#I hate being old I hate 4chan closing I hate the internet I hate

[domino-on-the-marathon]

I need more fire emblem content, or f&h content, or Zelda content or just... any content that please please PLEASE takes me away from that hellhole. I don't know if I can deal with it anymore.

It's a small fandom yet I already have someone's ass blocked who has decided that I'm their competition for some fucking reason I don't understand and whenever I post a fic they follow right behind, begging for attention.

THIS. THIS is the bullshit that drives creatives away. I don't want to be your fucking competition! Leave me the fuck alone, good god! Literally wanting to tear my hair apart right now. Dennis Reynolds has NOTHING on me in this very moment.

Thinking pretty hard on orphaning all my works and go back to writing about my dead in the water otps. I'll gett 1 kudos max, but the peace of mind? That's worth more than any kudos in the world.

Small fandoms are like professional restaurants. I don't want to deal with the sous chef, I change restaurants or change work shifts. But what the fuck can I do if the dickass follows me EVERYWHERE?! At this point hitting them with a frying pan in the face is more than fucking justified.

I'm so fucking upset. So so fucking upset. My soul wants to crawl out of my skin.

[cemitadepollo]

The wound in my heart that never closed is a result of online smear campaigns and backlash I faced when I was younger. I wasnt even like, famous famous, no one would know me outside a very very niche specific spanish speaking internet circle and even then it was like 100 people who saw what happened and like maybe 12 people where directly involved against me. 12 people is little on paper but imagine the social impact it had on 12/13 year old me. Now imagine how people that deal with a bigger audience feel.

I am almost 19 years old now and I still feel like I need to prove my honest and well intentions to everyone around me. I feel like I need to tell everyone every little thing that I do to be some sort of "transparent figure". I'm paranoid that most of the people that I love around me could turn on me. If someone is doing anything harmful it's not wrong to call them out, but there's a way to do things, and exposing them out for them to be eaten away by the world is NO way or helping someone improve and reflect.

And the worst part is that I'm fresh out of high school and it happened again but in real life and I hate that people would ruin someone's mental stability over things they're not even sure about. "She just uses people" how could you know??? How could you know that random stranger you have never had an actual conversation with, let alone know, has bad intentions??? Both in person or in the internet.

I hate cancel culture. I hate video essays made on individuals for petty reasons. I hate making someone a target and making them look like monsters instead of trying to privately handle the issue. I hate kiwifarms, I hate 4chan, I hate the way we choose "lolcows" and I hate the way normal people get harassed into fame and it justs keeps coming back. It's not fair.

Where is nuance?? Where is the compassion?? If you dont have proof of something then don't smear it all over the place and make someone look like a danger to others. Make yourself responsible for your actions and for what comes out of your mouth (or what you type and post around). Be honest with yourself; you dont want justice, you just want a reason to speak shit of and be rude to someone you dont know for no reason, youre not being moral or rigtheous, youre just a cruel person who thinks they have the right to "push back" when nobody did anything wrong to begin with.

[sapphire-weapon]

oh, and i forgot @ bawk anon

(sorry i'm trying not to post huge wall-of-text asks so much anymore, because when i have to reply to something piece-by-piece, it feels like the overall message gets lost)

and idk, it might be me but i have not seen a single youtube game review that talks about how re6 aeon sucked and ruined leon and the game for them, it's just bad bc the gameplay is messy and repetitive for each campaign. if it did ruin the game for ppl at some point, the ship is already forgiven by the general audience, based on what i read from chat and heard from ytbers/streamers. like seriously, the re6 aeon hate probably only exists on old rants on game forums, and aeon can't be the main reason re6 was hated by fans, so this just circles back to how this hate even got picked up or was cared about by the community manager who then would proceed to tell capcom, bc as you said, they only report a big fluctuation. a crowd hating on a once beloved duo in a game where EVERYTHING was hated on bc it was bad IN GENERAL is not out of the ordinary. it's an expected reaction from a game that was built poorly. like how can aeon, a small factor of the game, came out great when the game it came out from was BAD? you know what i mean?

so what you're doing is looking for shit being said in 2025 and/or things that still show up in search results in 2025

when what i'm talking about was the immediate knee-jerk response from fans back in 2012.

the internet looked very different back then. youtube was not the main source of content back then; the biggest video game channels back then were, like, spoony and angry joe and the angry video game nerd and machinima. twitch didn't exist in the form it is today, and the only like... "big" video game streamer who was actually doing video game streaming as a career at that time was destiny, who doesn't play RE and was still doing starcraft 2 tournaments. tiktok didn't exist. twitter had almost 0 fandom presence. podcasts weren't really a thing yet.

those "old rants on game forums" were the fandom, at that time. fandom existed on neogaf and gamefaqs and /v/ and livejournal and tumblr and the biohaze forums. community managers, back then, talked to people directly on those forums for feedback. they even had special flair on neogaf so people knew who they were. they lurked and shitposted on 4chan anonymously. they visited fan-built fan-filled RE forums. they read through the RE community on livejournal. that's what a community manager used to do, before social media took over everything.

i never said that aeon was the main reason why people hated RE6. i'm saying that the hate that aeon generated in the immediate aftermath of RE6's release was loud enough and ubiquitous enough and anomalous enough that it caught the community manager's attention, and word got back to the devs as a result.

the effects of that outcry can still be seen today -- because most of the guys who were working at capcom during RE6's release still work there. RE almost died as a franchise because of RE6's disastrous reception, and i'm sure that the guys at the highest levels of the project (like hirabyashi) are terrified of doing anything that comes too close to anything that RE6 did ever again. that includes both gameplay and story. aeon isn't the only thing that these guys probably feel is toxic now -- but it's on the fucking list.

it doesn't matter if fandom's forgiven the ship; it's very clear that hirabayashi took that feedback really hard back in 2012 and still just wants absolutely nothing to do with a leon/ada romance anymore. he even talked publicly about how he kept the feedback from RE6 in the back of his mind while he was coming up with the dev plan for RE2make.

shit like that can be traumatizing. there's a reason why i keep bringing up the fact that mikami had nightmares for years over REmake releasing as a catastrophic failure. sure, today, REmake is hailed as the king of survival horror -- a timeless classic that's held up by video game fans around the world as the gold standard for what a remake should be and what a survival horror game should be. but that doesn't matter to mikami. because, at the time REmake released, it tanked so hard that it (like RE6) almost killed RE as a series and nearly cost him his job. he went into RE4 under the very real assumption that it might be the last RE game ever made; because of how poorly REmake performed, if RE4 was anything less than a smash hit, RE was done for, and mikami himself was going to get shitcanned. that's why RE4 was such a dramatic departure from what RE had always been as a series; mikami allowed himself to take risks and go crazy because he had nothing left to lose. sure, it worked out for him and the series in the end, but shit like that stays with you. it haunts you.

you can't just draw arbitrary lines through time and go "okay nothing that happened prior to this time matters anymore." it matters. because it's still the same guys working on the games.

with all that being said, i'm pretty sure that none of the guys who are making RE9 worked on RE6 (iirc they were the revelations 1 team before they were the RE7 team), so they won't have these same traumas that hirabayashi has. so they could very well just decide to go hard on aeon again in RE9. i don't know. but when we're talking about hirabayashi specifically, you'd have to be delusional to think that RE6's reception just doesn't affect him anymore.

well, delusional, or just very young. maybe it doesn't make sense to you because, for you, 2012 was just so long ago that there's no way that it matters anymore -- but for those of us who were already adults in 2012, it really wasn't that long ago. time passes differently as you get older. 2012 feels like 5 years ago, to me. it probably feels even closer to hirabayashi, who's older than me, and who likely measures time in projects. RE6 was only just three projects ago, for him. that's it. it's not as far in the past for him as you think it is or should be.

[rosetower]

the whole 4chan argument thing on here is kind of ignoring the fact that while it is true NOW that youtube, twitter, tumblr, facebook, reddit all contain spaces dedicated to hate speech and purporting fascism, that a decent amount of these spaces Originated from users and groups who met on 4chan and its offshoot image forums in the aughts and earlier 2010s, and I fear that many people don't understand what 4chan's role specifically was in fostering the sort of spaces that enabled for this kind of thing to spread, how 4chan was the doorway of sorts to quote unquote dark web that had people leading others into gore collection websites, child pornography and sex trafficking ring sites, snuff websites, animal cruelty fetish sites ETC., how people started thru visiting 4chan and how it lead into much else. A lot of you do not know this because you weren't using the website in the early audits unsupervised on an unregulated internet. you didn't have the experience of being groomed online the way some of your older peers experienced and recall, and while it should be said that yes right now 4chan is not a unique center of hatred (I would argue modern, current, unregulated fascist-owned twitter is almost 85% close to how old 4chan was) the reason why many people, those who either Know of the role it had or those who experienced it firsthand in the online spheres of the 00s and early 10s hate anyone who refers with normalcy to their "4chan phase" is because many of us were either groomed into being abused or suffered at the hands of the violent teens and adults that were involved in that sphere from that time

[dukeofriven]

Let Boys Love Girl Things

For a deeply depressed, angry, and vitriolic bisexual 20-something who stumbled out of a toxic 2-year intensive college program confused as fuck about his gender and hurting everyone around him, it is with no exaggeration that I say My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic’s low-key stakes, warmth, humour, kindness, and utter lack of cynical irony was my first step on the road not only to recovery but coming even sort of close to having an accord with my identity. So I quite frankly I am exhausted that I have spent nine years being judged on the behaviour of a fandom group from 4chan. Nine years ago there was a gross perpetuation of toxic masculinity where men were ridiculed en-masse for liking a “girl’s show,” a campaign of derision that only intensified as the worst elements of 4chan gave everyone the evidence they seemed to want to justify their snap-judgement that boys liking girls shows was fundamentally weird, gross, and worthy of censure. We like to clap ourselves on the back for how woke we are now. There’s no discourse that says it is “skeevy” that men enjoy She-Ra, and petulant MRAs on Reddit getting upset about the show’s new ‘feminist’ agenda is considered to be representative of nothing other than petulant MRAs on Reddit, not the She-Ra fandom as a whole. Steven Universe is triumphed everywhere as a victory for better masculinity - without anyone ever noting that Steven would love every single moment of My Little Pony: FiM. He’d cry at the wedding, and he’d weep at the destruction of the library, and he’d think the Storm King was an effective villain while Connie rolled her eyes and tried and failed to point-out the weak characterization. Steven would cheer and cry every time a villain was redeemed through the power of love and friendship. Because he’s Steven, and he loves schmaltz, and it’s okay for a boy to like schmaltz. If we truly believe that, as we say we do, it’s time let the habit of shaming boys who liked a cartoon show go. It’s been a decade. Yes: MLP: FiM had a disgusting contingent of its fandom. You know what other franchise has that problem? A little film series you might have heard of called Star Wars. A contingent of Star Wars fandom was so racist it drove actors of colour off of twitter because it piled hate upon them. It was so misogynistic that somebody out there recut the entirety of The Last Jedi so that men save the day and all the women get reduced to bit parts. And yet if I see a Star Wars avatar my first assumption generally isn’t ��oh you like Star Wars, so you must therefore be a misogynistic racist.” Because statistically speaking, you aren’t - just like, statistically speaking, the men who liked My Little Pony weren’t 4chan users. Not that most people bothered to find that out, because - shockingly - the worst elements had loud voices and got all the press, and the standard we applied to them was so entrenched in patriarchy that none of us wanted to accept that men could like the girls show without it being some gross violation of the proper order. I’m tired of that. The show’s been on nine years - long enough that kids who grew up watching it are old enough to start entering “The Discourse Space,” and what kind of example do we want to set for them that a show that might have meant so much to them growing up is given a defacto label of deviancy? ”Adult males like this show about the little kiddie ponies - that’s so creepy.” There’s a point I want to make here that I think really needs to be said so I am going to make it large

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a show for children; it is not a show about children.

What do I mean by this? Adventure Time is the story of Finn, a 12-year-old. Steven Universe is a show about Steven Universe, a 12-year-old. Ok K.O. is a show about K.O. a 6-11 year-old. Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a group of kids aged 11-14. She-Ra is a show about Adora who is… 16-ish? 17? And so on.

MLP:FiM is a show about 20-somethings. It’s a show about a grad student, a small business owner, a baker, a farmer, an environmental technician, a… trust fund baby?*... and, later, a former dictator. Yes, there are some kid characters, but the primary cast are all young adults who’ve reached adulthood and found themselves having to learn over and over again all sorts of shit they really ought to have known by now but don’t. It is, in short, a story about Millennials: an entire generation who reached adulthood not knowing what that meant or how to cope. Every time you laugh at the characters and go “how do they not know this [obvious thing that is obvious to adults]” you do so while watching a children’s cartoon rather than paying your taxes because you’re still not sure how to do that properly and are just low-key freaking out about it and hoping the problem goes away on its own. I speak from experience. The list in endless: we might ridicule the ponies ignorance at social graces, but i’ve been on this hellsite long enough that I’m pretty sure most of you are social-anxious neurotics who cock-up just as often and just as spectacularly as any pony on the show.

I’ve grown up in-sync with these characters. I’ve seen them go from floundering at 20 to sorta getting their act together and coming to grips with adult life as they reach 30. I’ve seen them become successful, get new jobs, start new careers. There have been episodes about how to deal with parents who embarrass you, how to get your parents to understand that you’re an adult now and want to be treated that way. There str stories about how to handle deadbeat older brothers who won’t stop mooching off your emotional labour, and how to mourn parents who’ve died. There are also stories about the byzantine nature of school regulation. (If next season is all about Twilight Sparkle reforming the Equestrian tax code it will be entirely in keeping with the adult-life-trend the show has been on for a while.)

My point with all this is that the “liking the kid’s show” narrative is disingenuous in the way it frames fans as creepy. To get tu quoque about it all I could raise my hand and point at all you adults gushing about all these kid protagonists in your favourite cartoon shows and go “Isn’t that CREEPY and GROSS you DEVIANTS” and on and on and on.

But I won’t.

Because it was never really about that, was it? It’s never been about that.

It was, at first, about what it was and wasn’t okay for boys - for men - to like. As a kid who’d been mercilessly bullied for being even the tiniest bit effeminate, openly embracing the fact that I liked this show about the colourful cartoon ponies felt like painting a target on my back. As for the boys younger than me - the boys still in high school in 2010 and 2011 who openly embraced this show? Braver than any US marine. When this all started it was about policing what was ‘appropriate’ for boys - nobody gave the adult Transformers fandom the same kind of shit, I assure you. It was about patriarchy - and how unwilling we all were to let go of it, no matter how progressive we told ourselves we were. Just like any moral panic, it developed a far more disturbing tone of disapprobation because if a handful of fans on 4chan were creepy than surely all the fandom was creepy. I’ve had plenty of fun mail in my inbox as people with cartoon avatars told me my opinion was invalid because I had an avatar from a different cartoon show. If I had an MP avatar that made me a “brony,” which made me a creepy MRA edgelord. Never mind that I don’t even use the term, and haven’t since… well, since the grossest elements of 4chan got it tattooed on their phalluses and trumpeted it to the heavens as the calling card of their misogyny.

There was a moment, I think, back in the halcyon days of 2010 and 2011 where we could have taken this another way. Where, socially, the rise of boys watching ‘the girl’s show’ was treated as a breakthrough, as a paradigm shift, as something to be celebrated and nurtured instead of something to revile like an anti-homosexual PSA from the 1950s. “Can’t let the adult men near that children’s show, who knows what might happen. They might repeat the trends that all fandoms have done for decades upon decades - the horror!”

We could have been better - but we weren’t. We mocked, and clutched our pearls, and looked appalled, and in doing so we fed the trolls all the ammunition they’d ever need to turn themselves into The Poor Oppressed Babies who just wanted to be left alone to watch their ponies and belittle women in peace. So the gender-questioning bi boy trying to feel good about himself got rounded-up with the usual 4chan suspects because we both enjoyed the same television program.

Patriarchy is not an external force with its boot upon our necks: it is a collaborative social effort, reinforced both consciously and sub-consciously every day. The internet of the early 2010s was a very different place, and the decisions we made then still live with us today. If we want to stop the perpetuation of toxic masculinity, we have to ourselves cease to perpetuate it. There’s an entire generation of queer boys and non-binary boys and non-bro cis-boys - the kind who cry and care and give a shit about kindness - who have grown up on Steven Universe and Adventure Time and yes, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. These are boys who deserve to have a better place prepared for them than I had, one that isn’t still littered by the baggage of all the dumb stupid crap from 2010 and 2011.

It’s time to let the ghost of Toxic 4chan Fandoms Past go already, and let this show about cartoon ponies be free to entertain and delight without incurring a moral inquisition. Life is so bad right now, the news is so dire. Curl up with My Little pony: Friendship is Magic and let all its goodness, and kindness, and laughter, and caring carry you away and remind you that we can still tell stories about worlds in which those virtues are treasured. Let the show stand on its actual merits, and not the cultural lodestones of long-gone reprobates. And stop granting the phantoms of 4chan the power to say anything meaningful in 2019.

_________________ *Serious question: what does Fluttershy do for a living? Like, as her job? For most of the series? She’s the only one who doesn’t have a meaningful career, and after meeting her enabling parents you just know she’s been living off pre-existing savings for years (she’s thrifty like that).

[Note: this post was originally posted in this thread. It has since been re-edited and slightly modified.]

[explodingdisgust-blog]

The Muran Hordes I

Following on from: https://plus.google.com/114999809330885155321/posts/cXHoqpEPMYy (archive[dot]fo[slash]PN6WJ)

@marshax-marshmallow

I’ve said this before, ill say this again. On my Tumblr, or nowhere. I will address your points there, since it’s a place i’m active on and the formatting is better for me to debate things.

Sorry, did you forget something? Your old 'this is the internet' excuse? As I've said before, I don't give a fuck about where it happens. And since you bill yourself as being so 'controversial' and partisan in the particular way that any reactionary does, you are a fucking weakling by your own standards. Don't tell me that I don't know about the pride that contrarian reactionaries have when invading new spaces of discussion and spaces of thought: it's happened to liberal talking points (even in academic circles: is Peter Singer not an example of someone who is dangerously close to biological reductionism, the kernel of racism?); it's happened to 4chan (/pol/ was filled with Swarmfront shills); it's happened to YouTube with the rise of the 'skeptics' who have accelerated rightwards. So okay, LET'S FUCKING SEE HOW YOU LIKE IT. I’ll turn up in both places just so you don’t run away from what I’m saying.

Remember, though: you don't go to see reality; it comes out of nowhere and gives you a punch in the face - so don't cry about how you've got a nosebleed in this metaphorical sense. It is just like how I had completely forgotten that you were on G+. But here I am, dealing with you anyway.

People who are reading Birdie’s G+ most often aren’t here to read some rando’s papers on Marxism and Sexual freedom, and I bet Sophia doesn’t want these things spamming her notifications. My blog is where I express those kinds of things, some people read it, either out of hate or genuine interest. I agree that you want discussion and I want too, and thats why i’m saying we should take this somewhere its most likely to happen.

All you're telling me is that people don't want my walls but that says NOTHING about what they contain. Who's the fucking contrarian now, Marsha? Huh? Who's on the side of what you - and if you're right about them, all the others - want to repress? Again, so much for being so radical.

I know that this is not a dedicated thread in any sense besides the fact that I have set many of the topics but I don't care because I am here, right now, discussing this. If you really want discussion, you'll do it here with me right now. I can fuck off to Tumblr, yes, but you should know EXACTLY why I continue on G+.

You want to go into my pathologies? Fine, I'm one step ahead of you. I also do this right here because people are obviously going to see how ridiculous I seem. I mean, what the fuck? I'm posting small essays in several comment threads underneath posts which are associated with some pubescent lolcow's pathetic attempts at being funny, edgy and critical. Of course I'm going to seem like I'm a mug. THAT IS THE POINT. But you can't get rid of people like me and what I'm saying: I know that it will haunt all of you. I want you to go further and fill in what I haven't. You don't like my calls to discuss because you want 'fun' in your online bubble, but the very reasoning behind why something is 'fun' isn't a settled matter and I will confront you on that.

After all, even if I balloon into a major lolcow (if I'm not already one!), I know what might happen. Some of the users refer to some lolcows as 'cultcows' because they gain a cult-like following from their particular stalkers and trolls. You know being a cultcow can be turned to one's advantage with some major sacrifices, right? Like how Chris-Chan retains their fame? I have the pathology of a sort of 'sacrificial catalyst'; that is why I stay here. Not quite a martyr (so you won't see me getting the equivalent of '72 virgins' any time soon; I have much better things to do than submit to a disgusting cult and waste everything that I have), but far more willing to do something for what I believe in than cowardly little you. I have so many kinks to work out and numerous torturous self-imposed programmes to go through. I don't want any of your fucking guilt, but I can turn your own pathologies against you and watch you cry as I exceed your ability by your own standards. So go on, fucking outdo me. Have a great time. Make it a special occasion. ‘Controversial’ my arse.

So please, take your arguments there or stop talking to me, cause I won’t answer. Hell, you can even copy paste what you’ve said here so we can continue, but please. You dont even need to use your account afterwards.

You think I don’t know how this works? You’ll set your sex-obsessed friends on me and when you have no arguments left, you’ll spam the fuck out of me and then introduce me to all sorts of horrible people who’ll do their best to shut me down. I don’t even care any more to some extent. Prove me wrong, I dare you.

But of course, now that I’m here, you’re gonna have to actually tackle my earlier points. You don’t get to run away from those, either. And if you do get your friends involved, neither do they get to run.

Earlier posts from the G+ thread (first post first):

@marshax-marshmallow​ :

im glad you're finally standing for what you believe in, birdo everyone in this goddamn community thinks all dark humor makes terrible things look cool but it couldn't be farther from the truth, if you dont actually believe in what youre saying and treat everyone with respect, you're fine. also, if you have a rape fetish that's okay too, because as long as everything is in your head, you're not harming anyone. rape is a fetish because it's taboo, and if you think all rape fetishists think rape is okay in real life you are so terribly wrong. i cant express how proud i am of you

@explodingdisgust​ :

WELL, WELL, WELL. If it's not the contrarian little shit that I've been monitoring for the last few weeks. I've seen what you do and I've archived your precious Tumblr; do you think you can get away from your bullshit? Not when I'm around. "everyone in this goddamn community thinks all dark humor makes terrible things look cool but it couldn't be farther from the truth" Their sensitivities and lack of appreciation for the critical part of your contrarianism is not an excuse for the rest of your contrarianism to be upheld. You have made a serious position out of the 'opposite' of common Western-liberal-enlightenment values of 'decency'. I've seen your at-least-ironic racism in the first few pages of your Tumblr and I wonder whether you've changed at all. Of course, I remain quite pessimistic about that considering your 'innocent' and nonchalant response to RibChills telling you to stop sexualising her fursona. These fuckers throw the baby out with the disgusting bathwater whereas you cling onto both. I'll get to your excuses soon enough; don't think that I won't utterly demolish your entire worldview. "if you dont actually believe in what youre saying and treat everyone with respect, you're fine." Right, because respect is reducible to maintaining standards of decency while maintaining fetishes and horrific pathologies in one's own private space? And where did such ideas for such thoughts, pathologies and fetishes come from? You will tell me that it is 'human nature', that it is innate, but no biological structure (including the brain) can account for the limitless quantities and qualities of thoughts that we could possibly have. In fact, if you were to say that you were actually and inevitably controlled by brain chemicals or anything else that isn't you as a rational individual, then this idea of what you've said would be owed to such chemicals - but there is no proof that the brain structures or anything else that isn't at the level of reason itself can account for it and has simply been left hiding for all these thousands of years that human thought has been changing for.   ANY FETISH IS ABOUT REASON ALONE, and the particular manifestation of this one is contrarianism - a love of what one is denied by those who follow and construct the most dominant values in societies. But because reason is intersubjective and comes from other subjects - after all, no ideas are innate, they are all communicated otherwise right now we would be able to understand the greats of philosophy in our toddler years - it cannot be something that's simply private. It can get into the 'private' domain and it can run out - ideology is reproduced memetically by us as rational subjects. Everything becomes framed in terms of rape or whatever fetishes become dominant. Rape becomes accepted and eventually it seems inevitable (just like capitalism) to the extent that it would be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of that social phenomenon. But if people 'accept' the conditions of hypersexuality which come with the rape fetish, this is not necessarily a free choice because they are in the chains of what is socially-expected of them. Even though we are not conclusively-determined by our biology or by the laws of atomic physics, we ARE determined by movements in the social field which we too determine. The social field is inescapable and all-encompassing for rational beings (in our time, humans)! I advise you to read the works of Lacan and other psychoanalysts in matters like these. ALL of your empirical evidence about 'rape fetishists being decent people' or whatever's relevant that you want to prove only impresses those who uncritically accept the bourgeois-liberal idea of the split between the public and 'private' domains. Again, as I have shown, there is no such split. This is known to Marxists, who understand that we are not reducible to 'individuals and families' as Margaret Thatcher was an idiot to suggest. At the very least, a particular fetish is the dark reflection of the society in which one is brought up - and we are indeed brought up in a society where postmodern contrarians - neo-reactionaries and fascists of all stripes, 'progressive' or not - are in a frenzy of rebellion against ageing and self-destructive liberal values. Their solution is your solution: the uncritical acceptance of the simple negative of the old values. 'Sex is only a bit of fun, like you say, but we should embrace that instead of being all serious like you say!' And so it is with outright racism, sexism, all sorts of other things. You and the other cunts are the flies who buzz in the face of the old liberals - you are at war with yourselves over which of your identities can win out (e.g. Tumblr 'SJWs' and 'neo-Nazis' from 8chan would have serious disagreements over which groups' identities matter the most but they agree with the basic premises of a general segregationism; they feel that people are intrinsically hard-wired to behave in certain ways, for example). The paradox is that this is a very serious position for you. Yes, contrarianism is a conversion of an initial critical reaction to a  given set standards into another standard position which is the simple negative of the old one. You put all your weight behind supporting 'what exists and should not exist' instead of changing the field entirely and being too contrarian for your own contrarianism. Liberals cede political ground to such identity politics because they are forced to defend free speech and uphold the domain of the 'private', which is part of the excuse that the new reactionaries use against them. But you are not reading the words of a liberal here, Marsha. I AM A PROUD AND PARTISAN MARXIST and I am not afraid to hold you or anyone else responsible for what you say as a rational subject. I seek to qualitatively-change standards, taking the best from everything in a similar way to Lacan's borrowing from other philosophers. I know that 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is what we need to do rather than 'forget everything and go full reverse gear'. This is infinitely more horrifying for you than the old conservative 'get it out of my face' mentality: I HAVE FOUND REASON TO BE BORED OF CONTRARIAN FETISHES, EVEN THE CRITICAL DIMENSION THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE. The upshot is that you are throwing VERY DANGEROUS IDEAS into childrens' minds, stripping the ideas of all critical content that they might have while branding whatever remains as hip, contrarian and critical. You want people to accept what they are trying to repress and embrace it as if it won't do anything. Sorry, Marsha. IT FUCKING WELL WILL, and you know it. Go and fuck right off from this place or be ready for another wall of text. You're not going to get away without someone shattering your excuses one-by-one. I guess it's just the internet, huh?

@marshax-marshmallow :

can you speak common english? I understood half of what you said because you feel the need to constantly bring up the Big Boy Political Labels instead of calling things for what they are, not to mention the 'holier than thou' language you parade. No, me defending free thought isn't "a spit in the face of the old western liberal contrarian ideals" or whatever and you being a PROUD, PRO LACAN AND PARTISAN MARXIST has nothing to do with any of this. Cut that bullshit, go straight to the point. And if you want people to engage in your debate, make it easy and precise for them to understand, especially since this is *Birdie's Google+* Do that, on my tumblr, and i'll try to debate with you. But I doubt you could do that without getting off your high horse

@marshax-marshmallow :

+RainbowDashie Artist Wikipedia doesn't bring up unrelated issues and neither does it use long and eloquent speech redundantly

@explodingdisgust :

So because people have NO FUCKING CLUE as to how to use dictionaries, literature and videos, I'm going to have to fucking explain everything all over again. Fucking shoot me, I do not like doing this but I consider myself ethically-bound to do so not only because I am a Marxist but because I have to try to give a bunch of kids a critical leg-up, as it were. But I will remain here to remind you that your arguments ARE DEAD and there are no two ways about it. "can you speak common english? I understood half of what you said" Right, because you can't even use one of those dictionaries that's been written by liberals let alone confront the vast tomes of thought that I am currently studying. And of course, you can't even be bothered to tell me what it is about my post that you don't understand - your only hint is that you're unfamiliar with the terminology. To everyone who isn't mentally-handicapped or a bourgeois ideologue - this is precisely the laziness of the neo-fascists! If you're serious about your position, why the fuck aren't you gonna make a much harder and more detailed defence of it? "because you feel the need to constantly bring up the Big Boy Political Labels instead of calling things for what they are," You'll be shocked to hear this but I am indeed "calling things for what they are". I am doing my best to step away from much of the horrific psychoanalytic and political terminology in my explanations of such terminology when I do include them in my work so that I'm not appearing to tailspin in the dense bodies of thought which I have confronted over the years. For example, do you not know what I mean when I make the distinction between the 'public and private domains' given the ubiquity of this sort of liberal concept? It should be very clear that the 'private domain' is simply the social world of humans (or more generally, of rational beings - a category whose only known members are humans) at the level of individuals. Come on, did you understand my use of the Margaret Thatcher quote - her erroneous judgement that society is simply 'individuals and families'? Is that 'Big Boy' enough for you, huh? What about the 'simple negation' of Western-liberal-Enlightenment values - or more simply put, of 'conservative' values? I mean 'simple negation' here in a sense that anyone who's understood Hegel, Marx and Engels in even the slightest fashion can understand it: it is simply a particular 'not' of the prevailing values around a preconceived axis - that instead of rape fetishism being a taboo, 'it's fine and doesn't even harm anyone'; that instead of ironic racism being unspeakable, 'it's nothing like that; it's absolutely fine and it's just a joke'; that instead of repressing and trying to minimise sexuality and confining it to the private space of desire, 'it's completely fine to be hypersexual and it's fucking fun too'. It is not a complete change of values, taking the best from both the proposed worldviews and discarding parts of them where they are 'both worse' and constitute a 'double blackmail'. Your particular 'simple negation' accepts much of liberal philosophy and comes to reactionary, fascistic conclusions: the hypersexual and supposedly-hedonistic libertinism (look that up) of the private domain is to be brought into public view and then celebrated as something inevitable and fun, even among children. To go a bit Zizekian: the opponents that you recognise, the conservative defenders of 'decency', have taken the blue pill because for them 'none of this overtly-sexual rubbish should happen' and it represents the degeneration of Western values; you have taken the red pill, seeing 'reality' for what it is and celebrating it. The bluepilled and redpilled consider themselves to be opposites of one another. Marxists, meanwhile, do not recognise even many liberal conclusions which both the blue and red pills depend on: we construct and take a third pill even if it's just from bits and pieces of the red pill and the blue pill - it's something more than simply the two combined. For Marxists, the private-public distinction is very weak because the very stuff of reason that 'private individuals use' is shared between people - after all, how was much of it given to them? Were they born with it? If so, where is your empirical evidence about this and how does it prove that it can be owed to something that they were born with? If I'm wrong here, toddlers would say that they understand neurobiology or quantum physics without any intervention from us! Show me a study which says that they can do that. My claim otherwise is contrapositive (in a formal-logical sense and not a dialectical one); it is based on the lack of evidence for the opposite claim. See how far I'm willing to go to drive my points home to someone who essentially claims is that I am like an arrogant priest who is speaking to the hopeless and stupid laity? Frankly, if you don't understand my points, it is because you don't fucking want to understand them and you are consciously going out of your way to not investigate. You are also involved in this excuse of a discussion whether you like it or not. 

"not to mention the 'holier than thou' language you parade." Fucking hell. You are serious when you say this? We are in dark times. MOTHERFUCKER, ANYONE CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM SAYING IF THEY CONFRONT THE WORKS THAT I HAVE DRAGGED MYSELF THROUGH; I AM NO FUCKING PRIEST. I DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO SOME SACRED TEXT THAT ONLY I HAVE THE SPECIAL ABILITIES TO DECIPHER. Because I have done what I can think of to explain myself, the onus is on you and the other boring contrarian ARSEHOLES to get the fuck over to the literature of the traditions that I identify with and use in order to understand 'the other half' of what I'm saying. If I knew that you would never be able to approximate what I'm saying, why would I bother to explain myself instead of condescendingly passing by and sneering at you for subscribing to an 'inferior' worldview? In fact, why would I even be here at all? And no, before you fucking pipe up about how I want to 'indoctrinate children' and throw other stupid accusations in front of me, I do not want you or anyone else to take what I'm saying as scripture. I want you to critique and extend what I'm saying; I want to construct a dialectic here. I am willing to spend hours of time flooding you with oceans of text not because I wish to wave my pride before you but because I want to discuss things and explain what I'm saying. I want people - including children - to be empowered using philosophy, science and all the other kinds of knowledge and standards of reason. "No, me defending free thought isn't "a spit in the face of the old western liberal contrarian ideals" or whatever and you being a PROUD, PRO LACAN AND PARTISAN MARXIST has nothing to do with any of this." WRONG. The traditions of Marx and Lacan do concern themselves with matters such as sexuality, ideology, 'free thought', small-scale politics and all of that. If sexuality, for example, was not a concern of Marxism, then there would be little or no discussion of it among Marxists. So why would Engels, not only a Marxist but one of the founders of Marxism, write THIS? marxists.org - Origins of the Family. Chapter 2 (IV) And why would Freud, a psychoanalyst who had much to say about sexuality, have his work incorporated into political theory many times over by the Frankfurt school of Marxism if Marxist politics have nothing to do with sex? And in Lacan's case, what about his 'equations of sexuality'? Go on, go to Google, Bing, DDG or whatever search engine you want and type in 'lacan equations of sexuality'. Even besides that, you are telling me that none of what I'm saying matters, but what I am discussing entirely relates to how best it is to consider sexuality. It is not separate from politics at all - the sexual IS political, it IS a performance, it's not simply a matter of 'up-and-down movements'. Why would we question why we fuck at all? Why would we even do it in the first place if it's just a load of movements? You can try to argue that it's a matter of biology, but one can ask: 'why should we humans reproduce? Why should society be about biological reproduction?' So no, SEX IS NOT OUTSIDE POLITICS, and it is thus the concern of Marxist politics and of political philosophy in general. In fact, the great irony about your sentence here is that it is a political statement even as far as discussing sexuality is concerned. I mean, seriously? Are your understandings of philosophy and politics THAT bad? Then again, I know that you are nothing short of a troll if your insistence on repeating your boring humour (e.g. ironic racism) and your recent Discord 'raids' are anything to go by - so you have a vested interest in not sitting down, shutting the fuck up and understanding my words. Never mind that the greatest troll is to seriously engage with my arguments and leave me with the much bigger task of having to find more material. Of course, what are you actually trying to say here? You are no 'free-thinker'. Instead, you are another boring contrarian who viciously upholds the seemingly-permissive, seemingly-inclusive 'simple negative' of prevailing ideas of decency! That is as far as you will go in being critical of the current state of the world. 'Accept your sins!' you scream. 'They are inevitable and natural! Why do anything to stop them? It's the internet, for fuck's sake!' Meanwhile, here is a Marxist asking for something much more radical - and it is going to horrify you to no end. MAKE SEX BORING AGAIN. I am no enemy of the freedom-chasing power of contrarianism; I encourage its use. But contrarianism is not free enough; it is still in the chains of thinking that it's the only possible opposition to the current ruling order. So in a way, it is not me that's holier-than-thou, IT IS YOUR CONTRARIANISM ITSELF, because it fails to unlock a new critical dimension and sneers before any attempts to go further than its own particular opposition to the status quo. But it also concerns Marxism in another way because it concerns (Marxian) Communism, the unique proletarian movement which seeks the end of class divisions and the end of capitalism. You want us to accept the logic of the private space, the fantasies of domination and mindless experimentation. Do you know what this is, Marsha? IT IS THE LOGIC OF THE BOURGEOIS CLASS. Nothing is off limits for the rulers of the world besides Communism. If they want to fuck a child, for example, they can bloody well go ahead and do it without being questioned. This is outrageous! We are allowing these people to do whatever the fuck they want regardless of the very real consequences including the social blackmails and lack of real choices that people are faced with despite legally being able to do many more things? Yes, Marsha, if something is recognised as being 'legal' by a government, it does not make it right. And even if a choice is 'guaranteed' by a given legal system, it is not necessarily put in place. If people are allowed to have rocket launchers and while one person can buy a rocket launcher and another who is otherwise the same as the first person can only afford a slingshot, who is more likely to destroy the other in a fight with their weapons? The politics of freedom is the politics of tearing apart the divison of the 'private' and public domains so that we no longer fuck around and do things without criticism. But in fact, this also frees the once-bourgeois in a sense because they can move on to do better and more effective things as dictated by reason, which does not represent the will of a particular person but all people including themselves. The bourgeois defence of what they believe to be this closed-off private space is nothing more than a defence of stupidity which is supposed to be 'kept away from the masses' but never truly is.

"Cut that bullshit, go straight to the point."

Sorry, Marsha. In trying to explain my points to you, I AM OBLIGED TO TYPE OUT THESE GIANT RESPONSES in case you misunderstand what I'm claiming if you

do

decide to engage with the arguments that I bring against you. There is so much to go through that you are going to have to sit down - perhaps for years - and read the works of those who are in the same traditions as I am. Worse still, you will have to read the works of others outside such traditions to compare and critique the various ideas which they discuss. Nothing is truly simple in the world whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, we live in times of clickbait, woefully-short attention spans and a lack of self-discipline (this is true even of myself!). You are going to confront your laziness even if you want to argue your own case in an effective way.

"And if you want people to engage in your debate, make it easy and precise for them to understand, especially since this is

Birdie's Google+

"

And what the fuck do you think I've been trying to do? Again, why would I even bother turning up? Get this: I know that I don't seem credible in the eyes of the hundreds of children who read her posts and I don't necessarily give a fuck - so if you accuse me of doing this to wave my fucking pride in front of you, you're dead wrong.

You can try to give me an Encyclopedia Dramatica - style diagnosis about 'the

real

reasons why I'm here' but anyone can say what I'm saying regardless of their psychology. I could've come here with a great big beaming smile on my face. I could adopt the same contrarian snark that you have. That you are confronted with an angry, grave and seemingly-parental scumbag is

irrelevant

because it subtracts nothing from the vast majority of what I'm saying. Motherfucker, do you know what an 'ad-hominem' fallacy is? Attacking a person rather than an argument which anyone can make does not attack that argument. If I said 'you're Brazillian and you come from a degenerate nation, your opinion doesn't matter', I would be making a stupid claim because I wouldn't have actually said why what you're saying is wrong - at most, I would've said something about the real social forces which led you to adopt this reasoning. So don't come to me with any ad-hominems of your own without engaging with my points themselves because it's not going to fucking work - even for your pride, especially now that you've tried to position yourself as a defender of freedom with all the dignity that comes with it.

"Do that, on my tumblr, and i'll try to debate with you."

First, I do not have access to a Tumblr page or account and I do not want to create one. Second, why NOT discuss shit here? Come on, what gets added to my arguments if I bugger off to Tumblr? Besides that, I am here because I would like to make a great big example out of you. You are 'sinfulmarsh', are you not? A crusader for 'free thought' and open 'acceptance' of (hyper-)sexuality, yes? Lover of all that's taboo, uncomfortable and other shit like that?

Well, fuck you. I am proud to turn up on some 'random' corner of the internet (which, in reality, is NOT 'random' at all but one that I've consciously-selected) and fire walls of text in your direction. If you don't like that, remember that 'it's the internet' and anything can happen; *

BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS OF REASONING

**, YOU SHOULDN'T BE MOANING SO MUCH. So much for being a contrarian, eh, Marsha? Where's your fucking 'free thought'?*

"But I doubt you could do that without getting off your high horse"

Your accusation is laced with with irony considering how your anti-intellectualism is itself an arrogant denial of my words having any worth whatsoever. You don't even bother to ask me any questions relating to the arguments themselves; do you think I won't spot that? FUCK YOU, Marsha. I am at least one step ahead of you because I know what it's like to be a contrarian; I've passed through this phase and I've become even 'worse' since. I know the tricks and the blind spot of your contrarianism; at its most general, it is the same as my own, and I am quite far beyond it as someone who seeks that 'third pill'. In fact, I am far more contrarian precisely because I seek to change values and standards. I have learned to weaponise my contrarianism! That is what is so unsettling for you about Marxists: we are you and more; we can emulate your modes of thought. We seek to take the best out of everything and turn it into something more.

---

@explodingdisgust​ :

Ah, look at this! Is 'eloquent' not a Big Boy word? Look at this motherfucker betray her own rhetorical standards. No shame, huh? And so the snake eats its own tail; the beginning of Marsha's dissonance is here. Meanwhile, for those of us who aren't busy trying to uphold degeneracy and soft forms of servitude:

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/195805-SL-cultism-exposed!!?s=d2444b96573a3897b1e106ae6f9bf772&p=2873207#post2873207

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3bBreSgaik

---

@explodingdisgust​ :

And before anyone says that I've misunderstood them, remember that you don't get to choose how your statements are interpreted unless you craft your words very carefully. If I missed something, point it out. If not, explain yourself or get lost.

---

@marshax-marshmallow

I’ve said this before, ill say this again. On my Tumblr, or nowhere. I will address your points there, since it’s a place i’m active on and the formatting is better for me to debate things. People who are reading Birdie’s G+ most often aren’t here to read some rando’s papers on Marxism and Sexual freedom, and I bet Sophia doesn’t want these things spamming her notifications. My blog is where I express those kinds of things, some people read it, either out of hate or genuine interest. I agree that you want discussion and I want too, and thats why i’m saying we should take this somewhere its most likely to happen. So please, take your arguments there or stop talking to me, cause I won’t answer. Hell, you can even copy paste what you’ve said here so we can continue, but please. You dont even need to use your account afterwards.

[gabriel-gabdiel]

Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

The Akira Fubuki arc finally ends. Also, Tomoyuki joins the Literature Club.

The rest of the chapters of my original story based on a plot from 4chan are available here. Enjoy.

First | Previous | Next

After staking out (or perhaps outright stalking) Class 1A for a little while after dismissal time, Tomoyuki Yamamoto found who he was looking for: Akira Fubuki.

Looking at him up close, the Cherry Boy was surprised he wasn't able to piece together earlier that the Younger Fubuki had actually catfished him by pretending to be his own sister.

Aside from the hoodie, the earphones, the emo hair, and the smartphone that doubled as his music player, he really did look like the fraternal twin of Aya Fubuki.

A short-haired, flat-chested, male, and gloomy version of Aya, to be exact.

"Hey," Tomoyuki greeted Akira.

"...."

Emerging from the classroom, the male Fubuki picked up his pace and walked away from his sister's stalker, but as expected of the creep, Yamamoto ended up matching his pace as he followed him all the way to Maehara High's exit gate.

Akira gave Tomoyuki a sidelong glance and mumbled, "We have nothing to talk about," before giving the Cherry Boy a glare that would've made Aya proud.

The Cherry Boy stopped cold in his tracks, but then said, "Yes, we do, Fubuki-kun."

"Leave me alone or I'll publish that picture of you and the Amazon Queen all over the Internet," Akira threatened, the volume of his voice rising slightly, his eyes darting left and right at his classmates who were walking around him.

"Go ahead," Tomoyuki called his bluff. "That's fine. The only one whose opinion I care about will understand the meaning behind that picture."

"I-I ain't kidding, Ch-Cherry Boy," stuttered the kid. Akira really was completely different from his outgoing crossdressing persona. "Your delinquent classmate will totally beat you up over it!"

Surprising even himself, Yamamoto grabbed hold of Fubuki's thin wrist and said, "If you want, I'll send the photo to the net myself."

The girly boy pulled his hand away from the Cherry Boy. Rubbing his wrist, he relented, asking, "W-Well? What do you want?"

***

Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko

An Anime-Inspired Original Story from 4chan's /a/ Board by Abdiel

Original Idea by Hataki.

For once, Tomoyuki explores his own passion and dreams in order to keep up with the brilliance of both Seikos.

Disclaimer: This work may reference copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is believed that this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. All copyrighted material referred to in this work belongs to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

***

Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

***

Alternate Universe (AU) Seiko Okamoto just texted Tomoyuki Yamamoto a message prior to his confrontation with Akira Fubuki.

"Cherry Boy loved the trailer of Kagemusha you sent me, AU Cherry Boy! The one that starred Zatoichi! Thanks! You're the best! You know yourself like the back of your hand, ya movie nerd!"

Ugh. What bad timing, AU Amazon Queen!

Tomoyuki wasn't in the mood for this. If it were any other time, he'd be ecstatic about the news. He had a lot in his mind right now. Like how he was supposed to approach the aloof Akira, the brother of Aya who catfished him.

The AU Amazon Queen then sent Tomoyuki a flood of messages, oblivious of the fact that he had no intention of replying to her for now.

"He thought at first it was an edited fake trailer using Zatoichi clips you see all the time on YouTube! But he then saw every last Zatoichi film and he couldn't put his finger on where the clips came from. Hehehe."

"Won't we get into trouble if he learns the truth that the trailer was from an alternate universe? Won't that blow his mind? It's still kinda awkward being around Miku-chin, though. I never thought she'd get this upset about my gift."

"If only they were just best friends like you and AU Miku-chin are back in your world. What should I do? Help me, AU Cherry Boy!"

Tomoyuki wanted to pay no heed to the messages, but he couldn't take ignoring the love of his life for too long, especially when she was asking for his help. So he messaged to her the following half-joke:

"Maybe you should broach the subject of alternate universes somehow within Machida's earshot. If your Machida is anything like our Machida, she'll definitely geek out."

Then, as Yamamoto holstered his keitai denwa (mobile phone) into his pocket, something else occurred to him.

Something about how the Akira Kurosawa movie "Kagemusha" had parallels with his current predicament with Akira (not Kurosawa) Fubuki.

***

At a park near Maehara High...

The two former students of the same middle school sat on a bench in silence. Once he was done texting with his transdimensional not-girlfriend, Yamamoto decided to talk.

"Your name's Akira, huh? Your name reminds me of my favorite movie director, Kurosawa Akira. Japan's own world-famous director. You two have the same name," was Tomoyuki's lame attempt at an ice breaker.

Had it been Machida, she would've compared Akira's name to the famous anime and manga "AKIRA" by Katsuhiro Otomo. Or Akira Toriyama, the author of Dragon Ball.

"...A-Akira's a common name, dude. It's no big deal."

The Cherry Boy cleared his throat. "Speaking of which, have you ever heard of Kagemusha? That's one of my fave films from Kurosawa."

Akira just stared at Tomoyuki. "I-Is that an old black-and-white film? W-What does that have to do with anything?"

Yamamoto caught himself from falling face-first into the asphalt in dismay. Jeez, young people had no appreciation for classic Japanese cinema!

"I'll have you know that it's a Kurosawa jidaigeki (historical) film about a thief turned political decoy of Takeda Shingen. The imposter took over Takeda's empire right after Takeda's death."

"I-I never watched it," said Fubuki before muttering, "W-Who cares about some old-ass movie anyway..."

Yamamoto then looked the crossdresser straight in the eyes and said, "The Kagemusha reminds me of you."

"I-I don't follow," mumbled Akira, looking away from Tomoyuki.

"You totally do. Like a mix between him and Shingen's brother Nobukado, who also served as his double. Even when it was for the sake of a prank, you still looked exactly like your sister whenever you crossdressed."

"O-Oh. I see." Akira stared at Tomoyuki with half-lidded eyes and an impish smile. "W-What's the matter, Cherry Boy? Are you frustrated I-I made you date the Kagemusha of my sister instead of my actual sister?"

And there it was.

Akira finally addressed the elephant in the "room" (or in this case, park), much to Tomoyuki's chagrin.

Fubuki smirked and guffawed. "You're so hard up to get a girlfriend, you couldn't tell when you're dating a boy!"

Ouch. That mostly hurt because it was true.

Aya Fubuki's younger brother probably saw Yamamoto as some sort of perv who stalked his sister and had bad intentions for her altogether.

Rumors of the legendary Cherry Boy and his "Nice Guy" exploits had spread beyond his first year class and into the whole Maehara High campus, particularly with how Yukari Goto messaged him a love confession by accident and he immediately believed she'd actually fall for a guy like him.

Embarrassing.

Still, Tomoyuki had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't enough to warrant an outright catfishing expedition, or at least catfishing to the extent that Akira went through.

Pretending to be the opposite gender over the phone or through an online chatroom was one thing. But Akira apparently hated him enough to go a step further than that. The extra mile, even.

"Any reason why you catfished me?" Tomoyuki probed, finally getting straight to the point.

"I-Isn't it obvious? I-It's because you're a creep and you've been stalking my sister all this time. I-I wanted to teach you a lesson!"

To Akira's surprise, Yamamoto then bowed and asked for his forgiveness.

"I'm really sorry for troubling your sister like that. She doesn't like me anyway, but I pushed the issue."

Akira rolled his eyes at Yamamoto. "A-Apologize to her, not me."

"I already have," said Tomoyuki. "I wanted to apologize to you personally."

"Y-You're the one apologizing to me? Ha!" scoffed the introvert. "T-That's rich, coming from you!"

"Yeah, I guess it is," said the Cherry Boy, who gazed towards the orange and red sky with a wistful sigh.

"I-Is this reverse psychology or something?" Akira asked. "I'm t-the one who catfished you, after all."

"Yep. You got me real good." Yamamoto chuckled, which made Fubuki frown.

"S-So what are you apologizing about?" asked the younger brother of Aya. "Y-You're going to play it off as a joke to save face or something?"

Tomoyuki's mouth went from a smile to a thin line, his lips moving inwards into his mouth. "I'd complain about how badly you think of me if you weren't completely justified to think that way."

The Cherry Boy heard the kid audibly gulp and saw him grip the edges of the bench's seat hard until his knuckles turned white.

From there, Yamamoto finally dropped the bombshell.

"I'm also sorry for punching your face back in grade school. It was supposed to be payback for when you punched me first, but I deserved that punch anyway."

Through grit teeth, Akira asked, "So you remember me after all, Yamamoto-sempai?" With nary a stutter.

***

About a couple of years ago, Kanemoto, Fubuki, and Yamamoto went to the same junior high.

Once upon a time, Kanemoto got lightly teased by his classmates, pairing him up with a girly kohai (underclassman) of theirs after he ended up near him during the school assembly. That kohai was Akira.

The thing about that was they had no girls in their junior high. It was an all-boys school.

Their junior was a boy who looked and sounded like a girl. He was like the little sister instead of little brother of his big sister Aya, who was attending an all-girls school at the time.

In Tomoyuki's desperation to fit in, he joined in on the teasing but laid it a little too thick, which led the popular pretty boy to put him in his place.

To be more specific, the jock told the nerd that he was a loser with no real friends and his greatest claim to fame was attempting to bully someone better than him.

Soon after, it was the Cherry Boy who got picked on by his classmates. It was karma in action, pure and simple.

But even before the well-deserved bullying, Tomoyuki got punched in the face by the same girly male kohai whom he also made fun with his teasing of Kanemoto.

This made the Cherry Boy's nose bleed, necessitating a visit to the nurse station.

A few days later, a "fight" between them ensued, with Tomoyuki hitting a punch at the kid before wimping out and covering his own face up with his hands to prevent getting punched back in return.

It was the lamest ending to a fight since, well, the Mayweather versus Pacquiao fight.

Never in the Cherry Boy's wildest dreams did he imagine that the kid he fought would end up being Aya Fubuki's younger brother, Akira.

Yamamoto was such a doofus try-hard when he was younger. Or maybe he was still one after all this time. He hoped this wasn't the case.

***

Back at the park...

The two boys went silent again.

Yamamoto stared at his shoes, examining its plain design like they were a magic eye picture instead. He couldn't bring himself to stare back at Akira.

"I'm really, really sorry about what I did to you before. I did you wrong and I can't apologize enough for it. I was such a shithead to you, Akira-kun."

"Don't call me that."

It was Yamamoto's turn to stutter. "A-Alright then, Fubuki-kun!"

Akira sighed then smirked, his upper lip quivering. "S-So you really did forget who I was up until recently. W-What traumatized me for years was just another day for you."

"It wasn't."

"H-Huh?"

"I remember it like it was yesterday. It was also one of the worst days of my life, getting beaten up by a kohai. How can I possibly forget that?"

Akira had a chuckle out of that one.

Yamamoto then confessed, "I know my apologies sound empty to you. I've been apologizing for my past actions so much that people are starting to not take any of them seriously. I wasn't teasing you, I was teasing Kanemoto, but when he bullied me back, you and I somehow ended up fighting instead. I...!"

The Cherry Boy stopped short when he saw the crossdresser raise his hand up. "Enough. I've heard enough," said Fubuki.

Tomoyuki sighed and nodded. He did his best. He knew that he wasn't about to be forgiven easily.

"I-I know you were teasing Kanemoto-sempai, not me."

Oh. He was angry about that. "Oh, so that's why you punched me on the nose."

"Yup, and you deserved it too, like you said," rejoined Akira, his raven hair glistening gold from the rays of the setting sun.

Yamamoto didn't know where to look, his cheeks getting warmer from the sight of the girly boy. "Sooo, you really had feelings for Kanemoto, huh?"

The crossdresser stared at the Cherry Boy's twiddling hands. "He didn't return my feelings," he mumbled softly.

"I am so sorry..."

"I-It's water under the bridge," said Akira. "S-So stop apologizing, it's getting annoying."

"So you forgive me?" asked Yamamoto hopefully.

The younger Fubuki chuckled. "M-More like I already got my revenge. We're even now, okay?" Akira then asked Tomoyuki, "So I'm Neechan's (Big Sis's) Kagemusha, huh?" while looking at the unseen horizon surrounded by golden buildings.

The afternoon sun acted like a Midas touch to everything its rays touched, turning them gold.

The Cherry Boy backpedaled from that thoughtless comparison. "Please don't take it the wrong way, Fubuki-kun. I didn't mean anything bad about it."

To Tomoyuki's surprise, Akira said, "I-I know. I-I've heard my fill of your stories when we were 'dating'."

Oh yeah. Right.

Tomoyuki told "Aya" everything about his dreams of becoming a movie director back during their "dates", as embarrassing as they were in retrospect. He made movie comparisons about everything as part of their small talk.

Smiling, Yamamoto shared, "Oh, did you know? Had Zatoichi's actor not taken the role of Kagemusha, it would've gone to Nakadai Tatsuya? It blew my mind when I first heard it! Imagine if Katsu Shintaro were fired from production. We would've gotten a totally different Kagemusha film altogether!"

"...And there you go again with your stories, Yamamoto-chan."

Akira then gave Tomoyuki a smiling, pensive look that made the Cherry Boy forget he was talking to a boy instead of a cute, short-haired girl.

Just like old times. This was the "Aya" that Tomoyuki fell for last year, lies and catfishing be damned.

Forgetting himself for a second, Yamamoto asked Fubuki a question he was meaning to ask AU Seiko.

"Let's say that in two parallel dimensions, one Kagemusha was portrayed by Katsu Shintaro and another was portrayed by Nakadai Tetsuya. Which one of them is the realer Kagemusha?"

The younger brother of Aya pursed his lips to a pout before it became an outright frown.

"W-Who cares? They're both fake," he said with a deep voice, shedding his female mask. Or perhaps he put on a male mask over his feminine self? "I- It's like me. E-Even in an alternate dimension, I could never be like Neechan. I could never be a real woman. No matter what version of me we're talking about."

The gazes of Tomoyuki and Akira finally met eye-to-eye as the Cherry Boy said, "Yes, you can never be Fubuki Aya, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you're twins or the same people from parallel universes, you two are different in many ways, and that's okay."

"Y-Yamamoto-se..." Akira looked like was about to add a "sempai" suffix there but caught himself at the last minute.

Yamamoto stood up from the park bench and bowed at his kohai. Akira looked like he was about to bow in return, only for the cheeky brat to give him a kiss on the lips instead.

"AH!" yelped Yamamoto, who jumped back.

Akira chuckled, stuck his tongue out, and winked at the Cherry Boy. "Okay, even though I'm still a little mad, now I forgive you."

The kid then rose, put his hoodie on, and gave a sideward glance at the flabbergasted Tomoyuki while squeezing his earphones into his ears.

"Later."

The Cherry Boy touched his lips, chuckled to himself, and turned around to literally walk into the sunset, only to come face-to-face with the slack-jawed expressions of Aya Fubuki, Yukari Goto, Miku Machida, and Seiko Okamoto.

His Friend Zone Harem (most of them, anyway) had seen that last exchange.

'Goddammit, Fubuki-kun.'

***

A little later, Tomoyuki texted the Seiko from another universe about Akira, asking her about him, only to get this response.

"Fubuki Aya-chin's little brother? No, she has a little sister here. They're practically twins. Is Akira-chin a guy in your own universe, Cherry Boy?"

Whoa. Mind blown.

***

Usually, with Tomoyuki's luck, he'd have rumors flying around Class 2B or the whole Maehara campus about him being gay for Aya Fubuki's little brother, Akira.

And as expected, that was exactly what happened.

Oh well.

In light of the things Tomoyuki did to Akira and Aya, maybe he deserved being caught red-handed with that one last fake kiss to the lips in front of his not-girlfriends.

It was all a misunderstanding of course, but how was he supposed to explain what happened?

His so-called Friend Zone Harem (or rather, Sugata's Actual Harem) had been treating him weirdly ever since they saw that last exchange between him and Akira.

For example, he was greeted by a glaring Aya with, "I WILL NEVER ACCEPT YOU AS A BROTHER-IN-LAW, YAMAMOTO!" that fine Monday morning.

She seemingly forgot that same-sex marriage wasn't legal in Japan (although, in fairness, she might have also probably forgot that Akira was her little brother instead of little sister).

Also, she forgot one other important thing.

"...Shut up, Fubuki. I don't swing that way," he said to her under his breath. "Stop talking! I don't want people getting the wrong idea!"

"C-Congratulations, Ch-Cherry-kun," said a glassy-eyed Yukari, who walked towards her male best friend in a stilted, robotic fashion.

In turn, Tomoyuki cried out, "For the love of Kami-sama, your congratulations don't make me happy at all! Don't congratulate me over weird stuff, Goto!"

Meanwhile, the girls of Class 2C ended up milling out of the door, squealing (or "squeeing", as the Class 2B Rep would say) left and right over the new prospective coupling of Akira and Tomoyuki.

"EEEEE! The Cherry Boy is actually in love with Iincho's little bro?"

"I support your gay love for Fubuki-kun, Cherry Boy!"

"It finally happened. Cherry Boy has been rejected by so many girls he ended up dating a dude!"

"It's so romantic! A true sempai-kohai (upperclassman-underclassman) love affair!"

"Do you think Akira-kun will end up popping Cherry Boy's cherry?"

"KYAAAA!"

They were certainly more supportive over Yamamoto becoming a couple with the younger Fubuki versus him ending up with an actual girl, the idea of which seemed beyond creepy for these... fujoshi (rotten girl, otherwise known as a boy's love or BL fangirl).

'Oh no, not the fujoshi!'

The Cherry Boy turned towards his classmates at Section 2B for refuge from the madness that was Section 2C, only for him to end up face-to- face with a flush-faced and heavily breathing Miku.

Uh-oh.

Tomoyuki made an about-face as soon as he saw the look in Machida's face. He could practically see Valentine heart shapes on her irises.

"AH! Yamamoto-kun! Don't turn away! We need to talk about you and your new romance!"

"Get away from me, Machida! I'm not gay!" he said as he ran away from Machida and the rest of the rotten girls of Maehara.

"But it's not gay to fall in love with onnanoko (girly boys)!"

"SHADDAAAAAP!"

A teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!"

***

A weekend later, about five days removed from Tomoyuki's birthday...

Thankfully, Yamamoto's nightmare from last night where he was labeled as gay for Akira by the entire student body never actually transpired in real life.

If things had escalated that far, then the Cherry Boy might've been rumored to have a male gay version of his "Friend Zone" Harem composed of Sugata, Matsuda, Ishiguro, Kanemoto, and Fubuki.

His female heterosexual Friend Zone Harem still treated him rather weirdly though, but otherwise nothing too over-the-top happened to him. The girls kept that little exchange between him and Akira to themselves.

For example, he could still greet Yukari like before, but whenever he attempted to bring up Akira, she found a way to change the subject.

"Hi, Cherry-kun! Good morning!"

"Oh, hi Goto! About what happened last Friday...!"

"Oh, speaking of Friday, K-On's last episode happened on Friday! Such a beautifully made anime! Season 2 when, amirite? I can't wait to talk to Miku-chan about it, even though she only likes gay stuff... er, not that there's anything wrong with gay stuff! Oh look, there's Aya-chan! HI AYA-CHAN! Er, I gotta go, Cherry-kun!" she said in one breath.

"...."

As for Aya, she was the opposite of what she was in his nightmare. She was kind of worse.

"I hope you make Akira happy."

"N-No offense, Fubuki, but please shut up. I beg of you."

"Aw, you even stutter like him too!"

Ugh. He then cringed when from behind him, Aya whispered, "Break his heart and I'll break your fingers."

He then hissed, "I have no heart of his to break because he likes some other dude! His heart belongs to another!"

Fubuki blinked. "Who else would it be? He kissed you."

"SSSSSSHHH!" he shushed.

No need to start a new rumor about him. He'd rather be the Virgin King than have people think he swung for the other team or however the turn of phrase went. "He was just pranking me! Your li'l bro is about as in-love with me as you or Goto are with me!"

In the background, Yukari choked on her spit.

Aya then raised an eyebrow. "Or as in-love with you as Machida Miku is?"

He shrugged. "Sure, fine. Let's go with that."

In the background, Miku choked on her spit.

Speaking of Miku, the choking Class 2B iincho had her nose in her notebook for some reason when Yamamoto entered Class 2B and literally bumped into her, which blindsided her and made her drop the object of her attention.

Miku was actually hiding a drawing of what suspiciously looked like Tomoyuki and Akira kissing. And naked. And... for lack of a better term... "sword-fighting".

It was a pretty well-done drawing, if unnerving to the Cherry Boy. Like a detailed oil painting of hardcore porn (a description that covered a disturbing amount of medieval paintings).

"...." chorused Miku and Yamamoto.

Apparently, she took the kissing scene between the Cherry Boy and the Lady Boy as well as Yamamoto expected, knowing her. As expected of the Fujoshi of Class 2B.

The Class 2B Rep immediately scrambled for her lewd materials, her face as scarlet as the setting sun or the circle on the Japanese flag that also represented the setting sun.

"Et tu, Machida?" asked Yamamoto, who looked and felt like he was about to melt.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorry...!" Miku apologized, bowing at the Cherry Boy repeatedly.

He then ran away from his so-called best friend, feeling a sense of déjà vu as he did so.

The teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!" only for him to blink and realize that out of all the scenarios he had in his dream, only the one involving Seiko came true.

Huh. So she really was the girl he knew the most among all the girls he'd ever wooed. Or failed to woo.

Or maybe he knew her AU self like the back of his hand and at times, he ended up guessing what the Seiko in his world would say because of how similar the two versions of her were.

Seiko grinned and laughed in that tomboyish, brusque way she usually did, which made Tomoyuki's heart break a little more.

AU Seiko used to be the closest thing Tomoyuki had to getting the object of his affection in his dimension, only for him to fall in love with her instead.

Now the Seiko of his dimension was the closest thing he had to getting AU Seiko.

However, the gulf between him and this dimension's Amazon Queen was about as insurmountable as the gulf between him and her AU counterpart that didn't even exist in his reality.

That gulf between them even had a name: Kazuhito Sugata.

Speak of the devil, Sugata decided then and there to pop out of nowhere.

"You're calling Cherry Boy gay? That's rich coming from a closeted lesbian like you, Okamato!" chided the blond-haired delinquent, making a pun using Seiko's surname and the word okama (transvestite).

From there, Seiko did a German suplex on her so-called childhood friend.

"OW! You're just proving my point, you stupid man-girl!"

"What's that? You want another suplex, Furyou-kun? Okay then!"

"GAAAH! LEGGO, YOU CRAZY BITCH!" yelped the Yankee. "Why are you doing wrestling moves when you're the Karate Club Captain? OOF!"

So far, Tomoyuki's Sugata Harem Extermination Plan (or whatever it was called, its title was a work in progress) had been rather successful in spite of himself and his social awkwardness.

Yukari Goto no longer pined for Kazuhito and neither did Aya Fubuki. Sure, Akira Fubuki wasn't part of Sugata's Harem, but Yamamoto was glad all his issues with both Fubuki siblings had been ironed out.

As for Student Council President Mana Otonashi, even the normally dense Tomoyuki could see that her interest with Kazuhito was only skin deep at best.

Besides which, he'd been hearing rumors of her possibly having a romance with the 2B heartthrob and Judo Club Captain Kanemoto instead. Maybe.

So at the very least, he didn't need to do much in order to bring Mana's crush with Kazuhito to an end. It was over before it began.

Although it did help out how Yamamoto had cut Sugata's (Actual) Harem down to size, seeing that the manipulative student council president had been using his harem against him.

Also, both Sugata and Machida were getting along splendidly. Soon enough, like in the case of his other childhood friend Megumi Minagata, the Yankee might end up dating Machida instead of Okamoto.

An ultimatum might finally be reached.

But even if Sugata broke Okamoto's heart the same way AU Sugata did AU Okamoto, would that be enough for the Amazon Queen to give the Cherry Boy a chance?

Tomoyuki gulped, unable to voice out the feelings bubbling inside him.

Even this far into his Anti-Harem Plan, any number of things could go wrong.

Machida and Sugata could end up incompatible since Kazuhito broke up with Minagata herself. Okamoto could somehow confess her feelings to the Yankee and then have them reciprocated. Or vice-versa.

The main problem with the Cherry Boy's harebrained plan was that, like everyone in his Friend Zone Harem... Goto, Fubuki, Machida, and Otonashi... the Amazon Queen only saw him as a friend and nothing more.

He had already pushed his luck by hinting to her that he still loved her (or at least another version of her) before "Aya" revealed himself to be "Akira" instead.

Besides which, didn't he already confess to her and got shot down?

Sure, his confession was done under the mistaken impression that Seiko confessed to him first, but that was a typical confession from him to be honest, as evidenced by his failed love confessions with Yukari, Aya, Mana, and Miku.

The two childhood friends from Hiroshima bickered, as usual. Like a married couple. While the Cherry Boy pined for the Amazon Queen in the background.

Has anything really changed in the end? After all this time? After all the progress Tomoyuki had in improving himself and his relationship with his failed not-romances?

Besides which, did he really deserve to woo someone like the Amazon Queen in the first place, whose specs were too high for the lowly likes of him? Much less her AU counterpart that was in love with him (kind of) but was a world away. A whole universe was between him and her.

She was such an athletic prodigy that she could join any sports club in Maehara and end up becoming the team captain there. She shone bright like the sun and Tomoyuki was the Icarus with waxen wings getting too close to her.

Maybe she deserved someone like the delinquent, who was at least a tough guy who knew her since childhood and could handle her strong personality.

"Hey, Earth to Cherry Boy!" greeted Seiko while gripping a blue-faced Kazuhito tight in a headlock, "What should I do with this stupid Yankee? Another German suplex? A crossface submission move? The Figure Four? A Scorpion Death Lock?"

Oh, he knew the answer to this one. "Emerald Flowsion?"

"All right! Emerald Flowsion it is... Wait, what?" The Amazon Queen's jaw dropped.

Regardless, she did the sit-out side slam regardless while never breaking eye contact with Yamamoto the whole while.

"Hey! SERIOUSLY!? H-Hey, Seiko-chan, don't... OOOF!" oofed Sugata.

Actually, it was the finishing move innovated by the late Mitsuharu Misawa, a pro-wrestling legend who recently passed away back in June 13 in both the universes of Tomoyuki and AU Seiko.

He died from what the police suspected was internal decapitation followed by a heart attack during a tag team match.

The other Seiko wouldn't stop crying about it. Misawa was her wrestling idol for the longest time. The Cherry Boy remembered because it was one of the few times when a celebrity death in the AU Amazon Queen's universe coincided with his universe.

"How do you know that move?" asked a bright-eyed Seiko who invaded Tomoyuki's personal space in her excitement. "Are you a pro-wrestling fan too?"

As though he were avoiding the blinding rays of the sun, Yamamoto's eyes darted away and gave a side glance at Okamoto and her huge, bouncing chest. "N-No, of course not. You must've mentioned it to me a while back."

Seiko scratched her chin and grinned. "Yeah, I guess so. Maybe it was during one of our practice sessions for the Sports Fest, right? Maybe."

Tomoyuki gulped and nodded. He winced at the careless smile the Okamoto of this world gave him, reminding him of the smile he always imagined the Okamoto from beyond this world would have shown him whenever she texted or called him.

"Then again, I don't recall ever mentioning Misawa-san's finishing move before. You've must've done your research on EBO again... Haven't you, Cherry Boy?"

Yamamoto cringed, looked even further away, and cleared his throat, remembering how his incomplete information about sports and whatnot made him look lame in front of Seiko.

"Like I told you before, you don't need to force yourself to like what I like, dude," said Okamoto.

Not quite looking her way, Tomoyuki muttered, "No, I'm not interested in pro-wrestling at all, but when you talk about it, MMA, boxing, or any other sport, you make it sound like the most interesting thing in the world."

Agh! What was he saying? He sounded so sappy! He wasn't going to earn brownie points from the Amazon Queen this way!

Afterwards, Yamamoto and the supine Sugata's eyes then met. To the Cherry Boy's surprise, the Yankee nodded to him as if agreeing with what he had said. 'The hell...?'

Huh. So even Okamoto's childhood friend who always acted like he was so unimpressed with her also saw her in the same light as the Cherry Boy did.

Tomoyuki didn't know what to think about that.

Maybe Kazuhito really was in love with Seiko after all. All it took was one more push and they'd be together at last, despite both of them playing hard to get.

And the realization shook Yamamoto to his core.

How could he compete against the Yankee if there was a possibility that he was still in love with the Amazon Queen? Even the AU Amazon Queen could end up with the AU Yankee had he not stayed in Hiroshima with AU Megumi.

He might as well give up. Right?

But Tomoyuki couldn't quit her.

Even if he didn't deserve the love of someone like (AU) Seiko Okamoto, he couldn't give her up.

Their science teacher, Miss Sakuragi, then entered the classroom, which made the students of Class 2B scramble back to their seats.

"...How do you do it, Cherry Boy?" Tomoyuki heard Seiko whisper behind him.

"Do what?" he asked, turning towards her and finally making eye contact.

"You went from not knowing what to say to me to knowing exactly the right thing to say to me every time. What's your secret?"

Before Yamamoto could answer, Okamoto already returned to her seat without waiting for his response.

"Uh... uh... S-STAND UP!" stuttered Miku as she hid her notebook full of boy's love drawings of Tomoyuki and Akira she had commissioned one of her artist friends to draw.

"Good morning, Miss Sakuragi!" everyone greeted.

"Good morning, class," the science teacher said. "Take your seats."

"Sit down!" ordered Machida, who had finally regained enough of her composure to sound more like a proper class representative.

***

During lunch break, Tomoyuki finally had his chance to talk to someone he hadn't had the opportunity to message in a while.

"So y'all finally gave up on that stupid harem plan thingy? It's 'bout time, City Slicker," texted Megumi Minagata, the ex-girlfriend of Kazuhito, to the Cherry Boy.

"Yeah," Yamamoto finally responded after editing his message over and over, with several of his unsent messages reaching the character limits of his phone.

He then explained, "Your ex's harem girls are dropping like flies. But even if he dumps Okamoto, I think I still won't win her heart. She just sees me as a friend."

"That's what y'all get for trying to do shady things to her instead of actually wooing her directly," she texted back. "She don't like that roundabout crap. Be straight with her."

He wanted to retort something back to Megumi, but he got nothing to reply with.

She was right. He had spent too much time falling in love with Seiko's AU version to woo the crush he could actually, physically interact with.

But maybe he was merely spoiled by AU Seiko. She was the Seiko that was already in love with him by default and by no "fault" of his. She wasn't even really in love with him either, but instead with his alternate universe counterpart.

"So? What's your master plan now?" asked Minagata.

He couldn't answer that either. Instead, he replied about something else entirely. Something that had been bothering him since the Sports Fest Volleyball Tournament.

"Okamoto is pretty amazing, isn't she? In our last Sports Fest, she was the MVP of Class 2B. She won the relay even after Machida tripped in the middle of it, and she almost won the volleyball tournament in spite of me being part of the team. Had she not spent her energy on the relay, she would've creamed 2A on her own. Was she always this amazing?"

"Hey, don't change the subject," came Megumi's first message, followed by, "Yep, that sounds exactly like Seiko-chan, all right. You just can't stop her when she gets going. She's stubborn to a fault but that's part of her charm."

"Right? As expected of the Amazon Queen," he wrote, adding, "I can't explain it properly, but anything she does becomes fun for me too, even things I'm normally not interested in. I don't even care about boxing, pro-wrestling, or MMA, but when she talks about those topics, I can't help but get hyped. Know what I mean?"

"Oh, absolutely," Minagata replied, adding, "She has always been an overachiever since I met her. We can barely keep up with her, Kazu-kun and I. It's almost like she's in another dimension, sometimes. A true alpha."

'Tell me about it. Both versions of Seiko-chan are like that,' Tomoyuki thought before texting back, "I want to keep up with her. I want to exist beside her. I want to live life the way she does. To the fullest."

"Hey," began the country bumpkin from Hiroshima, "You're starting to sound like someone I used to know. Watch yourself."

The Cherry Boy didn't heed Minagata's warning.

Instead, he took a picture of a poster he saw on the bulletin board regarding a certain club looking for new members. For future reference.

***

At dismissal time, near the exit gates of Maehara High...

"Cherry-kun! Nice timing! It's time for us to go to the Go Home Club!"

Tomoyuki heard Yukari Goto jokingly greet him, referring to the "club" that students who had no clubs belonged to, such that when it was dismissal time, they tended to "Go Home" instead of attend to club activities.

"You're going straight to work at that convenience store gig, right? Come on, let's go!"

Yamamoto stared at Goto blankly before stating, "Um, I'm actually part of the Literature Club now."

"Say whu...?" asked Yukari, doing a double-take. "Since when!?"

The Cherry Boy scratched the back of his head. "Would you believe since now?"

"You... You... YOU JERK! Every time with you! TAKE THIS! My love, hate, and all of my sorrow!"

"OW! What gives? What'd I do this time? And how'd you do that thing with your twin tails? OW! STOP IT! MY EYE!" screeched Tomoyuki as he cringed from the wrath of Yukari whipping her long twin-tailed ponytails back and forth at his face.

***

So two things happened.

Tomoyuki joined the Literature Club and scored pretty high on the initial test for it, much to the delight of the teacher heading the club, Miss Juri Kitamura. Yes, the same advisor and homeroom teacher of Class 2B.

All newbies had to take an English and Japanese language proficiency test to see how well they'd score and what level of reading they could handle.

He felt a little proud in crushing both tests.

There weren't many things he was actually good at, so being a little good at reading, writing, and language boosted his ego just a tiny bit.

Also, as a side note, Miku Machida was the class president of the Literature Club.

Well, okay then. Sure. This was yet another thing she was good at.

Yamamoto considered going to the Drama Club instead, but he didn't know how to act. At all.

There was also the Anime and Manga Club, but he had no idea how to draw either. Not to mention, it was a total sausage fest of lonely male nerds in that club, with it mostly being composed of sophomores from Class 2D.

Furthermore, there was no such thing as a Movie or Film Club in Maehara High. This was the original reason why the movie fanatic Tomoyuki never bothered joining any clubs. None of them matched up with his deep-down passion and interests.

The only club that usually filmed anything in the school was the Drama Club.

They recorded all of their theater productions on video, but from time to time they tried their hand at making actual films rather than just filming what happened on stage. They made use of the Audio-Visual department of the school every time they did so.

Therefore, it was indeed a shame that he couldn't end up in the Drama Club instead because he had for the longest time loved the art of filmmaking and appreciated the worldwide masterpieces of cinema.

He couldn't exactly write a script for the theater geeks to adapt either, since they usually just went with the classics of Shakespeare or Noh Drama.

Then again, he was kind of glad he had a familiar face with him in the club he ultimately decided to join.

To be honest, Tomoyuki expected Miku to be part of the Anime and Manga Club herself, what with her doing things like making doujinshi manga (self-published comics) that she sells at Comiket (Comic Market, a comic book convention that occurs twice a year).

She was friends with fellow fujoshi that drew the type of lewd doujinshi she wanted to make on the down low (since she couldn't draw herself), buuut that wasn't enough incentive for her to join the "creepy" Anime and Manga Club full of lonely nerds regardless.

Full of thirsty "Cherry Boys" like himself who wanted a girlfriend that was also interested in nerdy things.

Wait. Come to think of it, why were Tomoyuki and Miku best friends again?

Oh right. The moment that he swore never to attempt to woo her again, Machida was content to put him in the Friend Zone.

Like deep in the Friend Zone. Not the Ross and Rachel from "Friends" kind of Friend Zone. More like the Ross and Phoebe kind of Friend Zone.

Also, he wasn't that big of an anime maniac as the people from Class 2D. More like most of his knowledge of anime and manga was from the Class 2B Rep herself.

But at least with her rejection of his romantic advances, she kept her word that they could still be friends. Unlike that bitchy Student Council President Mana Otonashi, who screwed with him every chance she got.

Even though he barely read any worthwhile English, Russian, French, or local Japanese literature, he had a decent grasp of the language and he could use his movie knowledge in the Literature Club instead, particularly the films that were based on books.

Like "Lord of the Rings" by Peter Jackson. Or the "Harry Potter" film series. Or "Of Mice and Men". Or "Lord of The Flies". Or "Hakuchi (The Idiot)" by Akira Kurosawa. Or even "The Ring" horror film series.

These were all based on novels of some sort.

Actually, things went swimmingly well with the Literature Club. Surprisingly well. As if it were a club that fit like a glove in accordance to his needs and interests.

The only thing he was afraid of was him losing his part-time job over his decision to join a club. But he wasn't quite sure about how serious he was about either the Literature Club or his cashier work.

Every day, they were assigned books to read and reports to submit, just like in the case of their school work. And every day, he received praise for his work on every activity, which motivated him further and reminded him of why he joined the club in the first place.

For once, he felt like he was doing something for himself instead of trying desperately to seek approval from others.

Then, one day, after he played the trailer to Ran by Akira Kurosawa on his cellphone for the thousandth time to strengthen his resolve, he made his decision then and there.

It was a trailer to a movie that existed in a parallel world, starring Tatsuya Nakadai: The same actor who played the titular character in Kurosawa's Kagemusha instead of Shintaro Katsu, who was the Kagemusha in Tomoyuki's universe.

He still couldn't help but get misty eyed every time he watched this "lost work" by Kurosawa.

Once he had gathered enough confidence and courage from all his initial club activities, he soon wrote the first few words of his own short story.

It was all thanks to this birthday gift sent to him by the other Seiko.

***

Apparently, Tomoyuki was more motivated about his Literature Club membership than even he realized. Even though he ended up keeping his convenience store clerk job, he found himself scribbling on his notebook or saving notes on this cellphone in between breaks.

It'd been a long time since he felt passionate about something other than trying to get a girlfriend then failing in a spectacular and cringe-worthy fashion.

Like he was living the kind of life Okamoto had been living as this sports goddess oozing with pure talent, potential, and athleticism.

It was even enough for him to ignore whispers from his clubmates about him being a try-hard teacher's pet because he kept acing all of the tests and activities given to them by Miss Kitamura.

All the same, back at their clubroom, Tomoyuki wrote and wrote. He fulfilled more and more of the requirements of the club, such that he was even giving Miku a run for her money when it came to scoring high with their club activities.

"Very good, Yamamoto-kun! Aside from the purple prose and run-on sentences, you're getting the hang out of essay writing. Have you ever written anything else before? Like short stories or something?" asked Miss Kitamura to Tomoyuki after handing him his graded test paper.

Scratching his cheek while his eyes darted away at his buxom teacher, the Cherry Boy gulped and said, "N-No. I haven't... written anything serious or... anything. Just small stories and... terrible-looking doodles for manga."

His homeroom teacher for Class 2B chuckled and winked. "Well, you're a little diamond in the rough, methinks. Maybe you might even have talent for it. Keep at it."

He smiled back at her words of encouragement, bowed, and went back to his seat as Miss Kitamura called on the next club member.

His heart raced from acing yet another activity. It made him feel... things in ways reminiscent to when AU Seiko first confessed her love for him over the phone. Like he felt appreciated and loved for being him.

He never felt more alive in all his life. Was this the kind of rose-tinted life he would've been leading had him and AU Seiko lived in the same universe?

"How's your new story coming along?" whispered Machida after taking a peek at the notebook of barely legible handwriting from Tomoyuki. "Have you finally gotten off of your butt and started writing that romance of yours about lovers from different dimensions?"

"No, that's different! Also, if you want me to show mine, you better show yours too!" teased Yamamoto back.

A blushing Miku covered her face with her own notebook full of scribbles and notes right after impudently sticking her tongue out at her fellow... writer, was it?

Yeah, Tomoyuki was kind of a writer now, wasn't he? Even if he was an amateur at it. 'Ain't that a kick in the head?'

Speaking of which, he shouldn't get ahead of himself. All he was doing was making a rough or even sandpapery draft of a story.

But he did have fun exchanging story ideas and getting feedback from the Class Rep. Even though despite her cheery demeanor, she was stricter than even Miss Kitamura in pointing out the grammatical and continuity errors of his work.

He gave her feedback in kind though for her stories too. Although he didn't really care for any of her boy's love or young adult romance ones.

He also outright turned down reading any stories featuring him and Akira Fubuki. Or Kazuhito Sugata. Or Kanemoto. Or especially Ishiguro or Matsuda. Seriously.

He also thanked his lucky stars that Machida was embarrassed and self-aware enough to not share with him any of her, uh, more mature BL stories and outlines for her erotic doujinshi manga for feedback purposes.

She finally got the hint that he had no interest in discussing which guy should be seme (on top) or uke (at the bottom) in a pairing she made up for original stories or her fan fiction.

To Miku's chagrin, Yamamoto quite frankly skewered all of her literary work and outlines for the club, taking note that they all followed the same tired clichés of misunderstandings, arguments, and forgiveness. Rinse and repeat.

"But that's how all shojo manga (girl comics) stories ended! Don't knock 'em all down for following the same formula!" she'd complain.

"Yeah, sure, but... surely you can come up with some new and interesting twist on the formula, right?" he'd point out. "So that it doesn't come off as derivative."

To her credit, although she hated him for his devilish frankness, she didn't want him to pull his punches on his critiques either, especially since whenever he did offer praise she appreciated it doubly so.

That was also the way he liked his constructive criticism from her. She even quickly corrected many of his run-on sentences, repeated phrases, mixed metaphors, and purple prose as though she were an advanced version of a cellphone autocorrect.

She'd make a great editor for a book or manga publishing house someday.

What frustrated Yamamoto about Machida's otherwise excellent, detailed, and mostly grammatical feedback was when she said his stories were "okay" or "fine" plot-wise but said nothing more about them.

He didn't know how to improve upon "okay" or "fine".

"There's nothing wrong with the story, Yamamoto-kun!" Miku would insist.

"Buuut...?" Tomoyuki would then prod.

"'But' what? 'But' nothing! I just said the plot is fine! Jeez, Cherry Boy," she'd then say with enough exasperation for her to forget how embarrassed she'd normally be when calling Yamamoto the slang term for "male virgin".

Regardless, he was so inspired by the progress of his writing and the high scores he'd been getting from his club activities that he even began writing the first page of a long-form story with a premise that didn't conclude after 4,000 words.

In a few hours, one page became 10 and 10 pages became a chapter. That chapter then turned into 3 chapters. Then 9 chapters.

In just a few days, he was churning out chapters and word counts that would've taken him the better part of three months to produce. Like he'd suddenly been possessed by hypergraphia or the intense desire to write or draw.

As though he were a man possessed. He was on a roll. The scattered puzzle pieces in his life had started to finally falling into place.

***

"Wow. You joined the Literature Club? Good for you," said AU Seiko after updating Tomoyuki about how it went with her love triangle with AU Tomoyuki and AU Miku.

As a by the way, AU Machida did geek out about the prospect of alternate universes after AU Okamoto broached the subject jokingly while discussing the possible origins of the Kagemusha Trailer (from Yamamoto's universe) sent to AU Yamamoto for his birthday.

This distracted the previously upset AU Miku—who in their dimension had a closer relationship to AU Tomoyuki—over not giving the object of their affection a better gift than AU Seiko had.

As a downside, she wouldn't shut up about the Multiverse Theory the whole time they were together.

"The Literature Club is actually the perfect fit for you. You were always the creative type. I mean, judging by the Cherry Boy in my world."

"Thanks a lot, Amazon Queen," said Yamamoto, who couldn't stop smiling after revealing his decision to join a club for once. As though he felt somehow closer to the AU version of his crush by doing so.

Or at least worthier of her love.

It was as though he could see her back as he raced with her in his imagination, like he was about to catch up with her as she shone brightly as always did like the shooting star that she was.

"Come to think of it, our Cherry Boy... my Cherry Boy... the other you... is part of the Film Club."

He chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Of course you'd have a Film Club in your universe. That's how it always works, doesn't it? What we have, you don't have, and vice-versa."

The Amazon Queen giggled in return. "I'm just glad you're seeking your own passions outside of all this love business. But don't get too distracted by your club and forget about wooing the other me or anything."

Thoughtlessly, the Cherry Boy reassured, "The reason I joined the Literature Club is to impress the other you. Kind of."

"...Wait, what? How does that work?" AU Seiko asked in a... questioning(?) tone that took Yamamoto aback.

Did he say something wrong?

***

Back at the cafeteria, while Miku and Tomoyuki ate their bento and discussed their activities at the Literature Club, two familiar figures approached them.

"So the rumors were true. Yamamoto has left the Go Home Club and joined Miku-chan's Literature Club instead," said a smirking Aya from Class 2C.

"I-It's not my club! Jeez!" replied Miku with a sigh before munching on an egg roll. "A-And Yammamoto-kun is doing excellent work at our club, for your information!"

'Gee, I wonder how the news spread so fast,' thought Yamamoto before sparing a glance at Yukari, the girl beside Fubuki who couldn't meet his gaze "for some reason".

Making an apologetic chopping motion with her hand once she mustered the courage to look him in the eye, Goto asked, "Can we join you?" before sitting down anyway and not waiting for a response.

Huh. Even the aloof Aya followed Yukari's lead this time around and sat down with them on the same table. They didn't normally eat around Miku when he was around.

Him joining some club wasn't that newsworthy.

Miku and Tomoyuki sat opposite to each other, so the Class 2C girls ended up sitting together with each of them, with Aya sitting beside Machida and Yukari sitting beside Yamamoto.

"Congratulations, Miku-chan," said Yukari with a wide grin while covering her guffawing mouth, which prompted the Class 2B Rep to shush her with a blush.

"Don't congratulate me! Jeez!" the bespectacled girl pouted at the twin-tailed girl. "Congratulate Yamamoto-kun!"

"Stop bullying her," reprimanded both Aya and Tomoyuki in unison at Yukari in that familiar parental way they'd tell off a misbehaving child, much to their surprise.

Fubuki stared at Yamamoto for a hot minute with a blank expression on her face before turning her attention back to Miku and Yukari.

'Whew. I thought she was going to be mad,' he thought.

"Bullying her? Stop bullying me!" said Goto with a sniffle and wide deer-in-front-of-headlights eyes.

"Now, now! Let's not fight over something trivial!" said Machida, who took on a motherly role as she patted her friend's head.

Once everyone settled down, Yukari asked, "What have you two lovebirds been up to in your little club anyway?" before munching on some convenience store steamed meat buns herself.

With a "playful" kick to Goto's shin from under the table, Miku said, "We're in the middle developing our individual writing style, so I was concerned that Yamamoto-kun couldn't keep up. But it turns out he's a natural at writing. I'm so proud of him."

Tomoyuki nodded. "And I've been recommended several books I haven't read to help me find 'my voice' or something. The club members there are really friendly and nonjudgmental about book choice. Some of them even cover light novels, like Slayers or Suzumiya Haruhi. It's pretty... comfy going there, to be honest."

He then saw the Class 2B Rep giggle, which made him inquire, "What?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that all our classmates in the club call you the Film Snob," said Machida. "All your book recommendations were made into films one way or another."

The Cherry Boy palmed his face in embarrassment. "Aw man. Fine, I don't read many books that aren't films! Jeez, they're the ones being snobs!"

"Your new nickname is at least less embarrassing than your current one, Cherry-kun," quipped the bouncy Yukari.

Aya took a sip of her bottle of iced tea then asked, "So what does Seiko-chan think about you joining the Literature Club, Yamamoto-kun?"

"Huh? Er... Pardon?" asked Tomoyuki, feigning ignorance. Internally, he groaned.

Ugh, this again. Both AU Seiko and Not-AU Aya should mind their own business it came to how he went about wooing Not-AU Seiko.

What was up with those two anyway? 'It's not like I abandoned wooing Okamoto just because I became a member of a club. It's actually quite the opposite.'

Fubuki smacked her lips, thought for a minute, and said, "Just curious what Seiko-chan thought about you getting a club after all this time. My little brother told me you two have become quite close, so I'm wondering if you had asked her what she feels about it."

Tomoyuki cringed, recognizing what Aya implied even as both Miku and Yukari tilted their heads inquisitively at the both of them. "She's... fine with it. She thought it was cute and the perfect fit for me."

Oh man. And here he thought now that the whole stalking jig was up with Akira crossdressing as Aya, the Elder Fubuki would let up on him a little bit. Be nice to him for once.

But old habits die hard and one of the girls that made him infamous among the girls of Maehara was now putting his feet on the fire once again.

So that tattletale Akira told his big sister about the shenanigans they were up to at the hotel. Man, that sentence sounded so wrong and naughty in his head.

Then again, did the Fubuki brother also confess to the sister about how he was disguising himself as her in order to pull a prank on the Cherry Boy? Maybe he merely came clean to her and all, confessing everything.

Wait. Aya already knew about his crush on Seiko, didn't she?

Well, yes, of course she knew that he had a crush on (Non-AU) Seiko! The Maehara High grapevine was thick and accommodating of various grape pickers.

However, what must've sealed the deal for her was seeing Okamoto act all weird after she played his fake confession to Miku on her phone.

He knew better than to be presumptuous of the Amazon Queen's intentions, but for all intents and purposes, he interpreted the way she acted as... jealousy. Or maybe he hoped it was jealousy on her part.

Miku then asked Aya, "Oh really? What happened between Yamamoto-kun and Seiko-chan?"

A cold sweat dripped from the nape of Yamamoto's head as Fubuki's stare traveled back and forth from him to Machida. She then said with a cattish grin, "That's a secret."

The clueless Machida then told Tomoyuki, "But still, you and Aya-chan are closer together now than before, right? I'm so happy for you two," without a hint of jealousy, irony, or sarcasm from her sweet voice.

He hoped this clued Yukari in on how the bespectacled Class Rep really felt about him romantically.

***

To Be Continued...

It just occurred to me that Tomoyuki Yamamoto is kind of like the infamous Christian Weston Chandler or Chris-chan, complete with his "Sweethearts" or his version of the "Friend Zone Harem".

Also, his dream of making his Sonichu webcomic a serious thing even though it was just him plagiarizing existing content and lazily fusing them together is also reminiscent of Tomoyuki's obsession with Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

How about that?

Farewell, Abdiel

[militant-holy-knight]

Alleged Lucasfilm Insider Spills the Beans

On May 26, 2018, on the /tv/ board on 4chan an user titled Lfl did an AMA session with the users. Given that the source was anonymous and his refusal to prove his credentials, we should take his information it with a grain of salt. Though I felt like resposting most of what he revealed. I know I am posting this with the good chance that OP was just roleplaying, but time will tell whether any of this is real or not.

>any talk of firing kathleen? She’s certainly not in good standing after the Last Jedi debacle. Absolutely hated in my department and by a lot of others I know of.

>Let me guess this is a thread where you pretend Lucasfilm is in shambles because a single movie is underperforming. Far from it, actually, but we’ve seen better days. TFA killed a lot of the creative/“anything goes” vibe we had, as evidenced by the “Art Of” book. Seriously, take a look at how cool some of the concept art we had that was thrown out for a safer approach. However, R1 was a blast to work on and felt like the old days. TLJ and Solo were very awkward to work around. A lot of wasted potential with Solo and a lot of in-fighting with both productions.

>tell me about Indiana Jones, news on the 5th film, are more films in the future? It’s in development hell. 2019 is a lucky shot in the dark. Overall, I don’t know much beyond the fact that it’s barely been moving along.

>Do you wish Kevin Feige was in charge? Are toy companies pissed off because of the lame characters and designs? Possibly. There are a number of people I’d rather have in charge of the writing, mostly some of the creative veterans like Filoni or Leeland. The general idea around here is that a “hands off” producer who could also keep things under control would work best. Hasbro is actually pissed off at the way information is handled and the focus on “earth tones” and less interesting visuals in both background aliens and main characters. Going forward there will be a push for more “toyetic” and PT-esque designs. I’ve seen some interesting IX designs, especially Kylo/Rey, who both have “battle armor” on. Kylo has some sort of red crystals on his. Not sure if Kyber or whatever.

>Is the next anthology really Obi-Wan? Any plans for Maul in other anthologies? Yeah, Obi-Wan is the next anthology. Bit of a poorly kept secret at this point, but the announcement should happen within the next 3-4 months. I’ve seen some concept art and it’s honestly breathtaking. I have a great feeling about the film as long as it isn’t stiffled creatively. Don’t believe any bullshit about Thrawn being in it. As far as I know, he’s not. Next movie is up in the air, but talks are revolving mostly around a Boba Fett/Bounty Hunters movie. After that a Solo sequel is planned depending on how well this movie does. That’s where Maul should be making his next appearance. If Solo bombs then he’ll appear in the Fett movie. Considering the Mandolorian connection between them, it’s not a bad idea in my opinion.

>When’s Kuntleen getting the boot? How exactly are you going to right the ship for Episode IX? How much internal division is there at Disney/LFL about the direction the franchise is taking? Kathleen isn’t going anywhere until post IX. If that and Solo underperform then she’ll probably be chained to a smaller project that no one cares about, (ala FOD) and given creative control to herself. 9 is going to be very different. Timeskip, more “toyetic” designs. Personally, I think the damage is done at this point. A lot of higher-ups were gunning for JJ to do all 3 movies and are losing their minds at the idea of SW becoming unprofitable. By the way, Johnson’s trilogy will most likely not happen. Overall there is a very tense atmosphere in the upper-class of the company. Very competitive overall. Lower on the ranks, everyone seems a little bit more disgruntled than usual and a lot of the “magic” is gone. A lot of people are just happy to be paid.

>Is there any truth to the rumor that they are abandoning the trilogy structure for a continuous MCU style? That’s bullshit. Trilogies will always remain. Now, the anthology movies are a different case. Those will be handled more MCU-like.

>Anon you’re exposing yourself as a fake too easily here. Nobody shills on 4chan. It wasn’t JUST on 4chan obviously, but on the internet as a whole. Journalism sites, fan sites, ect. I think the lesson Disney learned is that shilling for a SW movie is pointless when the fans are so opinionated.

>How did they try to defend it? Rian Johnson was being toted around as a “true fan of both the OT/PT” here and that was the narrative/marketing strategy for awhile. Backfired when the movie actually came out and marketing had no idea how to handle it, so damage-control mode was engaged.

>Tell me the truth, how much posting on the Star Wars reddit is paid for? I go there for a good laugh every now and then, it’s the only community I’ve seen where people are so determined to be positive about TLJ that they will include stuff like “TLJ was my fav SW movie btw” at the end of completely unrelated posts. Reddit is a huge center of the marketing campaigns, especially since the site is such a hivemind and opinions get parroted once they’re popular enough to stand on their own. /tv/ is very similar, but contrarian, and harder to control. The Force.net is another, albeit smaller, center for damage control.

>what’s Rian like? Weirdo. Easily one of the weirdest fucking dudes I’ve met, and I only met him twice. Words cannot describe how awkward he is.

>What’s Pablo Hidalgo really like? Awesome irl, but a bit of a dick online. He’s constantly bombarded though. Personally, I think Matt Martin handles fan relations much better and more enthusiastically.

>Why is Disney afraid of using classic aliens? Why are all their alien designs fucking shit and the exact same earthy-brown muppets? Honestly, the art design in the Disney films are fucking boring, uninspired and more Dr. Who rather than Star Wars. Don’t even get me started. The reasoning behind it is despicable too. That brown/earthy skin tone is cheaper to cast for the prop department than recreating the colorful classic puppets/mask. It’s all about cutting corners. The amount of humans in the recent movies is so fucking boring and everyone agrees. Hopefully that’s something fixed with the “toyetic” initiative in future films.

>what is the general opinion of the movies and characters (rey, finn, poe) in the office? Not hated, but the general opinion is that nothing will come close to George’s movies/characters. Gotta admit, it was funny to watch some of the OT purists at LFL start to appriciate the PT when TFA came out. I think those movies will age a lot better now that George is gone. I know a fair amount people who really enjoy the ST characters. Rey is obviously the most popular, but everyone seems disappointed that Finn was sidestepped and turned into a joke in TLJ/TFA.

>Are they really talking about recasting Leia? That seems like such a shitty thing to do. Unfortunately, I can confirm it’s been talked about. No idea who the picks are, but it’s a better option than CGI Leia IMO

>Do you know why Trevorrow was Fired? What happened behind the scenes in rogue one between Edwards and Gilroy? He literally had no idea what to do with IX after Rian’s Rape and flipped out. I don’t blame him, who the fuck even cares about IX in the fanbase now?

[tessatechaitea]

Red Hood and the Outlaws #4

Lobdell should be a whiz at writing Bizarro since he was so terrible at writing Superman!

Is Scott Lobdell the only person left in the world who thinks it's clever or okay to nickname somebody with red hair "Red"?

The high jinks continue on the next page. I'd say it's comedy written by somebody who thinks vaudeville is coming back into style but that doesn't get to the heart of how bad it is. Bringing back vaudevillian humor isn't necessarily bad and has probably been done before by Alan Moore in some comic book I forgot to read. But I also didn't just want to say Lobdell obviously thinks the old jokes he's repeating are funny and original because that opens me up to people saying hurtful things like "Kettle, meet pot!" or "That's you, you stupid cunt-faced motherfucker!" See? I just did it there! How old is the insult "cunt-faced motherfucker"?! I probably cribbed that from Perfect Strangers. I don't know if Scott Lobdell doesn't understand how Bizarro speaks or if editorial told him to drop the Bizarro shtick because it's just too confusing. Because Bizarro doesn't kill Jason Todd by crushing him against the omnium glass. Instead Bizarro says, "Too many words! Bizarro am confused!" Normally, that would mean there are just enough words (or too few!) and that Bizarro totally understands what's going on. But at least Lobdell understands how Bizarro refers to himself in the third person but speaks with first person singular verbs.

You're better off alone! Jason Todd is the most annoying character in the DC Universe since he's practically only been written by Scott Lobdell! Run, Bizarro! Run far away! I mean, walk slowly close by!

I guess Bizarro is going to be a Lenny or big dumb kid type of character. Does that mean he's going to have a bunch of cutesy, adorable scenes that will make everybody who loves Lobdell's Jason Todd to say things like "He's my baby!" and "My baby Jaybird's Bizarro baby is my baby!" and "Baby baby baby baby Jason Todd baby! Booga too doo booty boo!"? Red Hood tells Bizarro a bedtime story and Bizarro falls asleep. That's when Black Mask and his goons — all wearing sex fetish gimp masks, of course — pack up Bizarro and take him back to the lab. Black Mask is impressed because Black Mask has chosen to be impressed by everything Jason Todd does. He has a huge crush on him. It's the only thing that explains why he's ignoring all of the signs that Jason Todd has infiltrated his organization to take him down. It's the only reason Black Mask would dare to hire as his second-in-command a man with close ties to Batman who is outside of his organization. He just wants to put his leather clad dick inside of him. Black Mask invites Jason Todd to breakfast so he can reveal his true feelings to him. Not only does he think Jason Todd will make a great heir to his criminal organization, he also considers Jason Todd a friend. Oh? Is that you make friends as an adult? You hire them into your organization and after one or two days, you choke back the bile and declare they're you're friend? That seems dangerous. What if on the third day of knowing them, I realized they were actually an annoying asshole? Are you allowed to just as easily declare somebody not a friend, or an enemy even? Jason Todd eats it up even though he doesn't want to because he is lonely and he likes how everybody is confessing to him that they're lonely too. It really helps build the theme of loneliness that lonely Scott Lobdell is trying to express. Lonely people are weak. And apparently they have roast turkey and wine for breakfast. Black Mask takes Jason Todd down to his warehouse of weapons where he reveals that he's known all along what Jason Todd was trying to do. Of course he did! It was so fucking obvious! Black Mask doesn't need Jason anymore even though he was talking about friendship just a few pages earlier. I guess he was just trying to butter him up so that Red Hood would agree to take over Gotham and run it in a way that would make it better than the way it would be if other people ran it. Why are so many people so obsessed with controlling Gotham? You'd think it rained fucking diamonds there. Gotham City must be the fourth largest economy in the world. Since Black Mask knows who Red Hood is, Jason Todd is finally able to tell him he's not interested in working with Black Mask. But Roman doesn't care because he's not lonely anymore. He has an even better friend than Jason Todd: Bizarro! With Bizarro, he can rule Gotham easily! I just have to ask again though: why?! How much fucking power does Gotham City give to whoever runs it?! It's just a goddamned city! I don't see the Mayor of Gotham wielding a might influence over anybody else in the DC Universe. It must be the ports, right? Gotham City has the best fucking ports in the world and everybody is just dying to ship their goods through it, right? Who fucking cares about Gotham City?! Just let Batman have it, you imbeciles. It can't be that great. Go take over New Orleans! That's a fun town and no superheroes! What Did We Learn? Loneliness will drive anybody to do anything. But mostly, loneliness will allow people to bound, one lonely loser to another. Then lonely loser readers will read the book about the lonely people who can't stop explaining how lonely they are (otherwise how will the reader know?!) and they'll identify with the characters. Then they'll post on the Internet about how much they love their poor little lonely Jaybird while furiously masturbate over that one panel where he's in the shower and you totally see his abs and almost the place where his penis attaches to his body. So close! Oh Jaybird! JAYBIRD! JAAAAAYBIIIIIIIRRRRRRD!

[skullmoss]

but honestly it is fascinating to me how 4chan and the “meme” culture that evolved from that cesspool from the early 2000s has evolved over time. troll culture begot the ‘alt-right’ movement, and i’m wondering how an online community has shaped the real world and whether this is due to a certain initial disconnect between what is said, the people it effects, and the politics it begins to create.

because racism, antisemitism, sexism, and all other types of hateful beliefs have been a staple of 4chan and its ilk all for the sake of being counterculture, edgy, and ~funny. i remember the days when 4chan was featured heavily in the news, from casual rape threats to “jokes” about racial segregation (the “pool’s closed” “meme”). like, no doubt did people have these beliefs or think such bigotry is ~hilarious to troll people and websites with, but i also think meme culture and the disconnect the internet offers (internet life vs real world, the idea that the people on the opposite end of the screen aren’t real, aren’t effected, are the same as them, etc.) helped to breed what we see today on the internet. 

and the common mantra of these people who react to people who get rightfully upset over this is to “get offline” or “block” people, as though these kinds of memes and harassment begin and end online. but as we’ve seen, through pop culture, modern day media, and now politics, this doesn’t simply end when you log off the computer. we live in a world that is now constantly connected. this isn’t the early 2000s where the internet was subject to a singular computer room, or your “mom’s basement” or what-have-you. we have smart phones, much of what we do is now online and the internet is something most people take with them everywhere, and as such the internet has become very much the real world and the lines of being online and off have become increasingly blurred.

we talk to most of our friends online or through devices, be they friends we’ve met in school/at work/in ‘real life’, or friends made online. we get most if not all of our news online now, hence the slow agonizing death crawl of the physical newspaper and magazine because it simply can’t keep up with the rapid fire ease of the internet.

there is no “logging off” and to be honest, there never really was such a thing to begin with. i’m no internet expert, i know not everything stems from 4chan but from other websites that predate the site, or have their own culture beyond the site, but in light of the recent pewdiepie scandal, where he plays off his “death to all jews” as a joke and an internet meme, which he feels ~bad about and that he’s ~not actually antisemitic

the truth is: well one, as someone who is swedish and white and a gentile, historically he is where he is due to sweden’s complacency through neutrality during the 1930s and 1940s so he’s benefited from the antisemitic history of europe whether he realizes it or not

but more importantly it demonstrates just how much disconnect there is with meme culture of specific parts of the web, and it’s not a new thing but incredibly old and consistent. antisemitism has been a constant “staple” of internet jokes and memes, just as racism and sexism have been, and the concept of “growing a thicker skin” which is the common turn of phrase these people use is complete and utter bullshit when you can’t separate life from the internet.

there really is such a disconnect of people today, and felix’s “joke” is a prime example of those not realizing that what’s said online as a “joke” is really just hatespeech with very little else to it.

[cearalucaya]

Doesnt tumblr feel like a vicious, hateful incestous place, like a hivemind of judges parading under the lie of being open minded and welcoming

A lot of the time, yeah. With people being all “IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW OUR OPINIONS TO A T YOU’RE A GARBAGE HELLSPAWN PERSON” and then flip flopping if something is revealed about the person to make them more of a victim. IE that “men like you is why we need feminism” “i’m a 16 year old girl” post. Or the SU recolours to white people blog that was actually a goddamn 4Chan raid. But as soon as the person people were cursing at for making the SU characters white was revealed to be black, they were basically on their knees grovelling. Like. Yeah. Cool. Do your social justice thing. Just chill a little and people will take you more seriously.

Instead of screaming at people on the internet while shovelling fistfuls of cheetos into your mouth, go out and do something. Instead of calling people monsters and cursing their names for protesting abortion and sending the girls death threats, be an escort for the clinic, donate to the cause, ect. Instead of just going “MY SENATOR IS X AND REEEEEEE” actually write letters. Vote if you can. Let them know what you want. The state senator election is next year. I think. I’m Canadian so I’d google that shit. This is why we have a democracy in Canada and the USA. Doing this kind of stuff is why Canada is more progressive. People voted, and now we’ve had gay marriage for over 10 years, and free tuition starting this year.

If you have a voice, let it be heard. But don’t shoehorn everyone into it. If people disagree with what you have to say, hear them out, listen to them, and then explain why your beliefs are the way they are. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe they will. But you can’t force people to change their minds about issues. By screaming at them, being crass and rude to them, threatening them, and wishing for their demise as I’ve seen in some cases, all you do is make them hold onto their opinions more strongly. Don’t barricade yourself into a safe space with people that think exactly the same way as you. Because you’ll end up being just as closed-minded as the people you’re against. Be open. Be inviting. Talk to people and consider their side before ripping them apart. Learn and grow and maybe people will respect your opinions and views more. I know most people respect a calm, cool, and well-mannered argument over “GOD KILL YOURSELF SCUM REEEEEEEEE” in response to what they have to say. Anyway.

Thanks Anon for the chance to rant. I don’t know if that answered your question but I do agree with you.

[fukette]

Other Things To Boycott Instead Of Netflix's Dear White People.

In this modern-day, digitized province of unsolicited dick pics and Trump sponsored displays of nationally demoralizing idiocy that we call the Internet, it's easy for some things to get lost in the melee. For example, I recently just got around to watching BET's New Edition biopic and gluten-free goddamn. I had always assumed that the group was just famous for giving Black America Bobby Brown, providing me a reason to stand in the wind covered baby oiled-chest to toe in silk pajamas with the shirt unbuttoned while singing Can You Stand The Rain, and providing the soundtrack to your mother's first disappointing sexual experience. But apparently shit was more real than Atlanta housewives when the sangria and cocaine run out when (SPOILER ALERT) Bobby Brown made people want to punch him and everyone went broke.

But, I digress.

Syd The Kid, of The Internet fame, recently released her solo album that is so imbued with a studiously crafted yet well-balanced atmosphere and unabashed charisma that I've relegated listens only to instances in which I need to supplement my confidence. Like, say, the next time I eat $8 pork shoulder enchiladas at Taqueria Del Sol, blow up the toilet stall like ISIS trying to ask Al Qaeda to prom, and then exit said bathroom by calmly walking past the line of waiting people not caring that they're all within the Poop Waft Danger Zone, but with all the chill and self-assuredness of Billy Dee Williams as he steals your girl the moment you step away to grab her a pineapple Bacardi and Coke.

Lastly, I just found out that we'll soon be able to listen to Prince on platforms other than the 'Participation Award' of streaming servoces, Tidal. Does this mean that I'll soon be able to put on all the car seat concerts I want while stuck in gridlock traffic on I-85? Gifting any passerby's that gawk at my pitch-perfect rendition of When Doves Cry with an unblinking, 'no CVS brand lube necessary' eye-fuck? I dunno. Maybe. Catch me on the interstate at around 5:30pm sometime and we'll find out.

Hmm, what else? Oh yeah!

Every motherfucker on the Internet missing a chromosome, but still able to access a 4Chan message board are wildin dafuq out over a 30-second teaser clip of Netflix's Dear White People.

Fuck it, maybe there's more to it than what the visuals, monologue, and every other aspect of the teaser leads me to believe there is. Perhaps I'm simply just not perceptive enough to discern the subtextual rallying cries of White Genocide® present in the clip who's message, I believe, can best be summed up with the statement "White People Who Wear Blackface: What The Fuck,Man!?!" Granted, I am genetically predispositioned to several cognitive impairing disabilities plus I'm the only person I know that genuinely enjoys eating Tapioca pudding so, it goes without saying, that my critical thinking skills are more fucked than the bathroom glory holes at a Young Republicans Retreat. That being said, the furor over a simple show would have you think that minorities are instituting outlandish policies by which White People should have to abide by under threat of White Genocide®. No one in their right mind would advocate legislation that stipulates that White People should have to compete in underground bare-knuckle boxing matches in order to qualify for Google Fiber. No person of color would mandate that White People should be taxed for every documented instance of them saying the words 'non-frap soy decaf' while placing a coffee order. It would be ludicrous to propose that anyone in possession of a playlist that features Father John Misty, The Chainsmokers, and Meghan Trainor be placed on a no-fly list and have their family members surveilled indefinitely. So maybe being quick to label a show that no one has seen and who's message you are clearly misinterpreting as hate speech against whites could be seen as deceitful at best and SO not Raven at worst.

Although, if it's just a matter of periodically feeding the beast with a steady diet of ultimately futile yet amusingly preoccupying outrage then I will indeed bid on that glass menagerie of hand-blown fuckery by providing some outrages of my own. Be sure to let me know know how trend-worthy these are because if none of them garner a significant amount of retweets from the alt-right community then, what, I'm just some reactionary fuckwit anonymously insulting strangers who disagree with me even though my own sensibilities can be best described as 'softer than Moroccan baby shit'?

How dare you even imply such a thing?

Boycott against niggas that feel comfortable commenting on the Instagram photos of women they've never met with some deeply personal shit that only serves to make people uncomfortable as fuck. (i.e. 'Glad you had fun at PCB this weekend:) BTW, your smile is just as beautiful as your mother's. Remember? You posted a pic of her 36 weeks ago. Also, I see in the background that your door is unlocked. Is that like an everyday thing or just a mulligan for today?)

Boycott against people who fail to recognize the superiority inherent in pizzas topped with pineapple and ham. I'm not saying we should base an entire eugenics program on this one trait, but I'm not NOT saying it either. You feel me?

Boycott against whoever thinks it's acceptable to use the enlarged font on their Facebook status to announce anything other than an immediate death in the family, a growing concern that you may have been shot, and a spoiler-free reaction to the newest episode of The Magicians. (It's an amazing show. Fight me.)

Boycott against push-up bras. Despite however narrow-minded and ignorantly misogynistic it sounds, THEY. ARE. LIES. Untruths coupled with ergonomic design. A 67% cotton-based fiction of mammories. Structurally sound falsehoods capable of making a man inattentively rear end the Toyota Camry in front of him thereby making him late for work and therefore obligated to listen to his sentient semen latte of a manager go on about the importance of timeliness. I swear to White Jesus, if I have to sit through just ONE more of those lectures, I'm not exactly sure of what I'll do, but I'm confident in saying that it will be a day annually commemorated both for its horror and the revelation that you indeed can kill someone just by pelting them with two day old cranberry scones.

Boycott against whatever sadist placed the volume button perilously close to the 'share' button on porn sites. I want to quiet my shame, not broadcast it like the goddamn bat signal. What person outside of Charlie Sheen's Barebacked Fuck Palace is jerking it, stops, then thinks to themselves "Wow, I sure would like to share this video of a 3-legged Bosnian GILF and the Verizon Amphitheatre full of men just waiting for their turn to penetrate her with all of my closest friends, family, and casual acquaintances." Do you want to be uninvited from future backyard BBQs and Secret Santa gift exchanges? Because that's how you get uninvited from future backyard BBQs and Secret Santa gift exchanges.

Pokemon GO. The era has since passed. The window has closed and shall forever remain closed. If your family still gathers around the fireplace Sunday evening for pleasant conversation and familial warmth then, with all due respect, fuck you. To be specific, fuck your mother. And, while we're at it, fuck your ain't shit grandmother, fuck Lil' Jessica and her bullshit Crohn's Disease, and DEFINITELY fuck Grandpa Abraham. Who just last week channeled his inner Amos and Andy by calling his waiter at IHOP 'Colored George' even though his waiter's name was actually Jackson and, judging by the fact that Abraham's Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity Pancakes had some Rooty Tooty colored balls rubbed on it like shea butter, Jackson was none too pleased about it..

Boycott against trial periods for WinZip. How come I'm the only nigga in all of human existence to be stiff-armed for the premium version at the MOMENT I try to unzip the collected Ebooks of Michael Crichton? I told them, this is what will happen when Trump gets into office, but nobody listens to me.

Boycott extra pulp, homestyle orange juice. Because it burns like chlamydia-brand battery acid if you have cavities.

[shirlleycoyle]

What Bernie Supporters Think of the Term ‘Bernie Bro’

Over the last few weeks, it's become clear that Bernie Sanders could actually become president. The Vermont senator is polling very close to Joe Biden in Iowa, has a large lead over everyone in the latest California poll, and seems likely to do very well in New Hampshire. The prospect of Sanders winning the nomination has the finance world freaking out—there are already reports of stocks falling as he climbs the polls—and has inspired a backlash from his many detractors. Centrist pundits have declared him to be unelectable, and his former competitor Hillary Clinton has denounced not just Sanders but the entire "culture around him," which she recently described to the Hollywood Reporter:

It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it.

The "Bernie Bro" stereotype isn't new, of course, but the notion that Sanders supporters are different from other Democratic voters, and even dangerous in some way, seems poised to dominate the never-ending debate over the 2020 primary. It scored a major piece of ink on Monday, when the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, "Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army." It describes a passionate fan base who donates their money and time to their candidate, but also sometimes attacks opponents with insults and even threats.

"When Mr. Sanders’s supporters swarm someone online, they often find multiple access points to that person’s life, compiling what can amount to investigative dossiers," the Times wrote. "They will attack all public social media accounts, posting personal insults that might flow in by the hundreds."

If you’ve ever posted anything slightly critical of Sanders, this sort of dogpiling may sound familiar. (Full disclosure: I'm a Sanders supporter who yes, spends a fair amount of time online.) Interviews with dozens of Sanders backers find them admitting that the "internet army" can at times be vicious—a reality that many leftists themselves bemoan. But they also see the Bernie Bro narrative as an invention of the media and the Democratic establishment.

Standard-issue online sparring is often conflated with threats, and Sanders supporters feel frustrated they are so often associated with the worst behavior of their fellow travelers. "Most Bernie supporters online tend to be young, somewhat irony-poisoned, and angry. I'm including myself in this group," Joe Conley, a 33-year-old Sanders supporter, told me over email. He pointed out that there’s an "irony gap" between Bernie supporters and people on the receiving end of their ire. While tweeting a photograph of a pig with shit on its balls might be a standard-issue troll for a member of left Twitter, it’s perceived as online harassment from people who aren’t acquainted with this language of certain subcultures. At the end of the day, every political tribe has its toxic streak, so why do "Bernie Bros" get singled out?

Even as a self-identified Bernie Bro, I’ve gotten a fair amount of grief from leftist dudes on the internet. But I’ve received an equal heaping of hate from women who supported Clinton, anti-semitic Trump trolls, and beyond. Though fewer in number than Sanders supporters, Andrew Yang backers can be just as fiery online—notably, there are a significant number of irony-drenched #YangGang members from 4chan and other Trump-adjacent corners of the internet. Tulsi Gabbard, another Democrat with fringe appeal, has an intense fan base that contains members of the far right. In general, the culture around political celebrities has become more like regular celebrity stan culture, meaning fans feel intense emotions and share them online, and campaigns have little control over those feelings. (Sanders’s popularity is forever intertwined with his online army, but his campaign does not promote cyberbullying or misogyny—as the Times story noted, the Sanders campaign has publicly condemned bullying. That hasn't stopped it.)

One Bernie supporter sent me a dossier of all the abuse Bernie supporters receive from "loyalist Democrats" and "Donut Twitter." (Anti-Bernie liberals sometimes use a donut emoji in their Twitter names. It's a long story.) This collection of screenshots is really ugly, with people tweeting things like "I’m rooting for Bernie supporters' death," and "anyone that fucking supports Bernie Ratfucker Sanders is a piece of shit." There is also a glut of disgusting, unquotable, racist and misogynistic insults that have been hurled at Nina Turner, a Black woman who has worked with Sanders for years and co-chairs his 2020 campaign. (VICE was unable to confirm the authenticity of all of the screenshots and is not linking to the file, but did verify that many of the abusive tweets were real.) The fact is, the internet is a cruel place for everyone, regardless of who you’re voting for in 2020.

"I really think we are no more mean or aggressive than any other group of people," said Peter Graham, a 28-year-old who works for Disney and is voting for Bernie. "[It’s that] Bernie has younger supporters that are very online, [they] are probably better versed in sardonic Twitter dialogue, and there's more of them."

The stereotype of a nasty online leftist bro—unmistakably masculine, usually sneering—predates that election season. In 2008, the feminist writer Rebecca Traister (then a Clinton supporter) published an op-ed on Salon, bemoaning the rise of the "Obama boys." Young women who backed Clinton, she wrote, told her "about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends [and] described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women."

Leftists have accused the mainstream media of using this stereotype as a club to beat Sanders with. "The ‘Bernie Bro' narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic," Glenn Greenwald wrote on The Intercept in 2016, calling it "a journalistic disgrace." And the idea that the democratic socialist's base is largely male is arguably just straight-up false: Polls have shown that Sanders supporters are diverse across racial and gender lines, with young women making up a larger proportion of his support than young men.

Yet the narrative has remained pervasive, likely because there are plenty of genuinely nasty Bernie supporters lurking online, and more recently, because Sanders has achieved frontrunner status. Since his rise in the polls, Bernie has received a deluge of negative press from mainstream publications. "This isn’t about Sanders supporters being uniquely toxic. It’s about Sanders leading in Iowa and New Hampshire and leading a genuinely diverse working class movement," one Bernie supporter tweeted in response to the New York Times article. "Elite liberals fear and despise the working class. That’s the reality."

"This is ruling class propaganda," another remarked. "And rather than keeping Bernie above the fray, the campaign's scolding of supporters was used to validate their false narrative of abusive Berners, as I feared it would be. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. So don't."

Peter Daou, a former Hillary aide turned Bernie diehard, expressed dismay about the Bernie Bro stereotype over the phone. He said that he and his wife, Leela, now "receive the same type of personal attacks" as he did in 2016, when he was loudly supporting Clinton online. "People are using the term ‘Bernie Bro’ in a targeted way,” he said. "It’s a toxic narrative, leftover from 2016. The idea of these raging white males online that all support Bernie is the establishment’s way of trying to torpedo Bernie’s campaign."

Jovan Prunty, a 31-year-old who works in construction, also takes offense at the Bernie Bro narrative. "As a Black man I think this term erases me and all his other women and POC supporters," he said.

Sanders supporters generally agree that there are toxic leftist men whose behavior is out of bounds. But they insist that those people are a minority. Jaya Sundaresh, a writer for the socialist publication Current Affairs, voiced that sentiment on her Twitter in a post that garnered 15,000 likes: "I'm just going to say it: the Bernie Bro stereotype might be bullshit, but there's a variety of irony-poisoned shithead leftist dudes who have caused nothing but pain for myself and my female comrades." Over the phone Sundaresh was careful to emphasize that even though shitty men do exist on the left, the phenomenon is not specific to one edge of the ideological spectrum. "I’ve been swarmed by Pete Buttigieg supporters," she said. "I’ve also had good conversations with them."

Small, persistent jabs from Bernie supporters are unsurprisingly hurtful to people who support other candidates. Zandy Hartig, a Los Angeles-based actress, who backs Elizabeth Warren, tweeted on Wednesday, "It sucks that I feel I can’t tweet about my favorite candidate. my friends are respectful when they argue with me, but random people will jump all over me. It’s not their candidate’s fault, but it scares me nonetheless. And maybe that’s the point." Unkindness ensued, with Bernie supporters informing her that Warren does, in fact, suck, and imploring her to "calm down."

"I don’t think it’s Bernie fault," Hartig emphasized to me over the phone. "But I don't want to comment [anything pro-Warren] because when I have, people come down really hard on me and I almost feel like going private." (Her Twitter is currently private).

"During the 2016 election, I really didn’t think there was such a thing as a 'Bernie Bro,'" Hartig continued. "But this time, we’ve got a woman running who is much more progressive [than Hillary]… I’m starting to think it has a lot to do with misogyny."

The nastiness of online political culture has resulted in a gap between those like Hartig, who feel attacked by swarms of online Bernie heads, and Sanders supporters who complain that they are being unfairly stereotyped. Misogyny exists in every corner of the internet, they say. So why are we mostly talking about Bernie Sanders? "You’re gonna tarnish an entire movement as 'bros'?" Daou said. "[It] erases all the women, the women of color. There’s an ageist, a sexist, and a racist component when you generalize a diverse movement under the term 'Bro.'"

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[hogtown-socialist-alternative]

Fighting the Far Right – Socialist Strategy and Tactics

By George Martin Fell Brown -August 12, 2017

As Trump has launched attack after attack on working people and the oppressed, he has fomented racist, sexist, and xenophobic hysteria to boost support for those attacks. Many have accused Trump of fascism. But alongside Trump’s attacks we have seen the growth of far-right forces that much more closely fit the fascist label. In the first ten days after Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center counted 867 hate incidents, the vast majority of them celebrating Trump’s election. Fascist, neo-Nazi, and white nationalist organizations have popped out of the woodwork, sometimes under the guise of the so-called “alt right.”

The rise of the far right in the U.S. is part of a wider growth of far-right and fascist forces across the world. This has been particularly pronounced in countries like Greece and Hungary where explicitly fascist parties have been able to gain as high as 20% support in national elections. As the term “fascist” has increasingly devolved into a vacuous epithet used against any politician someone doesn’t like, the reality of actual fascist and far-right forces on the ground has come as a rude awakening for many. And the question of fighting the far right has come back on the agenda.

What is Fascism?

The renewed concern about fascism has revealed intense popular confusion about what fascism actually is. Popular explanations often take the form of superficial psychological or ideological comparisons between figures like Trump and historical fascists like Hitler and Mussolini. These sorts of explanations can paint any right-wing politician as a fascist, and are often used to scare people away from voting for third parties. Similar shallow explanations have also been used for even more dubious historical comparisons, such as the attempts to compare Trump with Lenin.

This was seen in a recent article in Raw Story which claimed to expose “the scary parallels between Trump and Mussolini.” Paging through a biography of Mussolini by R.J.B. Bosworth, the article proceeds to spout out a slew of banalities and armchair psychoanalysis. Thus we learn that both Trump and Mussolini “preferred to avoid in-depth conversations,” engaged in “cowing the press,” and that “there were few things that annoyed [them] more than overt criticism.” Trump is a horrible reactionary, but this sort of shallow analysis provides no insight into the factors that brought Trump to power, the threat he poses, or how his agenda can be defeated.

Fascism is best understood as a social movement, not as a checklist of psychological traits. That’s how Marxists like Leon Trotsky approached the question in the 1930s when fascism was at its peak. German and Italian capitalism had gone into crisis beginning in World War I, provoking massive revolutionary upsurges. But the working class suffered a series of defeats, while capitalism remained unable to solve its crisis. Nevertheless the question of social revolution began to be sharply posed again in the context of the Great Depression. The fascist movements of Hitler and Mussolini were mass movements whose aim was to physically liquidate all the organizations of the working-class in order to save capitalism. Resting on the ruined middle class, fascism served the interests of big business, with the brownshirt thugs doing what the capitalists couldn’t accomplish on their own.

Fascism as a mass force can only triumph thorough smashing the organizations of the working class and crushing all dissent. The situation today is not the same as in the 1930s. Under actual fascism the left would not be able to publicly organize or protest. Donald Trump may have enough passive support from the population to get elected, but there is no equivalent of a brownshirt army capable of crushing all dissent. In the past couple months, Trump has toned down his hostility to sections of the state apparatus and to a certain extent his anti-media campaign. At least for the moment, he is relying more on the generals and the Republican leadership than on far right figures like Bannon who has been partially sidelined within the administration.

Trump’s election has, on the other hand, invigorated a number of genuinely fascist and semi-fascist forces, like Ku Klux Klan splinters, various neo-Nazi and white nationalist organizations, and a semi-fascist layer growing out of the forces of the so-called “alt right.” These forces would gladly play the role of the American brownshirts. But at the moment, while emboldened, they remain extremely weak. Even in Europe, where the far right is much better organized and has real weight in many countries, many of the key far-right parties have frequently cut their ties with neo-Nazis. This is the case for example with the French National Front run by Marine Le Pen.

We may not be repeating the experience of Germany in 1933, but the rise of the right does pose a threat to workers and the oppressed. The small fascist and semi-fascist forces may not be on the verge of power, but they can still intimidate immigrant communities, transgender people, and other oppressed groups. And they can still carry out violent assaults on strikes and protests, as seen when white nationalists fired shots into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Minneapolis in 2015.

The So-Called “Alt Right”

One new phenomenon that distinguishes the far right of today from classical fascism is the development of the so-called “alt right.” The term was coined in 2010 by Richard Spencer. Spencer later became famous for being punched in the face during Donald Trump’s inauguration. Spencer is an open white nationalist who calls for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to build a homeland for the “dispossessed white race.” But Spencer has refused to openly identify with the term “neo-Nazi.”

Forces identifying with the so-called “alt right” became a prominent wing of the Trump campaign. The right-wing propaganda website Breitbart took up the term, with the website’s CEO Steve Bannon calling the site “the platform for the alt-right.” Bannon would later become Trump’s campaign adviser during the election and chief strategist afterwards. After Trump’s election, “alt right” activists held victory parties where they gave Nazi salutes and chanted “Heil Trump.” While not all elements under the “alt-right” label can be called fascist, nevertheless, it is increasingly a way for fascist and semi-fascist forces to worm their way into political respectability. It cannot be seen, at least so far, as a coherent movement.

More than classical fascism, Trump’s rise, and his relation with the so-called “alt right” hearkens back to the American tradition of virulently right-wing populism, often flirting with fascist ideas. The relation between Trump and Bannon bears a strong resemblance to Huey Long, who planned to run a right-populist presidential campaign in 1936, backed by the pro-Hitler radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin. Long’s campaign was cut short by his assassination in 1935, but other right-wing populists have since run presidential campaigns that gained a disturbing amount of support, from the 1968 campaign of the segregationist George Wallace to the 2000 Reform Party candidacy of nativist Pat Buchannan. Ironically, during the 2000 election, Donald Trump ran a primary campaign against Buchannan, presenting himself as a moderate.

In addition to right-wing populism, the “alt right” movement has also grown out of the libertarian movements, with many citing support for the Austrian School “anarcho-capitalist” economist Murray Rothbard. This is especially the case on college campuses, where it leans on better-off students who have less of an interest in populist appeals and more of an interest in defending their “personal freedoms” against “social justice warriors.” Libertarian student groups like Young Americans for Liberty, which grew out of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, have been to the fore in bringing “alt right” speakers to college campuses. This has lead to infighting within the libertarian movement, especially when Richard Spencer was invited to attend the International Students for Liberty Conference.

One distinguishing feature of the “alt right,” arising from that college libertarian tradition, is its use of irony to cloak its noxious politics. The movement flourished on the Internet forums of 4chan, which specializes in shock humor. They built up a new iconography out of memes based on cartoon frogs and old fast food mascots, so you could never tell if they were joking or not. People who didn’t like them would be accused of being easily offended “snowflakes” who just can’t take a joke. When a gay “alt right” spokesman like Milo Yiannopoulos says “If someone calls you an anti-Semite, you go to their page and put up swastikas” it blurs the line between genuine fascists and people playing at fascism to piss people off.

Another distinguishing feature of the “alt right” is their use of the Internet to carry out attacks. Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter in July 2016 for using it to organize targeted harassment campaigns against assorted individuals. Before he fell from grace recently over a pedophilia controversy, Yiannopoulos was carrying out a tour of college campuses where he engaged in “doxxing” students, posting their personal information to incite mob harassment campaigns. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee he outed a transgender student. And he had begun a campaign to out undocumented students across the country.

These harassment campaigns reveal the reality behind the “alt right” cloak of irony. Yiannopoulos may be “joking” when he posts swastikas on people’s Facebook pages. But systematic campaigns of harassment and intimidation against immigrants and transgender people can’t be explained away by irony.

Free Speech?

As far right forces have gained in respectability, the movement against them has grown. When figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer go on speaking tours around the country, left-wing activists have mobilized to shut them down.

But these actions have provoked a debate around the question of free speech. If we shut down people’s speaking tours, it’s argued, we’re no different from the fascists we’re protesting. This debate popped up prominently after an anti-Milo Yiannopoulos protest in Berkeley that Socialist Alternative helped to organize. Yiannopoulous’s visit was intended as part of his campaign to out undocumented students. Socialist Alternative helped initiate the protest, creating the Facebook event page. A wide array of forces came out, from a group of professors petitioning the university to cancel the event, to a group of Black Bloc anarchists. The protests managed to shut down Yiannopoulous’s event, but this was accompanied by the Black Bloc anarchists engaging in acts of vandalism and anti-fascist protesters getting into physical altercations with the Yiannopoulos supporters. Supporters of the “alt right” have used this to portray themselves as the victims.

But Yiannopoulos was intending to use that platform to dox undocumented students. When Yiannopoulos used his platform to publicize the personal information of transgender and undocumented students he wasn’t expressing his opinions. He was directly organizing a campaign of harassment and intimidation.

The liberal defense of free speech for fascists was taken to ludicrous extremes when Daniel Dropik, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tried to build an “alt right” student club at the university. Dropik is a member of the neo-Nazi American Freedom Party and he had been convicted of racist arson attacks against black churches before he started attending the university. But an editorial in the Wisconsin State Journal had the nerve to defend Dropik through an appeal to diversity, declaring: “If the university is going to treat diversity as an unmitigated good, it can’t really complain when that diversity comes in the form of an ‘alt-right’ federal convict.”

But if a layer of liberals adopts a crude, essentialist defense of free speech at all cost, there is also a layer in the anti-fascist movement that takes a crude essentialist defense of the notion of “no platform for fascists.” Socialists advocate mobilizing mass movements to block fascists and other far-right forces from using public platforms to mobilize, incite attacks, and recruit. We also oppose making appeals to the government to ban fascist organizations. Fighting the far right has to be the product of mass struggle, not strengthening the repressive apparatus of the state. When such legislation has been passed it has been used to repress the left as well. This was the case in 1940 with the Smith Act, ostensibly aimed at combating fascism, but which was later used against socialist groups, most notably the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the 1941 Minneapolis sedition trial. Unlike the Trotskyists, the Communist Party initially backed this legislation, only for it to be used against them as well later on.

At the same time, there is nothing automatic for us about a “no platform” position, even when dealing with explicit fascists. In general, we support denying fascists and other extreme right forces a platform and crushing them before they can gain a foothold. But this cannot be artificially done, especially where they have succeeded in reaching a broader audience who will need to be broken from them firstly through political debate. This problem was seen in Britain in the last decade when the semi-fascist British National Party (BNP) was making electoral gains. Anti-fascist groups like United Against Fascism refused on principle to debate BNP members. This meant that when the capitalist media did give a platform to the BNP, there was often no anti-fascist voice to challenge them.

Both sides of this issue were seen in the controversy of television host Bill Maher inviting Milo Yiannopoulos onto his show. This gave Yiannopoulos a major public platform and people were rightly disgusted with Maher’s decision. But once, Maher had given Yiannopoulos that platform, comedian Larry Wilmore correctly agreed to appear on the same show and challenge Yiannopoulos.

Exactly what tactics are appropriate depends on the extent to which far right forces have actually been able to develop a real base. Where the far right or fascists have gone beyond small circles and threaten to sink deeper roots, this generally reflects the utter desperation of sections of the middle class and working class in the face of capitalism’s crisis and the failure of the main forces on the left or the labor movement to show a clear way forward. The question posed for socialists in this situation is precisely to expose the false idea that targeting minorities will solve people’s problems and that what is required is a united fight of the working class and all the oppressed against capitalism. This of course must be accompanied by the mobilization of the working class to counter and prevent physical attacks by the far right. In this way the hard core of the far right can be exposed, isolated and defeated. But at the end of the day, the fight against fascism and the far right is 90% a political struggle.

The Need for Mass Action

Of course, the growth of the far right is not simply an ideological, but a physical threat. Even before the election, the question of violence and self-defense was being discussed. The punching of Richard Spencer and the violence at the Berkeley anti-Milo Yiannopoulos protests helped broaden this into a wider question about the role of violence in fighting the far right.

Socialist Alternative has no moral objections to punching Nazis, or sharing memes about punching Nazis. And we absolutely defend the right of workers and the oppressed to self-defense. But the most effective resistance to the far right will be mass resistance.

When a lone activist punched Richard Spencer in the face, it made many people feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it did little to actually stop Spencer from organizing. When Black Bloc anarchists in Berkeley broke through the police barricade while Milo Yiannopoulos was trying to speak, it served to concretely shut down the event and prevent the outing of undocumented students. But this was accompanied by graffiti and smashing windows which actively turned off the wider public. Moreover, while it shut down the far right in the short term, it emboldened them in the medium term. By April 15, “alt right” forces held a new “free speech” rally at Berkeley, in which counter-protesters found themselves severely outnumbered and violently attacked by the far-right demonstrators. This precisely shows the danger of focusing on small group “street fighting.”

Moreover, the Black Bloc actions were carried out without any democratic participation from the wider masses, including the other protesters. It was a small group of self-styled revolutionaries acting on behalf of the masses. Many of the anarchists who are attracted to Black Bloc tactics are opposed as a matter of principle to building mass democratic structures, and Black Bloc actions tend to stifle the building of such structures. But it is precisely structures like that that are necessary to build a mass movement that can challenge and push back both right populism and the far right.

In Minneapolis in 2015, when white supremacists fired shots into a Black Lives Matter protest, Socialist Alternative called on the labor and community forces involved to organize a broad labor/community defense coalition to physically defend the movement against attacks. Although the defense coalition was never set up, the call was well-received, and as the struggle against the far right heats up, these sorts of democratically-run broad defense coalitions will become a more prominent feature of struggle.

Beyond taking on the far right, mass action is necessary to stop the right populism of Trump and the conditions that breed Trumpism. Before Trump, we saw a wave of right populism in the form of the Tea Party which saw massive growth in 2009-10. But by 2011, the Tea Party was pushed back by the mass working class movement in Wisconsin. Although the movement failed to stop the anti-union attacks, the mere existence of the movement cut across popular support for the Tea Party and shifted consciousness to the left. The same needs to be done in the face of Trump.

Physically confronting the quasi-fascist elements of the alt-right is a necessity. But limiting oneself to small-scale street battles misses the wider struggle we’re facing. We need to defend not only against fascists, but ICE raids and police repression. We need to build the capability of organizing mass strikes. We need to build a party of the 99% that can take on, not only the fascists, but Trump and the whole billionaire class. We need to fight, not only the far right, but the conditions that allow the far right to grow.

[ophiocorvidceps]

here instead of main because i KNOW someone will take it the wrong way but i wanna vent

im even tired of going on 4chan bc while i always though tthe “4chan culture” of being as racist and awful as you could be was awful, the whole “X SAID TRANS RIGHTS” spam in every topic is also annoying and neither contribute to conversation and ALSO the people spamming that in vins streams is 99% the reason why i never watch him live. bc even though i agree with the sentiment i think trans rights are incredibly important! i am Sick and tired of every conversation having to come down to lgbt rights, racism, sexism, etc. etc. and it CLEARLY makes peoople uncomfortable. it CLEARLY makes vinny uncomfortable to have to handle political discussion thrown at him out of the left field because he’s just some 30 year old lad who watns to play video games and talk about beetlejuice honking his cock. i think throwing any sort of political comments at him or his stream (regardless of if i agree with them or not) is a dick move

being reminded every day that there are people out there that want to hurt me based off my age, my sex, my identity, my orientation? terrifying! uncomfortable! sometimes i just want to lay in bed and stare at the roof and think about the cure i dont wanna think about that shit!!

anyway i wanna browse 4chan in peace without seeing people turn a thread on “which brand of baked beans is your favourite” into an argument about lgbt rights again and again and again and thats a BIG reason why i’m so fuckin tired of reddit

i dont know how the climate has changed in america As A Dumb Australian but i can tell that the internet spaces i’ve inhabited have changed DRASTICALLY since the 2016 election; both sides are getting further apart from the centre, and louder and more OTT than before

i wouldnt even remotely call myself a centrist either, and i think taking a “both sides have their ups and downs :)” stance is kind’ve a pussy move, i would strongly consider myself a democratic socialist, or a ~*left-leaning libertarian*~ (as dumb as people call me for that!) but like some of the people on these sites are nuts. someone legitimately stated that adolf hitler was a better person than donald trump. adolf fucking hitler. and this is like ??? this is libertarianism?? this is “the left”?? i dont wanna be part of that!! they’re both awful people but its not a contest... but then theres people on the other side who Proudly spout racist comments about how “america is for the WHITE MAN and the WHITE MAN only!!! go back to your own home!! we’re just keepin our land pure...” and think that THATS okay either?? good lord

i just hate this political climate so much i’m so exhausted i just want to love everyone and be loved i want everyone to feel safe and comfortable in this world i want everyone to have equal rights but also: a bitch needs to take a break from the internet. a bitch needs to close out of everything, lay in the back yard and smell some goddamn flowers and forget about this war raging on online

[republicstandard]

Swastika Pong Is Good Wholesome Fun

Last week some kids in southern California were caught playing beer pong with their cups assembled in the classic Swastika formation. Perilous stuff, people. Kids arranging their beer pong cups into the wrong shapes is scary and can not be tolerated; it must not be tolerated. It’s another Shoah. One lady I encountered on Twitter a few days back actually recommended having child protective services visit the parents of these young pong-playing rascals to investigate them for child abuse. Oh yeah, people, we are that close to Sovietesque dystopia, if we’re not there already.

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Someone should tell this Neo-Bolshevik psychopath that all the scientific literature suggests children are not mere vessels into which their parents’ values (or “culture” for that matter) are thrown. In fact, a child’s peers are far more influential in shaping their opinions than are their parents. This, by the way, is an adaptive trait/phenomenon. You see, you need to learn how to navigate the social milieu you find yourself in, not the social milieu of two or three decades past! So, if anyone is responsible for these chilling (pun intended) cup formations, it is not the parents of these kids, but their peers, in particular youth-driven movements like the Alt-Right!

I know what is going on with high school and middle school kids these days. The power structure may hate us, but we are the counter-culture. We own the web. We are the vanguard of the right. We are the fount of radical and dangerous and ancient ideas. The young’uns know it. That is why every neologism my teenage stepson utters has its origins in Alt-Right-dominated internet forums like 4chan. Pretty much every single one can be traced back to our cause. When he first started using some of those words, I was flabbergasted, taken aback. However, it has happened enough times now that I’m basically used to it. It actually makes sense when you think about it.

Kids want to do things of which their parents don’t approve. They want to test the boundaries of propriety. They want to blaze their own paths, be their own selves, live their own lives, leave their own imprint on the world. Profound insight, I know. Nevertheless, the point is the youth are not interested in conforming to the Cultural Marxist (anti-racist) values of the 1960s. Those values are yesteryear’s values. They are stale and oversimplistic. To be frank, those values have failed us as a nation. The Alt-Right, on the other hand, is edgy and exciting. Even the kids who don’t adopt the Alt-Right’s worldview are being influenced by our ideas, by our terms, by our courage, by our memes, by our creativity. They are steeped in a counter-culture the Alt-Right created, whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not.

It is not teenagers doing provocative and rebellious things that are scary. That is normal and healthy. It is America’s response that is scary. It is a fact these kids are likely to be suspended from school for an irreverent joke, for expressive conduct done on their own time, far from school--- that is scary. It is as if our Cultural Marxist overlords know how fragile the system is right now, and fear that any act of disobedience, no matter how trivial, might bring it all crashing down.

After all, how is this national news? How can anyone consider America a serious or free country at this point, when kids can’t even be kids and engage in a little youthful rebellion, without being shamed and slandered nationally? Yet the boomertards and their pet minorities are still the only ones who seem to have any representation at all in the American press and power structure. What renders their histrionics so incredibly silly is that no one under the age of thirty is listening to them. No one cares. It is all so tiresome at this point. Boomers and non-whites have taken on the role of Western society’s children, throwing tantrums whenever others don’t give them their way.

That is what these kids are responding to and revolting against, namely the [over]reaction we all observed in the aftermath of this largely innocent beer pong game. These kids don’t care to be bullied over words, or shapes, or lectured to about microaggressions, or conditioned into thinking the supposed right things about historical events. They don’t like the social justice left, with its never-ending list of rules for everyday speech and conduct, or the lying press, which labors inexorably to legitimize the social justice left’s impressive array of imaginary grievances. The political left’s totalitarian drive to control everything is oppressive and intolerable, and wrong. Just listening to these sanctimonious blowhards carry on about how dangerous certain beer pong formations can be, is just too much for any reasonable person to bear.

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These kids want liberty and choice and speech and merriment and laughter and beer! So they are dissenting, rebelling, standing up, speaking out, as kids are supposed to. They are refusing to comply with the odious mandates of illegitimate authority, and that is a good thing; it should be encouraged. It shows that the human spirit is alive and well in America’s youth, especially our white youth. These kids are saying “fuck you” most boldly and emphatically, to the bankster oligarchs and globohomo tyrants that run the modern West. So good, good, good on them. All decent people should laud noble acts of resistance to tyranny. Even mere symbolic acts of defiance are preferable to a life on one’s knees. What I see is an old guard dying and a new generation springing to life, and it is beautiful to behold.

I am frankly overjoyed that kids in California are playing Swastika pong and not apologizing for it. I am a fan of good, wholesome fun which harms only the feelers of uptight Judeo-Supremacist power players and their bootlickers. Not just that, I am proud to be part of the political movement that inspired these kids to stand up to their vicious, genocidally anti-white overlords. I hope the assholes over at the ADL lose sleep over it. I hope Jared Kushner emigrates to Israel on account of it. And lastly, I want an answer to one particular question which has been bugging me all of this past week.

In a game of swastika pong, does the losing team get its own ethnostate as a consolation prize? Wondering for some friends.

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