and then have the audacity to tell me that I lack critical literacy for actually investing in the story.

Get the fuck out of here. Enough. I have read tons of literature in my life, tons. I am also a highly educated person, I know perfectly well how to analyse literature using critical thinking. Critical thinking means, first and foremost, that you understand what the fuck you're reading. "All sides are equally bad because all Targs are equally hot" is not critical thinking. It's literally the opposite and you can use your American superiority complex all you want, but you can't hide that wrongly accusing people of BiGoTrY on the internet is the only serious conversation you are capable of doing, if we can even call this travesty serious.

If you can't handle people having serious conversation and voicing strong criticism on the internet and you prefer focusing on thirst posts, fine. Do it. I don't care. It doesn't affect me personally. Just don't say that that makes you so smart and critical and educated and we are stupid bigoted fanatics for using our brains and trying to analyse the actual story. Just stay in your lane, do your thing and let me do mine.

[transfenris-truther]

Romance asks: 1, 5, 7, 11, 17, 21-25, 30, &31 for fenhawke pls :)

Thank you so much for the ask! Sorry it took so long. Writer asks below the cut.

1- What drew your character to their LI and vice versa?

For Julian, it was crush at first sight. He watched Fenris tear the heart out of a slaver and make his smooth entrance and was immediately smitten. He likes a man who can defend himself and is cool under pressure. Meanwhile Fenris was having some of the most anxiety inducing moments of his life.

For Fenris, he noticed that Julian was gentle, for a mage. He was a good listener and he asked very astute questions. He seemed thoughtful and it also didn't hurt that he was very pretty.

5-How do they comfort each other when they are sad?

Fenris responds well to creature comforts, and Julian loves to spoil him. Hot baths, warm sheets, big comforting meals. Sometimes an upset Fenris doesn't want to be spoiled, or even seen, and Julian has to sit on his hands and wait for Fenris to be ready. he hates to see Fenris lean on old, unhealthy coping skills, but he knows they'll always be there.

Julian can often be joked or teased out of a bad mood. Almost always the reason he's sad is loneliness or thinking about the family he's lost. Fenris will make time with their friends, schedule time to get out of the house, or even out of Kirkwall. Mostly he just tries to be there for Julian, to remind him that he still has family.

7- Favorite date activity?

Camping. They're on equal footing out in the wilderness and it's a great escape from the bigotry of people who don't like to see elves or mages among the rest of society.

11-Do they have any inside jokes?

"This one's going in the book," or "Another one for Varric."- said sarcastically by Fenris whenever something happens that Julian would absolutely NOT want to have in "Tale of the Champion"

"Fenris will vouch for me." - said by Hawke when he's lying his ass off about something. Fenris will always back him up in the least convincing way he can manage.

"The finest vintage in Kirkwall." - said when one or the other gets blood, muck, or some other disgusting thing in his mouth.

They have a dozen inside jokes, all of them very stupid.

17-Their ways of expressing their love.

Julian for Fenris- Apple pastries stocked in the pantry, extra clothes lying around for Fenris to cover up when he's cold or doesn't want to be touched, running hot baths, leaving trashy novels and obscure histories in the library, fresh flowers, massage, minimal complaining when Fenris warms cold fingers and toes on him. "I love you."

Fenris for Julian- Affection and care for the people and animals Julian loves, hot tea brought up to bed in the morning, sex, honesty, vulnerability, thinking before he speaks, whispering secrets like a teenager at a sleepover late into the night, accepting healing and affection. "I am yours."

21- Personally, do you think they are a good couple?

I think they get better with time. Initially they're terribly co-dependent and they have to learn to communicate better. Fenris struggles a little with jealousy and Julian has to get better at understanding that Fenris' touch aversion isn't something he can love or heal away.

I don't know if Fenris ever gets over the codependency, or he just gets better at hiding it. If Hawke gets left in the Fade, Fenris will do whatever it takes to get him back.

Ultimately, I think they're good for each other. Fenris grows a lot with Julian and finally relaxes enough to be happy. It means a lot to him that Julian has never ever made him feel ashamed of himself or his past. Julian falls for someone who loves him for who he is and accepts him after feeling for a long time that his family's love was conditional. They have the same humor, and the same values, even if they enjoy debating the details.

22- From the outside looking in, what is their dynamic like?

Depends on who's looking. Unfortunately, there's a lot of racism in Thedas.

At a glance, most nobility see Fenris as a servant. Julian is having none of that. Fenris, on the other hand, is totally unbothered. The opinions of nobility mean next to nothing to him.

Elves routinely ask Fenris if he's in danger from the big human mage. Both Julian and Fenris are offended by that.

Kirkwallers see their relationship as "local madman celebrity and his muscle."

To those astute enough to acknowledge them as a couple assume it must be an opposites attract thing. They're only partly right.

23- Did you tailor your OC for the other in the romance?

It's more like Julian tailored himself lol. He matures a lot in Kirkwall. He stops believing he knows best all the time. He's a little less rash. He gets quieter. Kirkwall takes a lot out of him. If he and Fenris had started seriously dating when they were first attracted to each other, they would have had a relationship ending fight fairly quickly. But they both mature and become more compatible. Mostly because they both become more patient, flexible and accepting.

24- Is there any moment that happens between them that you know happens and just makes you melt?

When Julian wakes up for the first time and Fenris is still asleep in his arms. He's so used to Fenris leaving, trusts him to come back each time. But finally having that trust and vulnerability means so much to him. For both of them, it's a sign that they're finding safety together.

25- Share any head cannons about their relationship.

They travel a lot together after they leave Kirkwall and see important places from each other's past. Fenris strongly dislikes Ferelden weather and food. Hawke feels the same about Seheron.

31- Share anything you would like about the couple!

Hawke tries to learn Tevene but his accent is TERRIBLE. Secretly Fenris likes that he sounds like a foreigner.

Neither of them can cook. It's an ongoing problem. Fenris is better at it, but even at his best, tavern food or Orana's cooking is better.

For a long time, Fenris is insistent that Hawke do a noble's duty, be polite to Kirkwall's gentry and at least try to find a woman to marry for appearances. Then Hawke demonstrates how fun it can be to baffle and offend the nobility and Fenris realizes for the first time in his life that he's protected from retaliation. Then he really starts to enjoy himself at parties.

30- How does their love change as they get older?

They talk way less. When their relationship first starts, they're desperate to discuss every little thing. They have to have a lot of serious conversations, and they flirt a lot as well. But as they get older and are together all the time, they say as much with expressions as with words.

Hawke saves the first note Fenris ever leaves him, but it's lost when they leave Kirkwall.

Fenris insists upon wearing Hawke's favor for the rest of his life, but he cares less and less about his house crest over time. The crest represents Hawke's nobility and that's not really what Fenris loves about him.

Hawke loves to do little slight of hand tricks as flirtation. Fenris finds them VERY funny and once he softens on magic, he really enjoys it when Hawke uses slight of hand to make excuses to Templars. He thinks it's hilarious.

They have a silly voice they do for the dog. They get caught doing it once by Sebastian who they swear to secrecy.

[straightfromthetorturedpoetsdept]

Totally Nuanced Tuesday Topic: Autism, Extremism, and Whiteness

At some point, we're going to have to accept that autism is a valid reason for past bigotry, to a certain degree. I see the popular take on here and on tiktok is that there is never a valid reason behind bigotry and autism doesn't exclude you from accountability and yes, I agree that you should always be held accountable for bigoted statements.

However, having a valid reason for something is not the same thing as asking for an excuse from consequences and this is an inherently ableist thought pattern to engage in and uphold as a standard of communication. Autistic people are not inherently asking to be excused from accountability, but it is important to recognize that Autism is entirely dependent on cultural norms and telling autistic people that "autism is not a valid excuse for bigotry" is asking them to deny seeing a bigoted cultural norm in society that influenced them to think a certain way to begin with. After all, how can an autistic person have racist thoughts and opinions if everyone else wasn't behaving in racist ways leading them to think this is how people SHOULD behave in social situations?

Take me, for example, I was very fortunate to grow up in the bronx during the early 00s and 10s. If I didn't have black friends since pre-school, I would have easily succumbed to my mother's beliefs (and I did for a hot second after we moved to an entirely white neighborhood in bumfuck mass and my social circle became insanely racist naturally) growing up. Instead, I spent my childhood getting into fist fights over whether or not black people had a natural chemical in their skin that made them smell bad or whatever my mother would throw at me. After being diagnosed, my brief stint into anti-feminism and racism (I say this like it lasted for longer than six months and wasn't just my "not like other girls" phase) made a lot more sense especially after I moved away for college and returned to the socialist I was as a child and even more radical. Like, I'm not saying that I didn't say fucked up shit (nothing I can remember now, mostly slut shaming other people and there's only 2 genders, etc. i was more of a truscum than anything, which makes sense since I was the most ignorant on trans people at the time when I was 13). But what I am saying is without my autism diagnosis, I don't know if I could have ever overcome the shame I feel now looking back if I didn't have the tools and language to describe ~why~ I was so sexist and thus, racist, as being part of my mask.

I see a lot of people say that "autistic people should be better at recognizing patterns of bigotry because they're good at recognizing patterns" and this ignores the fact that autistic people are human beings, and the fact that "pattern recognition" is a trait inherent to ALL humans not just autistic people. Like, by this logic, shouldn't all humans be good at recognizing patterns of bigotry especially after they are informed of the existence of bigotry? This is just more ableist rhetoric that stems from the "savant or savage" stereotype of autistic people. We're not allowed to fuck up because if we're "normal enough" to be racist, then we MUST know being racist is wrong? Like, do you see the ableism here- the othering of a neurotype, in this case- or do I need to continue spelling it out? I think I've debunked this argument enough. Moving on.

Another argument I see is "well autistic people have an innate sense of justice." No, we are highly sensitive to injustice perception. This means that if we feel like we are on the right side of history, we feel righteous anger and can be slow to persuade otherwise. This says nothing about what the individual autistic person is PERCEIVING as being "unjust." Again, you are dehumanizing a neurotype that's different than yours based on bad stereotypes and ignorance on not only autism but systematic oppression in general.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth about autism and bigotry. A lot of us adopt bigoted masks as a SURVIVAL TOOL in a violently ableist society. When we talk about intersectionality, it's important that we don't fall into the trap of stigmatizing certain oppressions as not "that" serious or life-threatening. Ableism is just as harmful, just as dangerous as racism as sexism as homophobia is. Autistic people die if they can't mask properly, either by socially-assisted suicide or homicide, and in the society that we currently live in, being a bigot is the fucking standard. You're ostracized as a kid if you're not normal, and racism is normal. Sexism is normal. Transphobia is normal.

Saying autism isn't a valid reason for bigotry is saying that we should've known better than everyone else who is saying and behaving in much worse ways and gaining social clout as a result. It's cool to be a bigot and autistic people need to be cool to survive. By refusing to hear out an autistic person who tells you their autism is why they were racist or sexist or homophobic etc, you are asking them to ignore the truth of the situation and minimizing the necessity of masking as a survival tactic for many autistic people.

[koreandragon]

I just saw kinnporsche trending on Twitter and it's trending with like almost 900k tweets the other week it was trending with 1 million point two tweets stranger things didn't pull those numbers when it was trending last month. Streaming execs are so fucking stupid, the misogyny and bigotry stopping them from making so much money, look at how heartstopper was so huge. And bridgerton etc. And for most of them they cost a fraction of the horrible shows they keep churning out with big names who demand a lot of money and who say things like "it's not a tv show I see it as a long movie" fuck you if you don't like tv don't act in it. They could just make a few romance shows, some of them queer with poc leads, some of them based on webtoons or manga with a huge fan base and with new talented actors and they would get SO MANY VIEWS, they just need to be halfway decent let alone if they're very good. They all try to emulate the latest big hit like Lost or game of thrones until it's a romance show or shows from other countries with gay people. When they do it it's representation when other countries do it it's fetishism.

there's such a disconnect between audience and film/tv industry like they'd rather keep cashing in on an already beaten to death horse because they know it's a "safe" option than take a risk (which is, let's admit it, not actually a risk because numbers prove that people will tune in to romance and poc/queer leads) and actually make something that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. netflix churning out second seasons of sweet home, all of us are dead and squid game, all of which could've done without a continuation but it's too good of an opportunity to pass up and they have to hit the iron while it's hot. all of these are btw easily marketable to every demografic since it's violent and action filled and has minimal to no romance that would scare off male audiences. everything is a spin off of a spin off or a remake of a movie that came out less than 20 years ago or the 987th season of a show that should've died after the first 3 seasons. they get influencers and big name celebs that are not being told what they're doing in scenes to protect the integrity of Who Dies and they have a bunch of interviews where they just talk but say actually nothing of substence.

they don't want to make shows that are kind, that are gentle, it always has to be violent and edgy (which i'm not saying is bad because y'all know my taste) that desensitise people to the world instead of trying to comfort them. like all of this happening, the mere thought of it is making me want to crawl into a hole and die

[opinated-user]

The series finale of Voyager has Janeway go back in time and deliberately put herself at risk of dying at the hands of her most feared enemy because even after getting her ship home, she refused to accept a timeline where her one of her best friends is suffering from an incurable form of dementia and the other is dead. "Badass who gets things done" rips out the emotions of the character entirely. Is she a badass? Sure. Does she get things done? Absolutely. But she's also so consumed with guilt that she risks a fate worse than death. Even if you're not paying attention to the entire show, the ending episode alone should've explained to LO that Janeway isn't a #girlboss, she's a complicated character. She's willing to rewrite a quarter of a century of history to make a timeline in which Chakotay and Tuvok are okay even knowing it means breaking the Temporal Prime Directive, punishable by death if she's caught. She's guilty, upset, stubborn, future Janeway calls her past self stubborn and self-righteous, and present day Janeway doesn't have an argument against that assessment of herself. The fact that the conflict between the two is "which of our plans to fix everything at the risk of killing ourselves do we go with" should, in and of itself, be enough to get LO or any other viewer to realize she's not a remorseless Aliana style badass. She cares so deeply it's the cause of 90% of her character flaws.

The kicker here is that I don't even like Voyager! I hated large chunks of it, I have so many complaints about the main cast I could write a book and I wrote an actual college paper on the problems in the finale. It's the second worst Star Trek series! I have whole seasons I don't think are worth rewatching but even I know better than to reduce Janeway to some murderous badass as if her whole personality is to be unfeeling and cool. She puts up the facade of being cool and collected but that's an act and we see it dropped constantly AND the finale calls it out at great length!

LO reduces complex characters down to one or two traits. If she likes them, they're cold badasses (Kuvira, Janeway) whose crimes are excused (Magneto, Kuvira) who she views as having done nothing wrong. When she hates them, they become irredeemable regardless of whatever they did wrong (the entire SU rant episode and most characters discussed). If they undergo character growth, that's bad and they're poorly written and the authors are authoritarian/Nazi sympathizers (Starlight Glimmer, Pink Diamond). This often goes hand-in-hand with demonization of characters who are not friendly to her faves (Korra and LO's mockery of her PTSD being the most egregious example) and being willing to overlook problematic elements in a show with a character she likes (antisemitism is fine because Harley is hot so who cares).

None of this is unique to her. A lot of neckbeards and whatever the lady equivalent is do this. This media illiteracy and moral myopia is common among the chronically online and self-centered. But she has influence over a large audience primarily composed of children, and what she's teaching them is that nuance is nonexistent, everything is black and white, racism/antisemitism/bigotry is fine if you're cool enough, murder/violence equals power and power equals morality, and to be in the right means all of your decisions are good automatically/to be accepted without question.

The problem isn't any one of her bad takes on characters. The problem is her presenting herself as a media analyst with intelligence who should be trusted by young people as an authority figure. Her work is aimed at teens but she herself is unable to understand characters who she's seen since her age was in the single digits.

(And I'm sure someone will try to use her being neurodivergent to excuse this, but she's old enough to know better. I'm ND and I don't pull this shit, and I'm younger than her.)

that has always been the worst aspect of LO, isn't it? it's the dychotomy between she acting as if she has a better idea of what is happening than anyone else while constantly showing her various limitations to media analysis.