#I don't like being called Nazi

[lil-gae-disaster]

(TW Holocaust/mustache man/Nazi mention)

Sigh

Repeat after me non-german(speaking) folks:

German culture isn't ww2.

Because I saw under a post about white culture a comment going along the lines of "and German culture is being a Nazi!" (Germany wasn't included in the post for some goddamn reason)

And, no. Ew. Don't. Please.

yes, the time has affected our cultural traditions. (Like Easter and Christmas leaning way more to it's pagan origins since mustache man was anti-christianity in addition to the obvious)

But please for the love of everything holy, our culture isn't just that.

Our culture is already watered down to just one sixteen of it. Yes, Germany ≠ Bavaria. Just like US American ≠ New York / Alaska / Texas.

The watering down and disregard to the culture has gone so far that I, as someone who's spent all their life in Germany, don't know much about my culture. I owned ONE traditional dress when I used to be a girl. But no one taught me how to wear it properly so I probably wore it the wrong way.

I'm sorry if I make anyone uncomfortable talking about this, but I think it needs to be addressed.

This piece of history is a dark chapter in the history of my country. It's important that it doesn't get forgotten what has happened to prevent that. But please, for the love of anything holy, don't try to play ignorant to my culture by comparing it to my country's biggest mistake and biggest regret.

German ≠ Nazi

Please learn that.

I'm at times ashamed of my nationality and ethnicity because others always have this chapter of my country's history hanging over my head if they won't admit they're wrong. Or just simply when they find out I'm german.

Thank you for listening.

PS: the war, or at least the wall, also affected my culture because if you look at vote-results or any other map in that matter I can guarantee you to 90% that the past ddr and brg (brd) will have vastly different results

[artcinemas]

people why am i seeing like fucking sixteen year olds call for genocide of "crores" of rohingya refugees (it is not even 50k girl atleast refer to actual sources lmao) in this country and then these same brainwashed dumbfucks say that hindus are oppressed in india. like y'all like to debunk yourselves a lot despite what your delusion likes to project in y'alls brains, like sanghis genuinely please touch grass and stop referring fucking quora and whatsapp posts for once!

[rawliverandgoronspice]

for no fucking reason: real life dictatorships in the 20th and 21th centuries are almost always allowed to thrive because of some empire's interests. If not, they get heavily demonized then dismantled by said empire over a relatively short period of time (unless exceptional circumstances, tho it's almost always applicable). the examples are countless; please read declassified reports and interviews from the CIA/KGB/other intelligence agencies across the world to lose your mind about it, especially those involving what happened during the Cold War and what happened in the Middle East (and still does).

characters like ganondorf are the epitomy of the fantasy that colonized/"exotic" countries naturally spawn evil incarnate and must be controlled/stumped/imprisoned/destroyed by the "responsible ones" while the perfect good place is perfect and utterly blameless about what went down and how the local population suffered (which, in real life, the empires of the world are most definitively not that --the amount of dictators that were ushered into power by western interests is staggering and we fucking love to see it don't we). And also, a blameless victim to whichever retribution eventually comes back their way.

It is a rethoric that denies interconnectivity and historical responsibility.

this is what I criticize about the narrative choices of a fictional conflict that *does not exist in real life* and has been entirely made up by human beings: the cowardice of blamelessness, and what little this kind of narrative brings to the table --especially today when we should be looking at the root cause of broken systems of violence instead of endlessly scapegoating minorities.

and well, especially given how effective this narrative apparently seems to be.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

one thing that does make me a little nervous sometimes about writing up pericles meta is that like.... quite a lot of it goes in-depth about the extent of how incredibly vile and cruel the things are that he does to other characters, and his reasons for doing them. that's Important, and i do my best not to try to cushion it, despite discussing how it plays into his trauma and the shit hand he was dealt and vice versa. if anything the juxtaposition of those things is the point of all this meta for me, and it gets to the heart of so, so much that resonates with me about sdmi. erasing that would be a disservice to him and basically every other character in the show that i'm invested in.

.....and at the same time it's always really sucked how often i see people talk about how one-note pure evil he is, how it's impossible to write him as a complex or sympathetic character without making him totally OOC, how people who genuinely like him are [insert apologist here], how you're not allowed to enjoy exploring the awful dynamics he gets into with people, how they want him to be gruesomely murdered by the protags and think it'd be funny and satisfying and the show would be better for it, and just generally talk about How Much They Straightforwardly Hate Him Because He Does Bad Things. not everyone does this, thankfully, but enough of them have over the years that i just don't really want to see it anymore.

i know i joke all the time about how 'i love him and he makes me sad but i am going to peel him like a banana,' and i'm not going to try to tell other people they can't dislike him or anything, especially since i know a lot of the stuff he does is going to be really fucking triggering for some people. i do my best to just curate and block, mute, or scroll past if i need to. but he's genuinely one of my favorite characters ever and he means a lot to me--especially since i can relate hard to a lot of the sympathetic themes behind his being a piece of shit--and when i write my meta posts about him, i do it to share what i love about his character, and maybe get some people to appreciate him in a new light. and the idea of actively adding to the torches and pitchforks instead is..... kind of depressing to me and i really hope that's not how it turns out.

basically i guess this is me asking preemptively, before i start writing up posts Really Getting Into His Awful Shit at Great Length and in Great Detail, that folks please be mindful with 'i hate this fucking bird' comments on posts i make. i do hope people enjoy reading what i have to say about him, and get something out of it, but.... yeah. he sucks real bad but please be nice.

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Your last two posts have made me imagine Brainiac 5 and the Legion getting stranded in the past for the umpteenth time, so Brainy just calls up Bart who calls up his time traveling family because y'know.

Anyways Brainiac (or more likely one of the other legionaries stuck with him) overhears Bart cursing and goes "wow they let you say that sorta stuff?" and suddenly has 4 different speedsters (Bart in horror, Jay, Max, and Wally in glee) looking at them

So the funny thing is that Max is from the wild west originally. That man is a cowboy and he has some rather... old fashioned values at times. Nothing too crazy. But he would definitely clutch his pearls if Bart was swearing in front of women because Max 100% subscribes to chivalry and all that jazz. He would be upset if Bart was swearing in front of children as well.

But the weird thing is that I can totally see Max being cool with it if it's just the two of them? Idk. Max has weird hang ups about being polite. It's especially weird when you remember that he's an introvert.

But yeah, Max would probably make Bart sit through an opera as punishment or something.

Now Jay would be VERY upset. He would give Bart a stern lecture about being polite, the whole nine yards, "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" and all.

I mean, Wally skipped a family dinner one time to prevent the apocalypse and Jay gave him a lecture about family values and being there for his kids. A single dinner. To save the world. Wally was an adult.

So, yeah, Jay would definitely have strong opinions on that.

Wally would think it's fucking hilarious.

[neverendingwinter]

Whenever I remember ***, I have a lot of thoughts, and one of them is "Wow, some of those posts are stuff that younger me would have probably agreed (but for another character)." And then I think about how younger me would probably hate the fact that I now like akechi.

My other thoughts are "Wow those guys suck."

[fandom-hoarder-official]

[lawrencegarte]

that "satire requires clarity of purpose lest it be mistaken as genuine" post but it's about e/delgard being an empirical dictator that kills everyone

[mayedays]

Apparently the term judeo-nazi was coined by an Israeli Jew. Charming.

Have run into too many people on tumblr/twitter today who thinks its just fucking fine to use phrases like 'zionazi' or 'judeo-nazi' and one of them is apparently an incredibly respected academic.

Like, you don't have to do this. You can just call them fucking facists or murderous racists or genocidaires.

[nostalgia-tblr]

Re: Hunting for Sport Poll though, I do want to add (separately) that you don't have to feel bad about not knowing the history of every place on Earth, even the famous bits. The world is very large and history is very long and there is no way you'll ever know even a basic outline of everyone's national histories unless you spend all day every day doing nothing else. Think of how much time you spent in school in a history class and it's no longer quite so shocking that you don't know even quite major things from the history of wherever you live.

So, like. Don't beat yourself up over things you didn't know because nobody ever taught them to you. And hey, you know now!

[earlymodernlesbian]

are you even really friends with your jewish friends if they haven't sobbed in front of you about antisemitism for hours and then told you that they trust you to hide them in your attic if needed?

[delisae]

Imagine sending your best friend a vocal of you talking for 5 minutes straight about how your brother is a fucking bitch

[six-seasons-andamovie]

Think I should start calling my uncle out for being a dick to me

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[anshelsgendercrisis]

something that's fucked me up over the last three weeks is the constant barrage of non palestinian goyim saying "why should we have to condemn hamas???????? why do we have to focus on jews or israelis when palestinians are dying??????????" and i know ppl who have already decided i'm guilty by virtue of being a jew won't give a shit, but i'm hoping people who still have a bit of humanity left in them will.

i've gotten so many anons chiding me and demanding to know why they should give a shit about the people killed by hamas (not all of whom were jewish or even israeli), and the answer i keep wanting to give is that. honestly you don't fucking have to. quite honestly, i wouldn't have cared if no one talked about it. i would be hurt to see people didn't see the loss of (assumed to be jewish) life as a tragedy, but i would have much preferred silence to the utterly horrific things i have had to see over the past three weeks.

bc that's the thing. we as jews are so fucking jaded when it comes to gentile reactions to violence against us. we're used to you saying it doesn't matter or even that we deserved it. gentile apathy has so thoroughly broken us that we consider it a win when y'all don't actively celebrate instances of antisemitism. and you had the opportunity to disrupt that pattern, to either take a single moment to offer condolences for the loss of so many lives (not all of whom were jewish or even israeli) or just simply back off and give us space to grieve.

but instead, i witnessed people, who just over a month ago had been wishing their jewish followers a happy rosh hashanah, post or repost some of the most appalling displays of antisemitism i have seen since may of 2021. i have watched you post about the "zionist media" ("jews control the media"), tell jewish israelis to just use their dual citizenship to go back to their third beach house on long island ("all jews are rich"), that jews israelis are bloodthirsty monsters who get pleasure from killing children (modern day blood libel), that jews are the "new nazis" (holocaust inversion), that jews in the diaspora are responsible for the actions of the israeli government (dual loyalty), and that every single israeli should die (literally genocide???????????)

i witnessed people who call themselves antizionist gleefully become tools of political zionism, bolstering the claims that the diaspora is not safe for us and therefore we must support israel when the countries we currently live in turn on us like they have without fail for the last 2000 years. and when i point this out, instead of taking this to heart, people double down. they insist if i'm pointing this out it must mean i believe it.

you all had the opportunity to do nothing, to prioritize the safety and liberation of palestinians over your own hatred of jews, and yet you still chose antisemitism. and i will never forgive you for it.

[gremlingirlsmell]

trans woman: we should talk about transmisogyny in queer spaces

a dozen he/they's with "terfs fuck off" in bio, who've been waiting for this moment in the limelight for their entire lives: this but trans men. actually this affects trans men more. everyone is affected by transmisogyny. wow why are you dividing the community. we should be kissing and sucking and fucking instead. you're too online, this "discourse" is so online. it's not real. it doesnt exist irl. touch grass. in REAL communities trans women never complain. what, you actually meant irl communities? well I don't believe you, you make this all up. youre erasing us. I'll just willfully misunderstand everything you say in the worst way possible. why do you hate trans men? youre being misandrist. you're such a transradfem. baeddel. feminazi. everyone should know op is a terf and probably also into some problematic stuff. callout post: be aware of op they're a tirf infiltrator seperatist problematic kink haver. reblogs* popular thinkpiece: these transwomen reclaimed a medieval transmisogynistic slur 10 years ago, here is 200 links of terfs and nazis badmouthing them uh i mean sources, i think we should be able to call every transwoman we dont like this slur and also theyre dangerous if they reclaim it again. love trans women before it's too late #transandrophobia