#Overall if you read my incel content you’ll see that the majority of it is simply—

[bakatenshii]

okay this is not to bash you in anyway shape or form but... idk the “incel” stuff just doesn’t sit right with me like incels are known for being heavily anti black and having an unhealthy obsession with women and treating them as sexual objects for their pleasure... like there’s a difference between having kinks and then glorifying a very bad minded group of people for your fictional pleasure... idk

Hi hi babes! First of all thank you for being so respectful in your ask, I really appreciate it. I just wanna say before answering this, that your feelings are definitely valid. I’m sorry that it’s put you off, and that’s entirely fair.

My thoughts under the cut! (sorry it’s really long)

The term incel, as we know, stands for Involuntary Celibate. It was coined all the way back in 1993 by a woman in Canada when she was detailing her sexual inactivity— the intended meaning for the word. Over the course of time, we’ve seen it change and warp into a subculture with entirely different connotations.

I have to start by stating that I absolutely do not condone them in real life, just as I do not condone the majority of my content such as rape, incest, and drug abuse. I’ve stated a few times on my blog that while I lewd incels in a fictional way, I do not in any way shape or form condone them in real life.

While there are absolutely extremist views in that subculture, just like there are in every culture, the basis of their ideology is that men are entitled to sex. I can’t lie, I actually did a lot of research on them (a case study, if you will) because I was so intrigued by how delusional and warped their perspective is.

You can compare it to the concept of being fascinated in serial killers and the mental oddities that contributed to their motives; to me, their mentality is absolutely warped and twisted.

But after rummaging the webs, going through both public and private forums, servers, sites, etc, the truth is that the great majority of them are just sad self-loathing men who bond together to wallow in self-pity and circlejerk at their pity party. Am I excusing them? No. I’m just explaining that most of them are spineless men who are touch-starved, and not as extremist as you’d think.

The bigger issue I’d like to address here is the lack of understanding when it comes to separating real life with fiction. What I write here is absolutely a romanticized version of a normally pretty grotesque thing. That’s why it’s fiction. Dragons don’t really exist, and neither do incels I want to actually fuck, just as I don’t feel any sort of attraction towards my family despite writing incest.

My blog is always going to consist of romanticized versions of things that are otherwise terrible. In this case, it’s misogyny. That’s how I cope; I take bad things and make them something I can tolerate. If that’s not your way of coping, not something you agree with, that’s completely valid!

I support in however you choose to explore your sexuality and sexual fantasies, and if following my blog and seeing this content is uncomfortable, then please unfollow or block me. Do what you have to to keep yourself safe and sane.

From now on I’ll be tagging incel content as #tw: incel / so please block that tag if you still wish to follow me for other content! Once again thank you for coming to me so respectfully. I appreciate it ♡︎

[raptured-night]

Hi! I’m part of the lgbtq+ community and Severus is my favorite HP character and I was wondering (if you have the time and feel obliged) if you could please give me a few examples of how he’s queer? It’s been a few years since I reread the books, and def before I came out, so I’m a little in the dark here lol Thanks!!

First of all, I just wanted to apologize for how long it has taken me to properly respond to your ask. I’ve been dealing with some ongoing health issues that have turned me into something of a moody writer. I’ll get random spurts of energy and inspiration and then hit a wall of absolute writer’s block assisted by a major case of executive dysfunction every single time I try to respond to the multiple asks languishing in my inbox. Fortunately, I found myself involved in a discussion just today that addressed your ask so perfectly that I wanted to share it with you.  In the very least, that discussion has also managed to shake off my writer’s block temporarily so that I have found myself in the right head-space to finally be able to give this lovely ask the thought and attention that I feel it deserves. 

Although, in regards to the Snape discourse I linked above, I feel that I should warn you in advance that the discussion was prompted by an anti-Snape poster who made a rather ill-thought meme (I know there are many in the Snapedom who would rather just avoid seeing anti-Snape content altogether, so I try to warn when I link people to debates and discussions prompted by anti-posts) but the thoughtful responses that the anti-Snape poster unintentionally generated from members of the Snapedom (particularly by @deathdaydungeon whose critical analyses of Snape and, on occasions, other Harry Potter characters is always so wonderfully nuanced, thought-provoking, and well-considered), are truly excellent and worth reading, in my opinion. Also, as I fall more loosely under the “a” (I’m grey-ace/demisexual) of the lgbtqa+ flag and community I would prefer to start any discussions about Snape as a queer character or as a character with queer coding by highlighting the perspectives of people in the Snapedom who are actually queer before sharing any thoughts of my own.

In addition, I also wanted to share a few other posts where Snape’s queer coding has been discussed by members of the Snapedom in the past (and likely with far more eloquence than I could manage in this response of my own).

Source

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Source

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Along with an excellent article in Vice by Diana Tourjée, in which a case for Snape being trans is convincingly argued. 

Importantly, you’ll notice that while some of these discussions do argue the possibility of Snape being a queer or trans character others may only discuss the way that Snape’s character is queer coded. That is because there is a distinct but subtle difference between: “This character could be queer/lgbtq+” and: “This character has queer/lgbtq+ coding” one which is briefly touched on in the first discussion that I linked you to. However, I would like to elaborate a bit here just what I mean when I refer to Snape as a character with queer coding. As while Rowling has never explicitly stated that she intended to write Snape as lgbtq+ (although there is one interview given by Rowling which could be interpreted as either an unintentional result of trying to symbolically explain Snape’s draw to the dark arts or a vague nod to Snape’s possible bisexuality: "Well, that is Snape's tragedy. ... He wanted Lily and he wanted Mulciber too. He never really understood Lily's aversion; he was so blinded by his attraction to the dark side he thought she would find him impressive if he became a real Death Eater.”) regardless of her intent when she drew upon the existing body of Western literary traditions and tropes for writing antagonists and villains in order to use them as a red-herring for Snape’s character, she also embued his character with some very specific, coded subtext. This is where Death of the Author can be an invaluable tool for literary critics, particularly in branches of literary criticism like queer theory. 

Ultimately, even if Rowling did not intend to write Snape as explicitly queer/lgbtq+ the literary tradition she drew upon in order to present him as a foil for Harry Potter and have her readers question whether he was an ally or a villain has led to Snape being queer coded. Specifically, many of the characteristics of Snape’s character design do fall under the trope known as the “queering of the villain.” Particularly, as @deathdaydungeon, @professormcguire, and other members of the Snapedom have illustrated, Snape’s character not only subverts gender roles (e.g. his Patronus presents as female versus male, Snape symbolically assumes the role of “the mother” in the place of both Lily and later Narcissa when he agrees to protect Harry and Draco, his subject of choice is potions and poisons which are traditionally associated more with women and “witches,” while he seemingly rejects in his first introduction the more phallic practice of “foolish wand-waving,” and indeed Snape is characterized as a defensive-fighter versus offensive, in Arthurian mythology he fulfills the role of Lady of the Lake in the way he chooses to deliver the Sword of Gryffindor to Harry, Hermione refers to his hand-writing as “kind of girly,” his association with spiders and spinners also carries feminine symbology, etc.) but is often criticized or humiliated for his seeming lack of masculinity (e.g. Petunia mocking his shirt as looking like “a woman’s blouse,” which incidentally was also slang in the U.K. similar to “dandy” to accuse men of being effeminate, the Marauders refer to Snape as “Snivellus” which suggests Snape is either less masculine because he cries or the insult is a mockery of what could pass for a stereotypical/coded Jewish feature, his nose, Remus Lupin quite literally instructs Neville on how to “force” a Boggart!Snape, who incidentally is very literally stepping out of a closet-like wardrobe, into the clothing of an older woman and I quoted force because that is the exact phrase he uses, James and Sirius flipping Snape upside down to expose him again presents as humiliation in the form of emasculation made worse by the arrival and defense of Lily Evans, etc.). 

Overall, the “queering of the villain” is an old trope in literature (although it became more deliberate and prevalent in media during the 1950s-60s); however, in modernity, we still can find it proliferating in many of the Disney villains (e.g. Jafar, Scar, Ursula, etc.), in popular anime and children’s cartoons (e.g. HiM from Powerpuff Girls, James from Pokemon, Frieza, Zarbon, the Ginyu Force, Perfect Cell, basically a good majority of villains from DBZ, Nagato from Fushigi Yuugi, Pegasus from Yu Gi Oh, etc.), and even in modern television series and book adaptations, such as the popular BBC’s Sherlock in the character of Moriarty. Indeed, this article does an excellent job in detailing some of the problematic history of queer coded villains. Although, the most simple summary is that: “Queer-coding is a term used to say that characters were given traits/behaviors to suggest they are not heterosexual/cisgender, without the character being outright confirmed to have a queer identity” (emphasis mine). Notably, TV Tropes also identifies this trope under the classification of the “Sissy Villain” but in queer theory and among queer writers in fandom and academia “queering of the villain” is the common term. This brings me back to Snape and his own queer coding; mainly, because Rowling drew upon Western traditions for presenting a character as a suspected villain she not only wrote Snape as queer (and racially/ethnically) coded but in revealing to the reader that Snape was not, in fact, the villain Harry and the readers were encouraged to believe he was by the narrator she incorporated a long history of problematic traits/tropes into a single character and then proceeded to subvert them by subverting reader-expectation in a way that makes the character of Severus Snape truly fascinating. 

We can certainly debate the authorial intent vs. authorial impact where Snape’s character is concerned. Particularly as we could make a case that the polarizing nature of Snape may well be partly the result of many readers struggling against Rowling subverting literary tropes that are so firmly rooted in our Western storytelling traditions that they cannot entirely abandon the idea that this character who all but had the book thrown at him in terms of all the coding that went into establishing him as a likely villain (e.g. similar to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Snape is also coded to be associated with darkness/black colors and to represent danger and volatile/unstable moods, while his class status further characterizes him as an outsider or “foreign other,” and not unlike all those villains of our childhood Disney films which affirmed a more black-and-white philosophy of moral abolutism, such as Scar or Jafar, the ambiguity of Snape’s sexuality coupled with his repeated emasculation signals to the reader that this man should be “evil” and maybe even “predatory,” ergo all the “incel” and friendzone/MRA discourse despite nothing in canon truly supporting those arguments; it seems it may merely be Snape’s “queerness” that signals to some readers that he was predatory or even that “If Harry had been a girl” there would be some kind of danger) is not actually our villain after all. 

Indeed, the very act of having Snape die (ignoring, for the moment, any potential issues of “Bury Your Gays” in a queer analysis of his death) pleading with Harry to “look at him” as he symbolically seems to weep (the man whom Harry’s hyper-masculine father once bullied and mocked as “Snivellus”) memories for Harry to view (this time with his permission) carries some symbolic weight for any queer theory analysis. Snape, formerly portrayed as unfathomable and “secretive,” dies while pleading to be seen by the son of both his first and closest friend and his school-hood bully (a son that Snape also formerly could never see beyond his projection of James) sharing with Harry insight into who he was via his personal memories. For Harry to later go on to declare Snape “the bravest man he ever knew” carries additional weight, as a queer theory analysis makes it possible for us to interpret that as Harry finally recognizing Snape, not as the “queer coded villain” he and the reader expected but rather as the brave queer coded man who was forced to live a double-life in which “no one would ever know the best of him” and who, in his final moments at least, was finally able to be seen as the complex human-being Rowling always intended him to be. 

Rowling humanizing Snape for Harry and the reader and encouraging us to view Snape with empathy opened up the queer coding that she wrote into his character (intentionally or otherwise) in such a way that makes him both a potentially subversive and inspiring character for the lgbtq+ community. Essentially, Snape opens the door for the possibility of reclaiming a tradition of queer coding specific to villains and demonstrating the way those assumptions about queer identity can be subverted. Which is why I was not at all surprised that I was so easily able to find a body of existing discourse surrounding Snape as a queer coded or even as a potentially queer character within the Harry Potter fandom. At least within the Snapedom, there are many lgbtq+ fans of his character that already celebrate the idea of a queer, bi, gay, trans, ace/aro, or queer coded Snape (in fact, as a grey-ace I personally enjoy interpreting Snape through that lens from time-to-time). 

Thank you for your ask @pinkyhatespink and once again I apologize for the amount of time it’s taken me to reply. However, I hope that you’ll find this response answered your question and, if not, that some of the articles and posts from other pro-Snape bloggers I linked you to will be able to do so more effectively. Also, as a final note, although many of the scholarly references and books on queer coding and queering of the villain I would have liked to have sourced are typically behind paywalls, I thought I would list the names of just a few here that I personally enjoyed reading in the past and that may be of further interest should you be able to find access to them.

Fathallah, Judith. “Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC’s Sherlock.” Television & New Media, vol. 16, no. 5, 2014, p. 490-500. 

Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or How to Speak With The Dead.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, p. 15-25.

Mailer, Norman. “The Homosexual Villain.” 1955. Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, edited by Sipiora Phillip, Random House, 2013, pp. 14–20.

Solis, Nicole Eschen. "Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater." Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, p. 115+. 

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “The Essentialist Villain.” Jan. 2019,  SBN13: 978-1-4384-6966-9

[bambamramfan]

____ aren’t fun

@oligopsalter mentioned the “games aren’t fun” thread from 2014, and that got me thinking on that topic again. When I first read SMG’s long takedown, I was very compelled by his arguments about fear, and capitalism, and consumption, but I didn’t really get his whole “games aren’t fun” thing. However since then, I’ve paid attention to that perspective and I’ve come around to it more, particularly as I’ve watched geek culture react to more games and more movies in a way that really disturbs me.

(An aside for a minute: when I say “geek culture” here I refer both to its left and right wings. While the incel types whining about Ghostbusters are more visible and more numerous, the social justice geek hype machine about the latest tabletop works in the same way.)

So the marketing departments of corporations and social media influencers have found a remarkable thing: if you get people talking a lot about a new product coming up, it will feed on itself and generate more chatter, and it will mildly boost sales. And due to the competition between “the ideal that’s in our heads” and “actual reality”, often it’s more fun to fantasize about what’s coming up. And this past decade, the “hype” for upcoming media has vastly outpaced anything like it before. I say this on the week a Star Wars trailer dropped over 8 months before the movie is coming out.

None of the above is new, but consider the way that reactions to major media properties can be broadly grouped into 3 categories (from smallest to biggest)

G1. The truly loved. These are games/movies that people like and genuinely stand the test of time. The boundary here is whether fans talk about them more after they come out than before, and whether discussions of them are about the actual work itself (quoting lines from the movie vs quoting box office stats.) This is rare for art overall, and only some works get this so the rarity of true quality isn’t a problem per se. In the geek sphere I am thinking of Fury Road, Overwatch, Breath of the Wild, Dark Knight, Star Trek (the initial reboot.) Of the MCU’s I would only count the first Iron Man and the first Avengers and Winter Soldier. Going back I would include the LOTR movies.

G2. The truly hated. These are games/movies that cause an explosion of outrage against them. (I’m not calling them bad necessarily; some of these are my favorite.) It’s not just that they fail to meet geek desire, but they also must bear the weight of months (years?) of anticipation by overly excited communities. The outrage against these failed products may be legitimate or not, but from an outsider it usually appears as grossly disproportionate. We’re talking the Diablo Immortal announcement, Endless Horizon, Duke Nukem Forever, Batman vs Superman, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and The Last Jedi. Going back I would include the Prequels. The extremely emotional nature of this reaction is what causes a lot of condescending analysis of “the geek community”, but that’s not what I am talking about today. At least it’s an emotion.

G3. The forgotten okay. Almost everything else falls into this middle ground. It would be wrong to call it mediocre - these are movies and games that when they come out are hailed as successes. They get positive reviews, big box offices, and the fans who see them are satisfied that “they got it right.” And then you barely ever hear from them again. No one ever talks about these “successful” properties. (Obviously not absolutely here, but relative to the above.) I’m talking about the majority of the MCU - including Black Panther, Captain Marvel, the other Iron Man movies, Infinity War, Spider-man Homecoming - but also Wonder Woman, the later seasons of Game of Thrones, the last book of Wheel of Time, and Star Trek: Beyond. (And videogames beyond counting, that after all was the purpose of the linked thread.) There’s always some pure plot-wiki-ization sifting of them (how will the Avengers defeat Thanos) in preparation for the next movie, but very little long term appreciation of it on its own. How quickly can you summon your favorite quote from Thor Ragnarok or even the Shape of Water?

This last group is becoming the majority of media produced for geeks. And there’s no explicit complaint about it. These products are in a constant state of being hyped, and once they happen, there is a very brief spurt of excitement, and then they go down the memory hole. Woops! It’s Tsathoggua, benign satisfaction and contentment with no epiphany. I’m not even blaming the works under discussion here - some of the “forgotten okay” can be very interesting with a proper reading, but who does that?

So when only talking about the last group, and seeing how it has come to dominate the marketplace, I understand what “games (and movies) aren’t fun” means. I can’t even convey it to you, just - pay attention to how much you see hype for upcoming products, how much discussion there is on reddit or other forums, and look at how often no one mentions even the “good” ones again mere weeks after their release. It’s actually upsetting, and you’ll wonder why all your time was wasted.

In the linked thread, SMG was theorizing that the constant agitation-and-emptiness of G3 leads to the emotional build up that explodes in G2, in a vicious cycle where the only visible solution is to ask capitalist industries to give us yet more G2 that never truly satisfies us.