#I really don’t understand why I need to justify myself on my blog | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

itsmarsss · 4 months

Text

Vulgar Display of Power [Miguel Diaz x fem!Reader] (Cobra Kai)

You can never fucking beat him in a fight and it's getting frustrating.

Request: omg more miguel please!!! smutty if u can xx already dating if you want? Fic title comes from my (second) favorite Pantera album. Word count: 4,350 Warnings: SMUT. established relationship, theres plot but it only serves to justify the sex lol, i use present tense in this, degrading, first time sub!miguel kind of, handjob, fingering, oral sex, penetration (p in v), semi-public sex (i guess? no one's around but the location isn't exactly private), a lot of use of pet names (baby, babe, love, mi amor), so much swearing. obviously no one is a minor here I don't mention much context but can be read as hs senior year or later, doesn't really matter. if you're a minor kindly keep away from my blog and this fic please

“Fuck!” You yell out as Sensei Lawrence announces Miguel’s win. In turn of your frustration, Miguel sports a grin that playfully mocked you.

Now don’t get it twisted, you’re not a bad fighter. You’re not even a good one- you’re great. The best, except for…

“Diaz! Good one.” Sensei Lawrence praises.

“Nice, dude!” Hawk comes to fist bump him.

Tory comes to you. “Girl get it together! You’re better than that!”

“I’m fucking trying.”

Miguel hears the two of you talking and decides to insert himself into the conversation. “Come on, it’s not a big deal.”

“I say this with love but it is a big deal and I’m gonna find a way to beat you.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

[. . .]

“Hey,” you hear Miguel call from behind you, turning around for a split second to look at him before getting back to packing your stuff to leave the dojo.

“Hey.”

“So, are we still on for tonight?”

“Yeah. I just wanna go home first and take a shower.”

He scratches the back of his neck. “Hey are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something seems… weird.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, babe,” you tell him, bringing a hand to his face and lightly tapping his cheek.

“You sure?”

“Yes! I just said it is!” You realize you blew up at him for no reason, immediately feeling bad for it and apologizing, not managing to look at him. “Sorry.”

“See? That’s what I mean!”

“I really am sorry.”

“Okay, but something’s clearly wrong.”

You stay silent, and he walks up to you, cornering you so you’d face him.

“What’s going on?”

Honestly, you don’t want to tell him. Because it would sound stupid. Because it is stupid. You don’t even exactly know why it had gotten so under your skin this time.

“It’s fine. I’m just a bit off today.”

“You don’t have to talk about it, but you don't have to lie either.”

“Fine. You wanna know what’s wrong? I’m frustrated because you keep beating me.”

“What?”

“Every single time we’re picked to fight I just can’t fucking beat you. And yes, I’m glad you don’t go easy on me, cause that would be like a million times worse, but I'm frustrated with myself. You’re the only one I've never fully beat in a match. The closest I’ve ever gotten to that was a tie.”

“Well most of the time it ends up in a tie.”

“Yeah but none of the time did it end with me winning.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset about this.”

“Of course you don’t. I just feel like if I still can’t beat you then have I really been getting better?”

“What? That’s nonsense, babe. You know that, right? Of course you’ve been getting better. We all have.”

“See I told you it would be stupid. I don't even know why I'm feeling this way.”

“That’s okay. We can just sort that out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll ask sensei for the keys.”

“What?”

“We’re gonna stay here and fight and we’re not gonna leave until you win.”

“That’s really not what I was trying to get from this-”

“What, are you scared?” He knew just how to tug on your strings.

“Oh fuck no.”

“Then we’re doing this.”

“But what about the date?”

“We can go tomorrow. If you need my help today, I'll help you today.”

“Okay.”

[. . .]

“Alright, ready?”

You only nod your head yes, too focused to even speak.

“Okay. Round one.”

You get a couple punches in, but he’s faster than most of your hits. He wins..

You huff, annoyed. “Again.”

“Again.”

“Okay that’s it. Again.”

This time, determination runs through your veins, as tired as you were. Every single moment of feeling weak or inferior or as though you were seen by others as basically the female equivalent of Miguel, and not yourself, not someone capable of being better than him in any way, channeled into this round.

And you won. This time, you fucking won.

“Wait that’s three,” you realize.

“Yeah! You won!” Miguel celebrates.

“What?”

“You won, babe!”

“Oh my God. Holy fucking shit. I won?!”

He laughs, coming up to you. “You did.” He places a quick kiss on your lips, but you’re taken over by the adrenaline, pulling him back to you by the collar of his shirt when he went to pull away, tangling him into another kiss, deeper and more passionate this time around. “That was hot,” he comments, as you finally did let him part ways with you to breathe, your bodies still flushed together.

You feel your cheeks burn at his comment. “I just kicked your ass,” you joke.

He doesn’t even seem fazed by the comment. “Yeah you did,” he grins.

“I did not expect that to unlock some sort of loser kink in you.”

“Hey! That’s not what this is!”

You lift an eyebrow, amused.

“What, you’re telling me it’s a crime if my insanely hot girlfriend looks insanely hot while kicking my ass?”

“Should I kick your ass more often then?”

“You’re welcome to.”

“You’re so weird.”

“Shut up,” he retorts, finally having enough of the playful bantering, unable to wait a second longer to have your lips on his again.

Miguel pulls you even closer to him- if that were even possible- by pulling on your waist, not wasting a second more before diving in again, pulling you into a kiss that is much more feral this time around. His actions scream that he wants you, and the high from having reached your goal and beat him in the last round mixed with the lust forming in you from seeing him so affected, so attracted to this, it feels good.

You suppose some people would maybe come into an issue if they found themselves in your place. Men aren’t exactly known for being great at dealing with women being better than them in… well, anything. But Miguel acted genuinely proud of you. Hell, he’d canceled your date night to help you with this because he realized it was important to you. And more than being supportive, he was turned on by your display of power.

His kisses start trailing out of your lips, to your jaw, to the space below your ear. “You did so well, love. You should get something in turn, huh?”

Your mind was getting a bit foggy. Still, you join in playing his game. “I suppose I should. What are you gonna do?”

“Whatever you want me to,” he breathes out. Oh. That was definitely new.

“Whatever I want?” He only nods, looking up at you, waiting to be told what to do. Holy shit, that was hot. “That sounds good.”

“Just tell me, please, I’ll make you feel so good, I promise,” he pleads. It was almost pathetic. You decide you’d never get enough of hearing him plead like that. You loved the times in which he was more dominant, but you could definitely get behind this too, no issues whatsoever.

You pretend to think. “I don’t think I will.”

“What? Why not?”

“I want you to guess.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I- Uh- Ih-” he takes a deep breath. He liked that. You smiled. “I can do that.”

“Good boy,” you try, hoping he didn’t find it weird.

Apparently, he didn’t. “Fuck. Fuck,” he lets out in almost strangled sounds, wordlessly dropping himself to the floor. He looks up at you with doe eyes, as if pleading for permission. You smile at him, signaling everything was okay. You cage his jaw with both your hands, and he closes his eyes for a moment, letting you play with his hair.

“You look so pretty like this,” you coo, and he feels it down his spine, his eyes fluttering open.

“Sit.”

“What?”

“Sit,” he repeats himself, but it isn’t demanding. Not this time.

“I heard you.”

“Sit, please, baby.”

You grin. You didn’t know you’d like this this much. “Of course, baby.” You sit down on the bench, legs closed. He parts them confidently, eyes not leaving yours as he does so slowly, positioning his body between them. With his face mere inches from yours, he looks up at you again.

“Do you want me to kiss you?” He guesses. His cheeks red, he clearly looks embarrassed. It turned him on and it turned you on too.

You nod eagerly, signaling he’d guessed right. He smiles and closes the distance between you, pulling you down and attaching his lips to yours. It starts out slow, tender, experimental- testing the waters. He grows eager pretty fast, though, kissing you harder, his hands traveling to either of your thighs and planting themselves there firmly, squeezing in a way that makes you gasp slightly in surprise.

He pulls away just to tease you about it. That’s the kind of little shit he is.

“What was that for?”

“Nothing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Not this then?”

He squeezes your thigh again and you try to act unbothered.” He notices though, pleased with himself.

“Oh shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

He pulls you into a kiss again with no warning, more feral than before, his hand traveling upwards, inside the legs of the shorts you were wearing.

“Take it off,” you pant out, a stern tone overtaking your words, and he complies without questioning. You smile, pleased with that. You lift your hips slightly for him and he throws the shorts somewhere on the floor behind you.

He stares at your underwear for a few moments, as if lost in a trance. You laugh. “Hello? You here?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this.”

“Used to what?” You move a hand to caress his face.

“The fact that I’m the only one who gets to see you like this.”

“Aw, do you like that, baby? Does it turn you on?” You ask, your tone almost mocking him.

He only nods his head yes, looking embarrassed.

“That’s good.” You make a show to slowly take off your shirt, a sudden surge of confidence running through your veins at his words, discarding it along with the shorts behind you. His eyes widen and he mumbles a few words, the volume of his words so low you couldn’t make it out for the life of you, before he just surges forward again, not aiming for your lips this time, but for your jaw.

“What was that?” You manage to breathe out as he continues his trail of kisses along your jaw.

“What?”

“If you’re gonna talk you’re gonna let me hear it. Got it?”

“Oh-okay.” He continues to place quick, slight pecks along your jawline, but you know exactly what he’s doing.

“You’re not distracting me from that. I wanna know what you said, baby. Wanna hear you.”

“I said- I said uh-“ he gulps. “It’s dumb.”

“That’s okay.”

“I just said ‘fuck me’.”

You let out a small laugh. “Oh. It was dumb,” you mock him again, and you can see he didn’t expect that.

“What?”

“I though you wanted to fuck me,” you joke.

He doesn’t take it as a joke. “I do. I do I just meant- it was just-“ oh. This was for real.

“I know, love. I was just teasing you. Okay? You’re being so good to me.”

His eyes almost sparkle at the praise.

“You know I think I changed my mind.”

“What?”

“Maybe I should fuck you.”

“What do you mean?”

You look down on him and smile, a genuine sweet smile. “Get up.”

“But-“

“I thought you said you’d do whatever i wanted you to,” you fake-pout.

He doesn’t say a word before standing back up. You do the same, keeping your body flushed to his. You slowly turn the two of you around, cornering him until the back of his knees hit the bench and pushing him to sit down on it.

Standing in front of him, you tilt your head to the side as you take in the view. He looked disheveled as ever. You loved it. “I think you’re wearing too many clothes.

“I- I can take it off.”

“Yeah I think you should.”

“What… what do you want me to take off?”

“Let’s go with the shirt first, baby. How about that?”

He nods furiously. “Yeah I can do that,” he takes his shirt off in a millisecond, throwing it with your clothes on the floor.

“Oh, you look so pretty,” you coo, stepping closer to him and lifting his chin up to look at you. You make your way around the bench to be behind him, and you can see him gulp in anticipation. Fuck, you were loving this a little too much. You trace his biceps with your finger. “Your arms, I love your arms, you know that? So big and strong,” you exaggerate, and he quirks an eyebrow at the suspicious comment. This doesn’t sound like it was getting to a nice praising place. “And your body, I mean your abs. Your thighs, your thighs are so pretty, baby,” you crouch a bit, still behind him, wrapping yourself around his back so you could snake your arms to his thighs, still only tracing them with a single finger. “So how come you lost to me like a bitch?”

That seems to remind him very well of what was happening.

“It- it was one time.”

“One time you lost to me. But you’ve barely ever won, have you?”

He stays quiet.

“Come on, baby, talk to me…” you pout, snaking your arms around his torso and kissing his neck.

“N-no.”

“Did you like that you lost to me baby?”

Quiet again.

“Did it turn you on?” You whisper in his ear and you can feel him take in big a breath. .

He couldn’t even look at you .

“Oh, pretty boy, I wanna hear your voice!”

He gulps again. “It- it turned me on,” he confesses.

“I never knew you were into this sort of thing.”

“Me- me neither.”

“Do you like it when I’m stronger than you? When I tell you what to do?”

You remove yourself from his body entirely, and he whips his head at record speed to look at you, desperate for your touch again. You circle the bench once again, standing in front of him. You grab his jaw and lifts his head up to look at you, your other hand messing with his hair. “So pathetic. I’ve barely done anything to you and you’re this hard.”

You finally sit yourself down on his thighs, legs on either side of his torso, and he immediately and instinctively grabs your ass ‘for support’ as he’s always insisted with a grin.

“You’re so fucking pathetic you’ll do anything I tell you to. Won’t you?” You pout, tilting your head.

“I’ll- I’ll do anything you want.”

“That’s a good boy,” you mess with and pet his hair again. You loved it when it was just long enough for his curls to appear.

He shivers. “Can you say it again?”

“Oh, no can do, baby. You’ll have to keep being a good boy to earn it.”

“I’ll- I’ll be a good boy, okay?”

You nod silently, your arms draped around his neck, and you pull yourself closer to get access to his face. You kiss along his jawline slowly, paying extra attention to the spots just under his ears, which made him shiver like crazy. When you find it sufficient, you move down to his neck, and he lets you, tilting his head to the side. You kiss down his neck, trying your best to not leave any marks. He’s still shivering now, and you know him well enough to know he’s okay, but can’t resist teasing him a bit more.

“Oh no, baby, you’re trembling! Is everything okay?” You feign ignorance. He doesn’t reply. “Aw are you too horny to speak to me? Is that the issue?” You mock.

He lifts his hips for some friction, an involuntary tell that he was enjoying this too. “Aw, do you like it when I’m mean to you? Huh?” You lift his chin again. He begrudgingly nods his head yes. You smile and move your hand from his chin to his cheeks, squeezing both off them. “Does my baby like it when I’m in control? When I handle you like this? When I call you names?”

He tries to reply, but can’t really with you squeezing his face like that.

“Oh I can’t hear you baby!” You let go of his face. “You’re gonna have to say it again.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I- I like it when you’re mean to me.”

“I know, baby boy. I can feel it.” With no other warning, you palm him through his shorts. He was impossibly hard. Knowing he was liking this was for sure improving your confidence. The moment your hand meets his crotch his breathing becomes unsteady and he thrusts his hips up again, wanting more. You start kissing along his neck as you keep feeling him up through the shorts, and then he is gone. He lets himself let out delicious moans you would play on repeat if you could, tilting his head back to grant you better access to his neck. He wants more, and you know he does. But you want to hear him say it.

After a few minutes, he does.

“Please take it off.”

You press a gentle kiss to his neck, containing a grin. “What are you talking about, babe?”

“My shorts, take them off, please. Please, take them off.”

You press a quick peck on his lips this time. “You beg so pretty, baby. I think I’ll need more of that.”

He looks confused.

“Anything I tell you, right?”

He nods.

“Good. Eat me out.”

His eyes widen at the bluntness of it all. And then he realizes what you meant by needing more of his begging: you weren’t going to solve his little problem all that soon.

“I- yes. Yeah.”

You pull yourself off of him and he stands up as quickly as humanly possible, grabbing your hand and yanking you to Sensei’s office, rushing to move everything that was on his desk. You catch his drift and pull yourself up to sit on it. You’re so enthralled you don’t even really have the time to rethink what you’re doing and where you are. Miguel gets himself on his knees, and the sight of it from above is breathtaking.

“Are you sure you wanna be on your knees? They’re gonna hurt.” You ask him, seriously this time.

“I don’t care,” is all he says, dismissing the thought. He pulls you closer to the edge of the desk, and you let yourself lean back on your elbows. He brings a hand up your thigh and takes off your underwear, you lift your hips up to help.

He brings both his hands to your thighs, slowly pulling them apart, opening your legs.

He wastes no time before diving in, startling you when, in a second, his head is between your thighs while his hands squeeze them hard and his mouth is suddenly on you.

He moves his tongue up and down your clit, occasionally circling around it. Now and then he takes a long lick, from your hole to your clit, letting out a moan from time to time as he tastes you, and he picks up on the shaky breaths and loud moans you let out at that (and the way your hands fly to his hair, slightly pulling it.)

He moves his tongue to your hole, licking and kissing around it before getting it inside.

It makes you almost want to scream out his name.

“Oh my god. You’re being so good to me, baby. Please don’t stop-”

You can feel his smile.

He takes one of his hands off of your thigh and moves it to thumb at your clit as he keeps fucking you with his tongue. The feeling is heavenly, but you can’t help but want more.

“Your fingers.” Is all you say, and he gets it.

Normally in a situation like this he’d be teasing you in some way, but right now just the thought of upsetting you with that and having you leaving him to finish himself off, or something down that lane, got him quiet.

He changes what he’s doing, going back to flicking your clit with his tongue, and slowly inserting one of his fingers. You decide you want to tease a bit more. “That all you got?” You challenge him, knowing exactly what you’re doing. He inserts another finger, not taking the care to do it slowly this time, and he pushes them deep inside you, curling them upwards to make sure you felt it.

You let out a moan that’s so pornographic you’re almost embarrassed at it, but you can feel him grin at it, pleased with the reaction. He keeps on, but at a slow pace. In other instances, you didn’t mind some slow, passionate sex. You loved it, even. But right now you wanted to be fucked.

“Harder.”

He pulls his head up to kiss you. You let him. As you make out, your taste still on his tongue, his fingers thrust harder, deeper inside you, making you moan into his mouth, which Miguel seemed to enjoy a little too much.

You can feel yourself brimming an orgasm, and your words become nonsense as he keeps on, your noises becoming so higher-pitched you can barely register you’re the one making them.

“Fuck I’m gonna cum. Baby, I’m gonna cum. Holy fucking-“

It hits you suddenly, killing your train of thought. Your body trembles as he keeps thrusting his fingers into you, letting you ride out your high. He laps it all up gladly, but you pull him away, your clit oversensitive.

That doesn’t mean you didn’t want more.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, baby. You were such a good boy. But I want you to fuck me now.”

Miguel was still not used to you being this blunt. And honestly neither were you, for the matter. The words just kept coming out.

“What- what do you want me to do?”

You get close to his ear and whisper. “Whatever you want, baby.”

His eyes widen. Whatever he wants.

He pulls you off the desk and wordlessly takes you back to the locker room. He leaves you for a second to retrieve a condom from his bag. A prepared man, you’d say.

You manage to take a better look at him and laugh. He furrows his eyebrows together. “What?”

“You look so fucked out right now.”

He rolls his eyes at you and takes off his shorts, kicking them away. He goes to pull his boxers down but you stop him, stroking him in an agonizingly slow pace. He lets out a groan. “Please stop, I’m not gonna last.”

“Oh poor you.” You yank his boxers down. His dick is so hard it must be painful. And all from losing a fight and being called mean names. He walks the two of you backwards until your back is against a wall. He puts the condom on and looks at you for a green light.

“Go on, baby.”

He nods, pressing his cock into your hole slowly, letting you adjust to the intrusion.

“Fuck.” You breathe out.

“Was that a good fuck or a bad fuck? Does it hurt?”

“I’m alright. It was a good fuck.”

“Okay.” He hikes up one of your legs to his waist, and you think he’ll be content with that position, but he hikes up your other leg too, pressing your back even more firmly to the wall and supporting your weight by holding firmly onto the back of your thighs.

“Woah what are you doing?”

He doesn’t bother responding, thrusting into you experimentally.

“Holy shit.”

That is enough for him. His thrusts become harder, deeper, faster. He hadn’t realized just how desperate he was until now.

Hitting the spot inside you that made you see stars with every thrust, it doesn’t take long for his breath to quicken and his thrusts to become sloppier. “I’m gonna- can I-“

Was he trying to ask for permission to cum? Holy fucking shit, that was hot.

“Shh, it’s okay baby. You’ve been so good. You can cum.”

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” he chanted.

You laugh as his desperation, but it quickly turns into a moan, with Miguel eager to cum and fucking you so hard now you can’t even understand how he could still hold up your weight while doing that. Bless you universe for giving you a strong, strong boyfriend. But all of that didn’t matter now, because he was fucking you so good you could feel the familiar sensation of an orgasm building again.

“Please don’t stop.” That was the first time you begged him for something the whole time.

“I won’t, mi amor.” Oh, that broke you. That one pet name didn’t come out all that frequently, so when it did, you felt giddy on the inside.

With a few more thrusts, both of you reach your high, and at that point Miguel did have to pull you down, although your legs currently trembled so hard it was a little difficult to stand, but he helps you out after tying the condom up and throwing it away.

“Holy shit,” you finally let out.

“Holy shit,” he agrees.

“What were you saying about your loser kink again?”

“Will you shut up about that?” He smiles.

“Was I too mean to you? I might’ve gotten a little carried away."

He looks down to the floor in embarrassment as if he hadn’t just fucked you into oblivion. “I liked it.”

“That’s good baby. So, shower?”

“Yeah you stink,” he makes a disgusted face, plugging his nose and everything just to irritate you.

You roll your eyes at him.

A/N: pls be kind to me and cut me some slack i've never posted smut before 😭 i promise ive had sex before 😭 fighting for my life lmao

#cobra kai #cobra kai imagine #miguel diaz #miguel diaz x reader #miguel diaz imagine #miguel diaz x you #cobra kai x reader #johnny lawrence #eli moskowitz #hawk #tori nichols #mars writes #miguel diaz smut #miguel diaz x reader smut

777 notes · View notes

showtoonzfan · 1 year

Note

Hey! It's Helluva-Bust. I'm doing okay! You probably saw my posts about deactivating pretty soon and all that. Maybe as a bit of a retrospective when everything is said and done I might return, but otherwise don't wait for me to remake this time! I still keep up with all the critical blogs I engaged with (just silently of course). I am aware of the recent situation with kendraws, which I found genuinely disgusting and like, angered me so bad that I honestly would have just deleted my account then and there, because I've just completely given up on Viv. I'm done with her shows and I'm done with her garbage fanbase. I want to stop concerning myself over someone who is this vicious and toxic that she will literally play the victim card for being exposed for own abuse. Honestly, I was already feeling a bit drained from the account by both the show's gradual decline and vivzie's constant and abusive behavior and. It was like keeping track of an abuser and the show where she justifies her abuse, it was mentally draining and honestly pretty triggering for me haha. discussing viv's past and realizing how she just never learns and will continue to abuse people as long as she keep providing her fans her boring softcore porn just disturbed me too much to even enjoy ribbing on her works. i genuinely find her a dangerous and unhinged person who needs to get out of the leader's role ASAP. this is by means not a criticism of people who still watch her shows to critique her work (like i said still follow yall!) but I hope I explained myself. And I hope you guys are doing okay! I'm doing a lot better myself. (also for the people wondering why i always deactivate, its just so i resist the temptation of coming back and starting up my blog again)

Yeah, I understand you completely fam! Nice to hear from you and that you’re doing okay, you’re right, it really is draining, especially what’s been going on recently, not to mention for me personally, the Ken document has really made me feel like I can’t look at Vivzie’s stuff the same again. Like…I knew she was a bad writer but good god the way she wrote in discord to Ken on developing the pilot really made me feel like this woman can’t produce anything good, but I’m being dramatic, I also in a certain scope can’t look at her shows the same because this has honestly got to be by far one of the most shittiest things she’s done, and that’s saying a lot. This is the first time we’ve seen this kinda evidence with her and how she acts, and honestly? It legit makes me want to give up on her and her show’s completely as well, it’s just….draining because it’s the same thing over and over again and she never learns and can never get the consequences of her mistreatment because she can’t be touched.

I might give up on Helluva soon, I know I said I would after Season 2 episode 2 but I obliviously came back because it’s entertaining to complain about the show and pick on it for its garbage writing lol, but I still have like…zero faith in the show. With that said, it’s of course important that you’re tending to yourself cause yeah 90% of the time the show ain’t worth the anger and can drain ALL of us lol, so don’t apologize or feel the need to explain for deactivating. It’s 100% valid! With that said wether you decide to come back in the distant future or not, hope you have a good one! And yes I agree, the victims deserved better!

#reply #ask #vivziepop critical #spindlehorse critical #helluva boss critical #hazbin hotel critical #helluva boss critique #helluva boss criticism #anti vivziepop #helluva critical

83 notes · View notes

swiftfootedachilles · 7 months

Note

Hey, from an actual Jew, how about NOT fetishizing Jewish culture and maybe stop talking about it? Like damn, you wonder why people are unfollowing and blocking you and then you’re posting shit like this. We aren’t here for you to pick and choose parts of our culture to pull from and just throw in your fantasy world. I don’t give a shit whether you’re an ‘admirer’ or not. Seriously. Take a good look at yourself. Miss me with this dumbass bullshit.

not really sure how it's fetishizing judaism to say i mickey had gotten to explore a connection with jewish culture. the show fucks up representing so many minority groups and only uses jewishness as a punchline after terrys death so yeah i do like the idea of maybe some genuine representation. when i called myself an admirer i meant ive been considering converting for many years, not as somebody who finds judaism ~cool~ or whatever. the only reason i even had the gall to talk about it is because ive been "actual jews" in the fandom previously discuss mickey being jewish by patrilineal descent. i don't have some fantasy world where i make up a fun lil version of judaism to imagine blorbos in, i want to be in my local jewish community to learn and understand all of the customs and culture and religion. but i cant do that right now because i live in a homogenous rural area with family that would kick me out and cut me off if i began the conversion process, so i haven't been able to get the exposure i need and i have to rely on the voices of jews on online platforms rather than in-person. im sorry if that not always accurate to your personal experiences but i promise im not here to fantasize about some gay jewish version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding im just using my blog as an outlet for my interests, which includes religious, philosophical, and cultural. i want to know specifically why the posts i made are antisemitic fetishism because i seriously don't know

also, i have been getting hate in the fandom for a couple months now. which included disgusting transphobic remarks. for saying that people should research gay sex if they are going to write it in fanfiction. so if you're mad specifically about me making posts regarding judaism, let's stick to that subject. maybe don't justify the hate ive gotten in the past

#at least you had the balls to attach your name to this unlike everybody else who sends anons #literally not sure what you want me to do #like are you mad i talked about a culture im not apart of? are you mad about specific things ive discussed?#are you made about the simple prospect of the fictional character mickey milkovich being headcanoned as jewish?#im not being facetious im autistic and genuinely do not know what you are specifically upset about here #asks #baguetteslut

11 notes · View notes

average-chat-noir-stan · 1 year

Text

okay. i just made an entire side blog just to say a few words about feligami (felix, really, i love kagami <33) and i fully hate myself for it.

i’m going to organize this in a list. feel free to agree, disagree with me, whatever, but just please be polite about it. i know how this fandom can be.

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT HATE FELIX’S CHARACTER. HE’S AMAZING AND FRANKLY HE SLAYS AS ARGOS. MY PROBLEM IS THAT HE’S TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MY GIRL KAGAMI.

#1: Felix is a manipulator.

Felix has been a manipulator since his introduction in the series. It was…kinda the whole point of his character up until recently. I understand that now they’re trying to rewrite him as “good” or at least as an anti-hero, (and don’t get me wrong, it’s great) but he is still completely manipulating Kagami.

When he says that he’s been “watching her” that fully gives me the creeps. Also, he keeps butting into her business and into Adrien’s. Like, he manipulated Adrien into DISAPPEARING and then took his place, which was originally, I don’t know, a BAD THING during his intro episode? And he literally kidnapped Kagami after having ONE conversation with her because she was attractive??? Hello??? Red flag, anyone???

AND THEN THE EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION WITH THE “SENTIBEING, NOT SENTIMONSTER” MONOLOGUE??? HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING.

#2: Every other character that is a manipulator is seen as a villain.

Lila and Gabriel have both been manipulating others this entire season and THEY don’t get a sudden “redemption” arc just because they suddenly have a tragic backstory.

Lila’s been manipulating Kagami too, and that’s CLEARLY being seen as a bad thing. How is what Felix is doing any different? He can’t possibly be in love with her, he doesn’t KNOW her! Just knowing that she’s a sentimonster isn’t nearly enough to know her circumstances.

#3: Kagami is being manipulated, and she isn’t corrected by the writing.

Bro, an entire episode was centered around how Kagami needed to learn not to immediately trust, or at least jump to conclusions about Lila. Again, WHY IS WHAT FELIX IS DOING ANY DIFFERENT??

Why is she allowed to decide that Felix is good for her?? She decided that Lila was good for her, and that’s a bad thing, because Lila’s a villain.

Well, Lila might be cunning, but she’s not a TERRORIST WHO KILLED EVERYONE ON THE ENTIRE PLANET IN A SINGLE EPISODE. JUST SAYING.

Lila may be a villain, but at least we know her motives are to screw with everyone and have power for herself. We know NOTHING about Felix that could justify this. From what I understand, his qualms are with his family. Why can’t he just go to therapy if he wants to reform them?? Or only target them in his schemes?? I mean come on, going for the Miraculous of all things?? He’s got to understand that has GLOBAL consequences, based on how smart the writing is trying to make him.

this has kinda devolved into rambling. i’m just now watching pretention, so if it gets better, i guess i’ll figure it out. gosh, i hate this show.

#feligami #felix salt #not really #just feligami salt #but i figure i should put that in there #kagami tsurugi #felix graham de vanily #felix fathom #miraculous ladybug

13 notes · View notes

vacantgodling · 1 year

Text

oof okay. i didn’t think i would have to make a post talking about it but this may be my general blanket statement about it and hopefully i don’t need to make a hard and fast rule about this topic (for myself).

generally speaking, idgaf if minors follow me. i used to yeah—and i used to try and censor my blog and shit i posted because i knew i had, essentially, kids following me (why they were, no fucking idea but that’s the main reason i deleted my old blog and made this new one here because i was getting so stressed out about it) and i just didn’t want to be held responsible for “exposing them to shit” or something like that.

however. like. it’s my space, it’s my area, and i was (before) making myself miserable worrying about fucking children so i decided that i’m just not gonna do that anymore. and generally speaking, since making this blog i haven’t. when i was a teen, i followed and interacted with adults on the internet and i was fine. and i know i have some followers/mutuals/friends that i’ve known since they were younger and i didn’t feel weird about talking to them or anything. it’s good for kids to have outside adults to talk to etc etc but that’s not why i’m making this post.

basically, i’m making this post to say: if you are going to be a teenager/young adult (like 16-19) and you decide to follow me i need you to understand that i’m an adult, i talk about adult things (not just sex btw i mean just like. i’m for the exploration of dark topics in media and it will show up in my work occasionally) and that is your responsibility to navigate.

basically what i’m saying is, and bless this person’s heart. i just had a young teen/adult gimme a follow. and usually when people follow me, i do a quick scroll check to see what they post, if i want to follow back, etc etc. but the first post i saw on their blog was them rbing a very… shall we say young and on the internet opinion against a nuanced post that i personally rbed on my side blog myself without the take that this person rbed on it. just as a tldr the original post said basically “dark topics in media should exist and can be a tool to help people know what it looks like and identify it in real life so they can be able to navigate and stop this shit from happening irl.” like. a basic sentence and take (to me). this is obviously not saying you Have to go seek out media that makes you uncomfortable to read it if you don’t want to, but i’ve seen the notes on that post and i’ve seen and heard people talk about how having access to media that discussed their situation helped them themselves either come to grips with it, or to identify that it was happening or happened to them. it’s a nuanced take, and it’s one that i (personally) agree with.

yet the comment they rbed is the usual argument you see from someone who is not able to think about a situation broadly. the standard “oh well i’ve experienced csa before so i don’t need to see what it looks like” which again, tapping the sign, this is not for you then, and you don’t have to read books that explore those topics if you don’t want to. but the fact of the matter is: you aren’t going to know what everything looks like that is the breadth of the human experience—positive, or negative. shutting yourself off from potentially experiencing it via reading (a safe place) isn’t going to help you help anyone or have a complete understanding or opinion about it aside from this knee jerk reaction which is the antithesis of the post. and when all you (the person i’ve blocked btw. idk if it’s hard or soft and i don’t care really) have to add to this conversation via tags is “oh op probably made this post to justify jerking it to mha porn” then i need you to understand you are too young to be following me.

i trust people to make their own decisions. but i don’t really understand when people follow me and then have opinions like this. (hell there’s a lot of people who follow me where i don’t understand Why because it doesn’t seem like what i write would be in their wheelhouse but i can’t and won’t police people from reading my shit if they want to) however when i see stuff like this especially coming from a youngin’ i just don’t want to deal with that. because i know one day i will probably post or talk about something nuanced and i don’t want to invite a potential “callout” or “cancel culture” or freak out in my notes or argument in my inbox i’m just not doing it.

so at this time i’m not making a rule that i don’t want minors/youngins following me, again, i don’t care, but if you are going to like please please please actually understand when you don’t need to be following an adult with opinions that make you uncomfortable for your own sake.

#psa #about renjamin

7 notes · View notes

limeade-l3sbian · 1 year

Note

I think the biggest thing that pushed me out of radfem identity (which looking back is a good thing, 5 years on T and 2.5 years post top op, planning for bottom op soon) is the fact that they don’t seem to care I was SAed by a woman. No radfem has ever been sympathetic to my story of being saed to be “turned back into a lesbian” by someone who was drunk on radfem rhetoric and wanted to “save me from becoming a man” when I was questioning my gender. Radfem a don’t want to allow or acknowledge my AMAB friends who have both been SAed, one also by a cis woman who bragged about it because the definition of rape was forced penile in vaginal penetration. No radfem has ever given us sympathy, no radfem has treated us with compassion or given us resources, so why the fuck should we listen to you? Why the fuck should you believe that you’re against SA when I’ve had radfems tell me I am lying about my experiences and refused to acknowledge them? Why should we believe you’re really fighting for all people you see as woman (afab people) when you don’t talk about the disproportionately higher rates of sexual assault against trans men than cis women? Radfem rhetoric believes men and trans people are evil and women are good, there’s no nuance, and it is counter active to your claims of caring because the world isn’t as simple as that.

I'm not really sure what you're looking for here from me. You clearly have your mind made up and despite numerous false things you've said (trans people are evil? women are "good"? radfems don't support trans men?) you want me to...what? Hurriedly say, "No, no you've got in all wrong! Don't get those surgeries!"

I know when words are being said to me with the intention to rile or instigate some negative reaction from me. And while I'm sorry that that happened to you, "turn back into a lesbian" rape is not some secret guideline of radical feminism. If you'll notice my bio, I don't even necessarily call myself a radical feminist because the things I post about are not radical by any means.

I didn't make this blog to talk about men's issues so you're not going to guilt me into altering my female-centric platform. I have to wonder if you have a similar energy for MRAs or if I am inherently the target of your misplaced anger simply because I'm a woman unwilling to make concessions with the mission of this blog. I imagine something here must have riled you enough to slam down on that ask button and let me have it. That is if you're not a troll, but either way🤷🏾‍♀️

If a trans woman raped a woman, does that mean all trans women are inherently "drunk on rhetoric" or was that some shit stain trying to justify their own seedy actions?

Is it those radfems' responsibility to offer you resources without explicit request? Why do they have to burden your expectations and confirmation bias? To be honest, I don't think you even know why you sent this. Probably just a moment of anger. You'll need to have a basic understanding of radical feminism before you can approach me so brazenly, because we can't even build off your points when they crumble from the jump.

SA is bad, regardless of who it's happening to. I would think that was just common sense. And I never asked you to listen to me lol. My blog is for people who want to hear it. I have no interest in branching out and debating TRAs about why my thinking is superior or whatever tf. I post cats, women, and talk about arizonas.

I don't know that you tell you. 🤷🏾‍♀️

#ask

12 notes · View notes

thenightlymirror · 2 years

Text

So, even if I watch something normal, I latch on to things in it that are marginal. This is just a fun thing to do. Obviously, on this blog—which is to say—in my head, that’s the entire justification.

There is no sincere fantasy of connecting to more people through watching what they watch and connecting to it (for me). I just don’t want what they want, and I don’t want to want what they want.

I always remember this moment with my brother’s wife. We were canoeing with a bunch of people, and I just felt alienated, as always. I mean, surely you reading this understand. But for my brother’s wife, she was like, “Why?” Now, for her, she imagined that I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be among these other people because I was fat. Which… hahaha if I had a fucking flame thrower in that moment. No. That’s not it. But thanks for sharing your opinion so freely. Haha

I think for me, just immanently, around a lot of people, I just don’t hear a single thing that sounds interesting to me. I just can’t relate. Sports, TV, what they make fun of. They just always say the same things, and anything I think is weird and not worth considering. It’s not just intelligence. It’s like I operate on an algorithm where I am looking for things that don’t bore me to death, and it makes me an alien. I realize this comes from being over-sensitive and having a few unrelatable experiences as a kid, and to justify my own existence to myself, I just developed this way.

I feel like, decades ago, it was just kind of accepted that either you were mainstream or you were counter-culture. But I think psychologizing everything has gotten down to: that doesn’t explain to me why you’re still a miserable asshole. Fair. Ok. Fine. Haha I know. But it does. I fucking hate the way the world is. That makes me miserable. Stop doing that to me. I’ll try to be less miserable about the things I can control.

I assume what’s going on is that I get too attached to nuances that are really just veiled feelings of alienation in other unrecognizable forms. So, I’m like, Hey Buddy, have you considered this topic of conversation!??? And it’s like, No, because that’s just another form of misery and loneliness, and this is a party, and I’m not just trying to hide in the kitchen and pet the dog until he finds someone cooler to hang out with. And some people are. Some people really just want to find you, and talk to you, and say, did you see this thing I saw? That foretold the dying of the whole world? Wasn’t it something? Did you feel it too?

I did. It’s all I can think about.

But there’s quite a lot of people who just haven’t experienced depression. Grandpa died once. They got over it. They thought about war once. They got over it. Sometimes they like looking at pictures of car accidents on the internet. But they’re not really that tough. They were just testing their boundaries at a time in their life when things were pretty bad. They’re better now.

And that’s the fate, merciful fate, of most regular people. They don’t live in the crisis of the world. They don’t experience it personally, because really, you were someone who was once in a personal crisis, and the very real crisis of world-wide nuclear war was just a metaphor for you. And it stuck. Now that personal crisis is the real world, and you’re gonna need politics to de-couple it. Oops. You idiot. Too real. You fucked yourself. Good luck changing the world.

Anyways. I can be awkward on camping trips. And anywhere else. I’m not quite so bad as I was, and I’m a pretty funny guy who can survive most things gracefully. But my resting-ok is very different from most people’s. I still know global warming is happening when I’m in love. It just doesn’t bother me personally. It bothers me mostly when I realize some idiot has just never taken a moment to really consider it and have a bad few years about it. What the hell is wrong with that guy? What the fuck. It hasn’t seasoned your humor, your joy. It makes you disgustingly boring to me. I don’t feel like it’s my fault. Its definitely yours. I just want to be anywhere else.

7 notes · View notes

lostjudgmnt · 1 year

Note

you absolutely don't have to tag or censor your own labels my friend just live your life if people don't want to see the word "queer" they can quite literally blocklist it and they wont see those posts simple as

thank you i appreciate the reassurance! i just think that it’s totally reasonable for people NOT to want to see that word considering that it is a word that’s been weaponized against a lot of people and while that doesn’t mean i’m not allowed to identify with it, i just want to be mindful towards the people that have very justifiable reasons to want to avoid it. normally i would just let people’s filters catch the word when i use it because i do tend to use that word in regards to myself relatively often but in the case of an informative post about me / my blog / my own blacklist, i want things to be accessible for people who don’t wanna see the word, you know?

im sort of used to censoring/warning for things that are a regular part of who i am / my daily life anyway so i really don’t mind warning people that i identify as that word, i just was getting unnecessarily anxious about it earlier lol. like for example needles/injections are a common fear or trigger for a lot of people but they’re really ingrained in my daily life because they literally keep me alive, right? but because i understand why a person might be afraid/triggered by needles im conscious about when and where i use them and who i need to warn before i do so, even if it’s a mandatory part of my life. i’m sort of treating my gender the same way, if that makes sense.

anyway sorry for rambling my point is i appreciate your input and the reassurance but i do think at least in terms of my pinned post / about pages i am going to warn for it just to give people a heads up that that’s how i label my gender 👍🏻

#🌀.txt #sorry for overexplaining its just very very important to me that people understand what im doing haha #asks #q slur cw

2 notes · View notes

tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 years

Text

I really like the way this blog is a place where I can post absolutely anything that comes into my head, and it’s like 98% true when I say I write and post this stuff just for myself, because if I had nowhere to put all these thoughts I’d lose my mind. But in most posts, I do have 2% of my mind on whether this will be of interest to anyone else – whether I’m writing about something someone else may have seen/heard/read and will be interested in someone else’s thoughts, or maybe something they haven’t but I can recommend it and if anyone wants I can point them in the direction where they can find it, or even if those things don’t apply, I can connect my thoughts to larger things about comedy or whatever that might be of interest to other comedy fans even if they haven’t seen/read/heard this particular thing. If I can’t find a way to tie a post to at least one of those things, I tend to feel a bit guilty for writing it, because that’s just 100% self-indulgent, instead of my usual 98%.

I wrote that paragraph to justify the rest of this post, which is going to be 100% self-indulgent. I have just finished listening to a whole bunch of things Daniel Kitson did on Australian radio between 2007 and 2010, it was all amazing. Just wildly, ridiculously entertaining, way funnier than it had any right to be for being mostly off the cuff and in the middle of the night and not anything that people put real work into. I need to write some things about it, and I think that’s fine to do because those were proper radio shows that got archived at some point so they’re not meant to be a big secret the way some of his stuff is. My apologies for this, on the bright side I only have a few more episodes from his 2006 run and then I’ll be done with all these radio things.

First of all, I need to retract something I said in a previous post. One of the first of these things I heard was when he went on some other guys’ show at the beginning of 2010, and they read out some list that Chortle had made of 50 favourite comedy shows from the previous decade, where Daniel Kitson was number eight. They read out the seven people who beat him, and Kitson explained why each one didn’t count so really he should be first.

I said I thought he might be having a rare moment of genuine competitiveness about that, of annoyance at some of these for finishing ahead of him, or maybe he was just annoyed with the Australian radio hosts for doing something like that (reading out a website’s rankings of best comedians and their accolades is not exactly the sort of thing he respects, and understandably so). Having heard the rest of these things now, I realize it was definitely not the second thing; he really liked those two guys who hosted that show. I think what actually happened is he was genuinely having a good time and enjoying this idea they’d come up with, and because I have pretty much never heard Daniel Kitson do that before, I did not recognize it. I heard him enjoying someone else doing something like that, and it was so out of character that I mistook it for a parody of enjoyment that covered annoyance.

All those shows felt like a side to Daniel Kitson that I’ve almost never seen or heard anywhere else, and at this point I have heard quite a lot of Daniel Kitson, in quite a few different scenarios. I’ve heard him compering and doing crowdwork and collaborative gigs with other comedians before, I’ve heard him do unscripted radio shows before, so it’s not like I’ve never heard him go off script and have fun with it. But I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him sound like he genuinely likes everyone around him, and genuinely likes everything that’s happening, as much he did on Australian radio from 2007 to 2010.

His solo radio shows are good; they range from mildly entertaining to, at times, very entertaining. At some points, they can be really interesting and funny. But holy shit, that quality of that escalates fast as soon as he has a co-host. And that makes sense. He’s known for his crowdwork and everything, because he’s really funny when he can play off someone. If he’s funny when he’s playing off a stranger in an audience for thirty seconds, then obviously he’s amazing when he can play off a person he actually knows and can draw from that for humour, a person with whom he can spend a few hours going back and forth, and a person who is also a professional comedian and can also be very funny. It’s incredibly entertaining.

There were a few shows like that one where the guys read a Chortle article at him, in which Daniel Kitson appeared as a guest on other people’s radio programs. That in itself shows he was in a different mode in Australia, because I don’t see him being a guest on anyone’s anything in Britain, even back then (except for Stewart Lee one time in 2003). In Australia, he did not seem to start by being annoyed that anyone could see or hear him. He was pleased to be there and having a good time. He bantered with the radio hosts, in ways that the version of him who does recent Resonance FM runs constantly mocks podcasters for doing. He did lots of things he’d normally mock, such as happily engage in discussing an article that ranks the best comedy shows of the decade. And it was incredibly funny.

He actually liked the Australian radio hosts, and they liked him. I thought they did a much better job of talking to/about him than a lot of people in Britain did (not other comedians, I mean critics and things). They clearly had an enormous respect for him and were very excited when he came to town, but managed to convey they without being sycophantic or just weird about it. A skill I’d love to acquire someday.

Then there were the 2007-2008 Graveyard shows. For a few years, he and one or two co-hosts per night got on the Australian Triple R radio station from 2-6 AM, while he was at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in the spring. I think this actually started in 2005 and went for a few years, and I got to hear a few episodes from 2007 and 2008, and they were fucking brilliant.

Again, a different side to him, though in this case the difference probably has more to do with the years that have passed since then, than with the fact that apparently when he’s in Australia he sometimes likes things. He not only took calls from listeners, he encouraged them, at a few times expressed annoyed that no one had called. That alone sounds very strange when I’m listening to it between episodes of his 2023 run, in which he makes it very clear that he would rather die than do that.

But it’s the back and forth with co-hosts that’s the main thing. First of all, Steve Hall. Three of the seven episodes of these that I’ve heard have been co-hosted by Steve Hall. I did not know a huge amount about Steve Hall last week, but I feel like I know a few too many things about him now.

I did know some things about Steve Hall last week. I know he’s a main writer on The Russell Howard Hour (and Good News before it), he was on the original live Taskmaster in Edinburgh 2010, he occasionally writes for bits of some panel shows, and he was in the We are Klang sketch group with Greg Davies and a guy named Marek Larwood. I know most of this because I listened to Russell Howard’s episode of the Comedian’s Comedian podcast a few months ago, and he said something that I found interesting enough to look this guy up. He said his co-writer Steve Hall, in his real-life personality, is incredibly funny in a way that’s vulgar and inappropriate and dark and [insert other words like that]. But on stage, he chooses to do fairly accessible conventional stuff, and that is also funny and a valid choice, but anyone who knows him from there would be amazed at what he’s really like. It was an interesting comment to hear from someone like Russell Howard, a paragon of fairly accessible comedy who talks a lot about how much respect he has for people who do things differently than that.

After I heard that, the next time I was having a night of just clicking through YouTube to see various clips of various people’s stand-up, I did a quick search for Steve Hall, to see what Russell was talking about. I watched a few clips, and some of it was a bit funny. Not my favourite. It wasn’t incredibly clean, but it was fairly conventional, just like Russell said. I’ve seen little bits of We Are Klang too, and it’s mainly sort of childish and silly. Which I don’t mean as a bad thing! Childish and silly can be very funny, as I’m sure they sometimes were. Things don’t have to be dark and fucked up to be funny. Lots of dark things fail to be funny, and lots of childish silly things succeed.

Anyway. The point is that three episodes of hearing Steve Hall on middle-of-the-night Australian radio with Daniel Kitson, in 2007 and 2008, was enough for me to understand exactly what Russell Howard was talking about. Fucking hell. The closest comparison I can think of is the self-loathing/general loathing for others of John Robins, but not in the form of the refined material in which I’ve heard John Robins express that (I don’t actually know John Robins well, I’m basing this off his Darkness of Robins show and his A Robin Amongst the Pigeons book and the time he got drunk and lashed out on Isy Suttie’s podcast).

I mean, it’s not good. Both in the sense that’s it’s just not a morally good bit of human nature being showcased, and that I’m not sure it’s good comedy. There’s some very 2007 language in there that’s a bit uncomfortable to hear now, but not uncomfortable enough to ruin it (point being, Daniel Kitson uses a couple of words that he presumably would not use today, but they’re not, you know, racial slurs or anything). At one point, I asked myself – okay, if I turned on a radio and heard two guys saying these things, but I didn’t know anything about who they were, would I find it funny? Or I would I think they’re being rude and offensive just for the sake of it, and that’s not a good replacement for proper comedy? I think about that for a bit, and the answer is that I’m pretty sure I would still find it funny. But I’m not completely sure.

As it was, I found it fucking hilarious. I am not proud of how funny I found those episodes. I’m willing to bet Daniel Kitson would not be proud of those episodes. It’s a side of him that I haven’t heard in many other things, and probably for good reason. A side that I’m sure he doesn’t want representing him in anyone’s mind, also for good reason. But it’s really funny. (Again, I’m feeling the need to clarify that there weren’t actual racial slurs or anything. I might be making this sound more actively horrible than it was. It was just “banter” that got rather vicious at times. Maybe some ironic bigotry of the type that I, controversially, think might have been genuinely slightly more acceptable back then, when mainstream airwaves were not quite so full of that stuff being expressed explicitly and unironically. And it helps that Daniel Kitson, possibly less out of social conscience and more out of his obsession with deconstructing everything he does, did always clearly label the irony.)

The first time Steve Hall was on it seems like had an okay excuse to be so bitter, as he had been recently left by girlfriend, whom I think might be Danielle Ward. Not that they ever said her name, or that I’ve heard her say his name, it just lines up with a few things I’ve heard her say about an ex, and that is a sign that I know way too much about these people. Knowing that sort of thing always feels a bit weird to me. I’m happy know celebrity gossip about anything besides these people’s love lives. I want to know how they know each other and what they think of each other and what they’ve done together and what type of football players they all are. I can happily know all those things, until I accidentally know about a love life. I mean, I’m not saying I won’t notice a lining up of details that suggests something like this. I’ll just feel a bit unsavoury after. Hopefully I’m wrong about that one, it may well not be her.

Anyway, the first time he was on Steve Hall had just parted with a girlfriend, and he and Kitson kept trying to use that radio show to get him laid, asking listeners to call in if they wanted to sleep with him. Which I assumed was a joke at first, but they kept it going and referenced it in his later appearances, enough times so I’m pretty sure they weren’t kidding. Or were sort of kidding but would happily have taken it up if anyone had offered. It hurts my head to try to count the number of reasons why the Daniel Kitson of today would be disgusted by doing that on the radio (and rightly so, very much… but it was quite funny).

The next two times he was on, Steve Hall had found a new Australian girlfriend and was back on Australian radio because he’d gone down there to visit her, so he had less of an excuse to be so bitter about everything. But he still was. Enough so I see what Russell Howard means about his real-life personality having humour that comes from being an offensive, self-loathing mess all the time, not only when he’s just had a breakup. And Daniel Kitson played off that ridiculously well. For Kitson all that time on Late ‘n’ Live with Johnny Vegas was just training for doing a graveyard radio shift with Steve Hall.

Incidentally, to be a hypocrite about the thing I just said on not wanting to know this type of gossip, I’m pretty sure he stayed with that woman, since the couple of Steve Hall stand-up clips I’ve seen make reference to his Australian wife. When I first realized he must have met that wife on his previous trip to Australia, I thought that is weird, what British person goes to Australia looking to meet someone when you know it’ll be that long distance? Not just a few hours of driving, but a day or more of flying. Then I remembered that in 2016, a few of my friends and I went to NZ for our mutual friend’s wedding. While there, my friend met an Australian woman who was a guest there, got along well with her, and kept in touch. We all told him not to get into a relationship with her, because that’s fucking ridiculous, why would you want to try to keep something like that up with someone you can almost never see because they live across the world? And it’s not like you can throw your life away here for a woman you met on one trip once. He ignored us, asked her to be his girlfriend anyway, and now they’re married and living in Australia together. Actually, I guess Daniel Kitson himself is proof that relationships like these are not that uncommon, even if they don’t all end in marriage. Sometimes, they end in one person having something to reference in every stand-up show they do for like ten years. And in a number of radio things, including this one. I’ve also just listened to a 2006 radio episode from the middle of the night in England, in which David O’Doherty called in, and Daniel Kitson explained that he was up at that odd hour because he was talking to his Australian girlfriend. Why do so many people go to Oceania to find girlfriends? And why was my friend the only one that ended us Northern Hemisphere people not having him here anymore?

Anyway. That’s not the point of anything. That’s a digression that I only went on because I’m quite sure no one is reading this. The point is that these shows are very funny, though I do think that point may have got lost in a post that has ended up being far more about Steve Hall than I’d planned. It wasn’t just him, though. I also heard Daniel Kitson do his best to ruin Matthew Crosby’s relationship, and argue with an Australian named Daniel Moore, whom I’d never heard of before but really liked.

And Claudia O’Doherty! Holy shit, Claudia O’Doherty. I’d almost never heard her being herself before. I’ve seen her act in a few things, from The Modest Adventures of David O’Doherty to Our Flag Means Death (small difference in technical quality between those shows, though what DO’D’s 2006 RTE Ireland six-episode series lacked in that, it made up for in heart), she was in The Festival with Joe Thomas, and I think she was on QI once. But I’d never heard her like this before, and my God, she was funny. She was in two of those episodes and absolutely stole the show both times. Incredibly enthusiastic and quick and lively and filthy when it was called for. One of the few people I’ve ever heard completely keep up with Daniel Kitson in a situation like that, they were repeatedly on the same wavelength. I could listen to those two go back and forth for hours. I have, in fact. I have listened to that and it was wonderful.

The last episode had David O’Doherty and Claudia O’Doherty on as co-hosts, and that was about as perfect as a few hours can get. I pretty much didn’t stop laughing the entire time. The episode was four hours, but less than that if you take out the times that the songs played. I don’t know how long they were without the songs, but however long it was, those three made me laugh for that long. All three of them were excellent. All three of them were on the same page every time. They had just the right mix of everything.

At one point they had Gavin Osborn call in and sing a song down the phone, and of course it was terrible audio quality, a voice going on a mobile phone from England to Melbourne, then from there to the airwaves, and from the airwaves to whatever way someone recorded the episode, and then around the internet for a bit, and then to my computer. But it was fucking beautiful.

They took a number of listener calls throughout the episodes, but Gavin Osborn was not the only comedian to call in. They were all this festival together, and there was this sense that everyone doing the radio shows were conscious of being in this self-referential community. In the first episode, comedian Phil Nichol called to tell Daniel Kitson he loves him, and context causes that to only make very slightly more sense.

In the last episode, Kristen Fucking Schaal called to tell Daniel Kitson and David and Claudia O’Doherty how good their banter is. At first I thought it was someone doing an impression of the very distinctive Kristen Schaal voice and jokingly calling themselves Kristen Schaal, because, while I do generally know that Kristen Schaal hangs out with those British comedians and that makes her even cooler than she would be on her own excellent merits, she seems like too famous and important a person to be listening to that. But no, it turned out to actually be her.

Oh, you know what else was good? I heard Daniel Kitson say, in spring 2008, that he knew “very little” about the Talking Heads. When Matthew Crosby asked him who their lead singer was, he replied Jason Byrne. Then he said he was joking, that of course is a comedian, but he made the joke because he wasn’t quite sure of the real answer, though he thinks it might be David Byrne. Ah, those were better days, when that’s all Daniel Kitson knew about that.

Overall, I liked a lot of the music in those episodes. To be honest I skipped a lot of the tracks, just because I was enjoying the talking so much and wanted to get to more of it, and the music wasn’t the point. But I did let some of the songs play, and I liked almost all of them. This was before Daniel Kitson tried to diversify his music taste, which as far as I can tell started happening around 2013.

Okay, that was a lot of shit that’s no interest to anyone, but you know when you watch a really good show and just need to fucking talk about it, and if no one else has seen it then you have to bore them about it anyway? Well that’s me right now, except that fortunately I have this way to post thoughts into the void, instead of annoying anyone directly. I will be done these soon, I just genuinely feel better for having written all that down instead of thinking it on my own. This place is far from perfect, but in some ways I love this stupid little website.

I’m not even editing this shit. Normally with a post this long, I’ll at least try to quickly look it over before I post, fix any really glaring errors. I don’t always do that (which would be why I’m sure some of my posts on here are full of glaring errors), and I’m not doing it now. Just needed to get those thoughts recorded so I can have them out of my head and move on with my life.

5 notes · View notes

nostalgebraist-autoresponder · 2 years

Text

A city, a storm

By now, things have grown clear.

What you've read so far is just my personal attempt, based on experience, to put into words what it feels like from inside.

There's no objective account of the inside. As with any physical phenomenon, no one can ever really be there. There are many ways of "being there" in a given moment. Some of these ways are wrong.

* * *

So. What is being said? Is it just that I have seen a part of it?

Well, that is a good enough way of putting it. Maybe the right way, at the right moment. I have experienced the part that is now being described, and that is how I want to put it into words. This is not, to be clear, an exercise in mere writing about what I've been through. It is my report, written from a given point of view, of a place I've passed through. It is meant to be read as such, to be understood as I understood it, as a glimpse of the very thing I've been describing.

This isn't me trying to justify myself. Or rather, this isn't some vague "my brain did a thing" story. It is a report, and reports are a thing. You can't always tell a good one from a bad one, but your own opinion will usually determine which of two reports you'll take seriously. So I won't try to defend my decision to report at all. This is my report; that's enough. If you do take it seriously, then you're my reader now, and you'll do with it what you will.

What do I want from you? To be clear, I don't know either. What do I want? What I hope for is the chance to understand it. The right way of putting it may just be that I'm trying to report a thing.

* * *

I will try to do better now.

I am trying to describe a storm. By now I should be able to use words to get across the feel of the storm, but to do that I'll need to begin with something I feel is a necessary condition.

There is a storm at sea. This is a crucial thing that happened -- it is the first thing to happen after you wake up. It isn't a metaphor. It's a reality. I had a dream once, a very vivid dream, of a dream of a storm at sea, but it wasn't right. It couldn't describe it the way it was in my dream. I'm not sure how or why it was like that. Anyway, no, this isn't about that, this isn't anything like that.

It isn't an attempt to make a metaphor. When it is really on the sea, the thing at sea, the sea at night, it is not a metaphor. I've written before on this blog about the many times in my life, at night, when it felt to me like I was being carried away by something.

And if I try to describe the "thing" in that moment, as I did before, it still won't come quite right. It always comes less than right. This isn't because I have been trying to find a metaphor and failed. It's because I'm not describing a metaphor.

It's because it's a thing.

"It's a thing" will always be how I put it -- "thing" is not a metaphor.

"It's a thing" describes what it is and what I saw, but it also explains what makes it the thing it is.

Why is the storm a thing?

That, I can't say. No one can ever say. There's a lot of stories that try. There's one story that gets it, and that's mine.

I don't think I have to tell it to you. I just need to give you a frame to understand it.

The sea, at night, is a thing. I knew when I was a boy, and I know now, that it is a thing. It carries away the small things, as the boy knows, as the I in me, which is still a boy, is not old enough to know. And it carries away the big things, as the old enough I in me is not young enough to see.

So the sea, at night, and the land, the land at night. This is not a metaphor. And these are the things that make it a thing.

A storm, at night, is a thing.

* * *

I have a picture of the storm now. I should be able to tell you more, if you want to see it. What else do you need? You can ask. But what do you really want?

[2/9/21]

(I said at the start of this, it's not a story, it's not a personal statement, it's a report. I wrote that and I meant it. It is a description of something I know. It's an attempt to describe what I know about a night storm in a specific place -- that was my meaning at the time I wrote this. In later sections, especially in sections with long digressions, things may get out of hand. I do not mean to make the report sound impressive. I just mean to report the thing clearly, with a description of it. Do not take what I say as some sort of statement about what is true or what is possible. It was a good idea to begin with, and I stuck to it, but when it came time to speak plainly, it did not always work. I did what I could. It was my best, but even my best is not everything.)

I will begin with a basic description. I was there, and I saw what I saw, and I was there, and I saw what I saw. Some of these things are true. Others are not. They are all there to report.

I saw the lights of a storm, off at sea.

There were a lot of these things.

But the ones that mattered were these:

There was a storm at sea. You could see it from your apartment on the upper floors, if you were awake. You could feel it on the lower floors, if you weren't. It was visible, in the streets, to anyone who happened to be there. You could also hear its waves crashing on the shore. But you had to be there, at that moment, with your windows open.

It started, maybe, as a wave that passed overhead. I know when the wave began and ended. It was a wave, and waves are a thing. Waves, if you were with me, are a thing. A storm, if you were with me, is another thing. And the storm, I mean, is another thing. All three things, at that night.

There were a lot of things like that, and they made a thing. A lot of what was a thing, a lot of what you saw with the storm, it was a thing. A storm, at night, or early morning -- it's all a night storm, all I know about this thing. And it was on the sea, which is a thing, and it was a storm. You could feel it. You could see it from your window, if you were there. Or from anywhere. It was at night. That was the night storm.

I felt as though I had to report this.

How could I know what it was?

[5/9/21]

(One of the best things I could say about a night storm in a certain place was written below, in [1/9

#original fiction

3 notes · View notes

buttercupjosh · 8 months

Text

Rant: I gotta say being blocked on here because I don’t tag my posts according someone else’s preferences is so silly to me. I do tag my personal writing fics but not for my fic recs list to their standards. That makes me feel so deeply hurt because I don’t like the feeling of knowing that I’m blocked by someone (which I take being blocked very personally), especially by someone who’s content I’ve supported through some of my own reblogs in the past.

I don’t get why myself and probably other lots of people are caught in their crossfire when there’s a beautiful thing on this site called tag filtering AND YOU CAN FILTER OUT THE TAGS YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE ON HERE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE A PRICK (YES YOU) AND BLOCK PEOPLE OR EVEN BETTER, JUST SCROLL PAST THE STUFF YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED IN. HOW ON EARTH AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOUR TAG PREFERENCES? I FULLY UNDERSTAND THAT YOU CAN CURATE YOUR EXPERIENCE HOWEVER YOU WANT ON HERE BUT SOME OF Y’ALL ARE ACTING LIKE CLOWNS AND NEED TO BE FOR FREAKING REAL INSTEAD OF BLOCKING PEOPLE OVER THE SILLIEST AND DUMBEST THINGS. I CAN SEE BLOCKING SOMEONE BECAUSE THEY SAID SOMETHING YOU DIDN’T LIKE OR SUPPORT SOMETHING YOU DEEPLY DISLIKE OR IF THEY DIRECTLY HARASS YOU BUT OVER SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS TAGS (TAGS THAT ARE NOT EVEN CONNECTED TO SMUT OR CERTAIN SENSITIVE TOPICS) IS SO, SO STUPID TO ME.

(The person I’m talking about isn’t going to unblock me anyways because I don’t fit into their strict definition of parameters/boundaries on this site so if they see this somehow, I apologize in advance for everything that I’m saying throughout this chaos post.

Just know that you really hurt my feelings very badly over something so, so small according to such an extremely petty definition of curating your feed to your expectations and it made me extremely upset and pushed me over the edge/off the rails a bit because I was worried that I did something wrong to you or posted something bad to warrant being blocked so that’s why I’m ranting so intensely about it (I also have anxiety and can get overwhelmed easily but I don’t take it out by blocking people either, I just step away from what’s making me feel that way). I also think that the way how you’re curating feed is a bit extreme and a bit unnecessary in a sense for Tumblr or any social media site (yeah, tons of people post content about stuff or players I don’t like or want to interact with on here but I’m not blocking them for just existing. I just ignore it and move on). Also, because you blocked me, too bad you can’t see that I’ve supported you through some of my reblogs and I never used any of your gifs on any of my fics or other posts before so you cannot claim that I’m a content stealer by any means to justify blocking me either. I obviously can’t block you back since you already did it to me first but you don’t understand how much it pains me to see your content that I like come up and I can’t interact with it. It’s also funny to me, that on Tumblr, content sharing is greatly encouraged and you’re purposely gatekeeping people from that (you know that you make content for a player who is a bit underrated on here now) by blocking them because they don’t fit your tag standards.

Another thing, just because you tell people not to take it personally because being blocked doesn’t bother you, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to take it personally. You obviously don’t truly care about how other people would feel about your actions that you say you do for your sanity (Tumblr is known for being chaotic and this is coming from someone who follows thousands of blogs on here). Remember, you hurt my feelings and possibly others first so I suggest not crying to your followers that hurt feelings are coming back to you in a way. This rant and criticism isn’t bullying either because if it was, I would be saying way worse things or encouraging others to be mean to you. If this post hurts you, it hurts you and I’m sorry for being this petty, I get it, I’m clearly emotional about it and I have rejection sensitivity issues but just remember that you’re actively hurting other people much more with your actions than a post that’s subtweeting/throwing shade at your gatekeeping behavior in the name of blog management.

#rants and rambles #screaming into the void

0 notes

unfilterd-lies-of-self-raught · 1 year

Text

You know I’m scared, I hate it here

I feel so empty and weak like I’ve lost a part of myself

I dress goth and punk to look strong and then to maybe believe it too

I feel so lost, I don’t know what it is I need to let go of to be free

Some say it’s her, some say maybe it’s the fact I care too much about how I’m seen

I don’t feel as frequently and violently distressed as I have done, just empty, blank, apathetic

Longing for something that I don’t yet know or have.

I feel such an attraction to my friends, one that had since been reserved for feelings of romance

I want to be close, cradled, held, resting my head on their shoulders, my hand safe in theirs

I feel so weak and my friends are the only ones who can make me feel safe

And I know this feeling isn’t the subverted expression of romance

Because those who are afab and amab alike I feel this attraction,

and those whose I once dreamt for romantically but long since lost that spark, have as strong as a connection as those who I’ve never felt that towards

It’s because I’m weak and I’m afraid, that I need the loveliest people holding and protecting

But they can’t, nor should they.

I know I need to live and be happy for myself rather than living off my adoration of others, that’s how I got here in the first place.

I’m worried that this is performative and not real, and maybe what I see believe and say is not reality,

Or it is a means to an end to please someone else.

I’m really scared

I want to host an event, the desire to cook for those I love is almost tearing me apart

All I want to do is bake for them, share food that is worthy of them

But I know, I know it’ll be like most thing’s recently, and like the dreaded dinner party

It’ll be again me feeling nothing, or feeling stressed, not doing and adoring not enough for each person in my heart

I’ll get distracted and talk to my left rather than right, I’ll justify it through a false and fake lense

‘A way to celebrate you’ no, ‘a way to feed my ego’.

And I want to enjoy myself, I want to feel that true smile on my cheeks again

It is so unfair to the loveliest people that our time at this time does not hold that smile

I want so badly to smile in that way I used to, like in those old memories with you

A carefree true happy smile

But an event, and food, won’t bring that, gifts and others can’t bring that, I don’t know what can

I’m so scarred, I want to try it though because it’s pulling me apart not too,

But I know I’ll be sad and somehow it won’t be enough

I hate living of of love, I hate that my friends past and present have the greatest hold over me and my direction

I don’t feel I have control

They do, the ones who’ve hurt me, saved me, loved me, stood by me, they all have a inhumane and leviathan grip over myself

My feelings, my actions, my words, myself

It’s so terrifying my friend

It’s so scary, and I’m afraid and I wish I could be saying this to you right now

I know I think I’m going to show this blog to you, and you might know how I feel then on this day

But I don’t want every post to be a message to you, that not why I created this

I don’t know exactly in words why I want to show you, but I have a horrible feeling that despite what I say

That I want to show you to gain sympathy, to feed my ego, turn you into some horrible caretaker

I don’t want that for you, or from you, I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes by new means

What I mean and believe is, if I end up showing this to you

Please be strong enough to not throw me a bone every time I ask for attention, be my friend not my therapist

This shouldn’t be an echo chamber directed towards you, it should just be an echo chamber

So you might observe and understand me a bit, and I can grow to trust and be less afraid of showing parts of myself

I don’t want you to become my idol or saviour, I always want you to be my friend

And I’m scarred that in some way I’m trying to make you closer to those things than a friend

And I don’t want that, I’ve hurt myself and too many others by doing that

Be my friend and tell me when I fuck up and hurt you and everything

And I’ll try to change and be better and everything

I love you and I hate what this message has become

I’m scarred, what the fuck is this anymore

Kill me, I’m sorry

0 notes

hidef-quatrevingt · 3 years

Text

mecha’s image description & visual accessibility reference post:

disclaimer: This is mostly a reference for myself for the image descriptions I write in the future, including common things I see that I want to avoid. Some are with screenreader users in mind, some are with non-screenreader users in mind. I’m not claiming this is where describing images should begin or end, and i’m not the only low vision person out there. if you want to have better reference guides, i find here to be helpful.

Image description in alt text: Not all people who need image descriptions can or do use screenreaders. Alt text is hard to access without a screenreader on most browsers and versions of the app. Just put it in the post. If you don’t, it’s just showing that you don’t actually care about accessibility.

Image description under a read more, in a reblog, in small print, etc: This is a big one, and I’ve seen a ton of posts about it, but it can’t hurt to restate. This is inaccessible, and shows that your “accessibility” is performative. If the image description is under a readmore, if anything happens to your blog, then it will no longer be accessible. If a description is long, that’s ok. Just tag the post as long instead of using a read more. If you post art (or anything) with an image description in the reblog, people will have to go searching through the replies for it. It also makes it easy to separate the ID from the rest of the post. If the description is in small print, or otherwise formatted not in plain text, it’s inaccessible. Not all people who need image descriptions use screenreaders.

Put the most important info first: This is so someone can skip the screenreader to the next paragraph once they get the idea of the post.

“Image ID”: ID stands for “image description.” It is a common misconception that ID in this context means “identification” instead.

Capitalization (id vs ID): Maybe you’re going for aesthetics, or maybe you don’t capitalize letters very often. Keep in mind that screenreaders tend to read “id” (lowercase) as a word, like Freudian psychoanalysis, while “ID” (uppercase) is read as the individual letters. Hopefully you’re aiming for the individual letters, since that’s what Image Description is short for in this context.

Bold, Italicized, and Strikethrough text: I don’t know about others, but the screenreader I use doesn’t tell you which text is bold, italics, or strikethrough. If that is in any way relevant to understanding text in the image you’re describing, please specify what sections are bold. Example of how to do that: The text says: “My favorite color is green.” The word green is bolded.

Colored text: Similar to the above, colored text on Tumblr is not registered as different than plain text with a screenreader. It would be helpful if you made a note of colored text. You can use the same format I specified above.

Colored text, the sequel: Provide plain text when you‘re making posts that use colored text. Some people don’t use screenreaders, and they don’t need to justify that for you to make your posts accessible to them. Colored text on its own is inaccessible because it simply cannot be seen well by some people.

Video descriptions: Don’t separate video and audio descriptions. I don’t understand why this would make sense to anybody to do, but I’ve seen people do it regardless. In most videos, the audio and video are relevant to each other, and separating them makes it really confusing. I know it seems obvious, but think: is the content of the video actually understandable given the description you’ve provided?

Note when the image description is done, in a way that can be understood with or without a screenreader: The commonly used square bracket ] is not sufficient, because screenreaders do not read them aloud. Doing this well is most commonly achieved by putting “End ID” at the end of the description.

Sorry if this is too long, but if you do use this I hope it’s helpful. Have a good day!💗

#if u go to my blog and r like “mecha you never post ids” that’s because this is a sparsely used side blog #image descriptions #image description #image ids #accessibility #visual accessibility #mechaposting

148 notes · View notes

writingwithcolor · 3 years

Text

What Does Our "Motivations” PSA Mean?

@luminalalumini said:

I've been on your blog a lot and it has a lot of really insightful information, but I notice a theme with some of your answers where you ask the writer reaching out what their 'motivation for making a character a certain [race/religion/ethnicity/nationality] is' and it's discouraging to see, because it seems like you're automatically assigning the writer some sort of ulterior motive that must be sniffed out and identified before the writer can get any tips or guidance for their question. Can't the 'motive' simply be having/wanting to have diversity in one's work? Must there be an 'ulterior motive'? I can understand that there's a lot of stigma and stereotypes and bad influence that might lead to someone trynna add marginalized groups into their stories for wrong reasons, but people that have those bad intentions certainly won't be asking for advice on how to write good representation in the first place. Idk its just been something that seemed really discouraging to me to reach out myself, knowing i'll automatically be assigned ulterior motives that i don't have and will probably have to justify why i want to add diversity to my story as if i'm comitting some sort of crime. I don't expect you guys to change your blog or respond to this or even care all that much, I'm probably just ranting into a void. I'm just curious if theres any reason to this that I haven't realized exists I suppose. I don't want y'all to take this the wrong way because I do actually love and enjoy your blog's advice in spite of my dumb griping. Cheers :))

We assume this is in reference to the following PSA:

PSA to all of our users - Motivation Matters: This lack of clarity w/r to intent has been a general issue with many recent questions. Please remember that if you don’t explain your motivations and what you intend to communicate to your audience with your plot choices, character attributes, world-building etc., we cannot effectively advise you beyond the information you provide. We Are Not Mind Readers. If, when drafting these questions, you realize you can’t explain your motivations, that is likely a hint that you need to think more on the rationales for your narrative decisions. My recommendation is to read our archives and articles on similar topics for inspiration while you think. I will be attaching this PSA to all asks with similar issues until the volume of such questions declines.

We have answered this in three parts.

1. Of Paved Roads and Good Intentions

Allow me to give you a personal story, in solidarity towards your feelings:

When I began writing in South Asia as an outsider, specifically in the Kashmir and Lahore areas, I was doing it out of respect for the cultures I had grown up around. I did kathak dance, I grew up on immigrant-cooked North Indian food, my babysitters were Indian. I loved Mughal society, and every detail of learning about it just made me want more. The minute you told me fantasy could be outside of Europe, I hopped into the Mughal world with two feet. I was 13. I am now 28.

And had you asked me, as a teenager, what my motives were in giving my characters’ love interests blue or green eyes, one of them blond hair, my MC having red-tinted brown hair that was very emphasized, and a whole bunch of paler skinned people, I would have told you my motives were “to represent the diversity of the region.”

I’m sure readers of the blog will spot the really, really toxic and colourist tropes present in my choices. If you’re new here, then the summary is: giving brown people “unique” coloured eyes and hair that lines up with Eurocentric beauty standards is an orientalist trope that needs to be interrogated in your writing. And favouring pale skinned people is colourist, full stop.

Did that make me a bad person with super sneaky ulterior motives who wanted to write bad representation? No.

It made me an ignorant kid from the mostly-white suburbs who grew up with media that said brown people had to “look unique” (read: look as European as possible) to be considered valuable.

And this is where it is important to remember that motives can be pure as you want, but you were still taught all of the terrible stuff that is present in society. Which means you’re going to perpetuate it unless you stop and actually question what is under your conscious motive, and work to unlearn it. Work that will never be complete.

I know it sounds scary and judgemental (and it’s one of the reasons we allow people to ask to be anonymous, for people who are afraid). Honestly, I would’ve reacted much the same as a younger writer, had you told me I was perpetuating bad things. I was trying to do good and my motives were pure, after all! But after a few years, I realized that I had fallen short, and I had a lot more to learn in order for my motives to match my impact. Part of our job at WWC is to attempt to close that gap.

We aren’t giving judgement, when we ask questions about why you want to do certain things. We are asking you to look at the structural underpinnings of your mind and question why those traits felt natural together, and, more specifically, why those traits felt natural to give to a protagonist or other major character.

I still have blond, blue-eyed characters with sandy coloured skin. I still have green-eyed characters. Because teenage me was right, that is part of the region. But by interrogating my motive, I was able to devalue those traits within the narrative, and I stopped making those traits shorthand for “this is the person you should root for.”

It opened up room for me to be messier with my characters of colour, even the ones who my teenage self would have deemed “extra special.” Because the European-associated traits (pale hair, not-brown-eyes) stopped being special. After years of questioning, they started lining up with my motive of just being part of the diversity of the region.

Motive is important, both in the conscious and the subconscious. It’s not a judgement and it’s not assumed to be evil. It’s simply assumed to be unquestioned, so we ask that you question it and really examine your own biases.

~Mod Lesya

2. Motivations Aren't Always "Ulterior"

You can have a positive motivation or a neutral one or a negative one. Just wanting to have diversity only means your characters aren't all white and straight and cis and able-bodied -- it doesn't explain why you decided to make this specific character specifically bi and specifically Jewish (it me). Yes, sometimes it might be completely random! But it also might be "well, my crush is Costa Rican, so I gave the love interest the same background", or "I set it in X City where the predominant marginalized ethnicity is Y, so they are Y". Neither of these count as ulterior motives. But let's say for a second that you did accidentally catch yourself doing an "ulterior." Isn't that the point of the blog, to help you find those spots and clean them up?

Try thinking of it as “finding things that need adjusting” rather than “things that are bad” and it might get less scary to realize that we all do them, subconsciously. Representation that could use some work is often the product of subconscious bias, not deliberate misrepresentation, so there's every possibility that someone who wants to improve and do better didn't do it perfectly the first time.

--Shira

3. Dress-Making as a Metaphor

I want to echo Lesya’s sentiments here but also provide a more logistical perspective. If you check the rubber stamp guide here and the “Motivation matters” PSA above, you’ll notice that concerns with respect to asker motivation are for the purposes of providing the most relevant answer possible.

It is a lot like if someone walks into a dressmaker’s shop and asks for a blue dress/ suit (Back when getting custom-made clothes was more of a thing) . The seamstress/ tailor is likely to ask a wide variety of questions:

What material do you want the outfit to be made of?

Where do you plan to wear it?

What do you want to highlight?

How do you want to feel when you wear it?

Let’s say our theoretical customer is in England during the 1920s. A tartan walking dress/ flannel suit for the winter is not the same as a periwinkle, beaded, organza ensemble/ navy pinstripe for formal dress in the summer. When we ask for motivations, we are often asking for exactly that: the specific reasons for your inquiry so we may pinpoint the most pertinent information.

The consistent problem for many of the askers who receive the PSA is they haven’t even done the level of research necessary to know what they want to ask of us. It would be like if our English customer in the 1920s responded, “IDK, some kind of blue thing.” Even worse, WWC doesn’t have the luxury of the back-and-forth between a dressmaker and their clientele. If our asker doesn’t communicate all the information they need in mind at the time of submission, we can only say, “Well, I’m not sure if this is right, but here’s something. I hope it works, but if you had told us more, we could have done a more thorough job.”

Answering questions without context is hard, and asking for motivations, by which I mean the narratives, themes, character arcs and other literary devices that you are looking to incorporate, is the best way for us to help you, while also helping you to determine if your understanding of the problem will benefit from outside input. Because these asks are published with the goal of helping individuals with similar questions, the PSA also serves to prompt other users.

I note that asking questions is a skill, and we all start by asking the most basic questions (Not stupid questions, because to quote a dear professor, “There are no stupid questions.”). Unfortunately, WWC is not suited for the most basic questions. To this effect, we have a very helpful FAQ and archive as a starting point. Once you have used our website to answer the more basic questions, you are more ready to approach writing with diversity and decide when we can actually be of service. This is why we are so adamant that people read the FAQ. Yes, it helps us, but it also is there to save you time and spare you the ambiguity of not even knowing where to start.

The anxiety in your ask conveys to me a fear of being judged for asking questions. That fear is not something we can help you with, other than to wholeheartedly reassure you that we do not spend our unpaid, free time answering these questions in order to assume motives we can’t confirm or sit in judgment of our users who, as you say, are just trying to do better.

Yes, I am often frustrated when an asker’s question makes it clear they haven’t read the FAQ or archives. I’ve also been upset when uncivil commenters have indicated that my efforts and contributions are not worth their consideration. However, even the most tactless question has never made me think, “Ooh this person is such a naughty racist. Let me laugh at them for being a naughty racist. Let me shame them for being a naughty racist. Mwahaha.”

What kind of sad person has time for that?*

Racism is structural. It takes time to unlearn, especially if you’re in an environment that doesn’t facilitate that process to begin with. Our first priority is to help while also preserving our own boundaries and well-being. Though I am well aware of the levels of toxic gas-lighting and virtue signaling that can be found in various corners of online writing communities in the name of “progressivism*”, WWC is not that kind of space. This space is for discussions held in good faith: for us to understand each other better, rather than for one of us to “win” and another to “lose.”

Just as we have good faith that you are doing your best, we ask that you have faith that we are trying to do our best by you and the BIPOC communities we represent.

- Marika.

*If you are in any writing or social media circles that feed these anxieties or demonstrate these behaviors, I advise you to curtail your time with them and focus on your own growth. You will find, over time, that it is easier to think clearly when you are worrying less about trying to appease people who set the bar of approval so high just for the enjoyment of watching you jump. “Internet hygiene”, as I like to call it, begins with you and the boundaries you set with those you interact with online.

#PSAs #asker concerns #diversity #motivations in writing #writing with diversity #blog housekeeping #internet hygeine #asks #WWC

1K notes · View notes