#The discourse

[sokkastyles]

The way some antis talk about zutara as if Katara continued to hate Zuko for the rest of her days is like if I argued that Katara could never be with Aang because he's in an iceberg and pretended that nothing ever happened after Aang was frozen in the iceberg. Like wdym they got marrried, he's an iceberg.

[fandomsandfeminism]

I think you can tell a lot about how rigorous and committed someone's belief in a human right is by how quickly they are able to name people who they think could or should have that right taken away.

[self-winding]

Along with the "how do we stop young men turning into angry radical right-wing types" discourse there's been a lot of discourse about the need for cishet male allies of the cause to stand up to their racist, sexist, homophobic etc. male friends and tell them to stop being those things, and other people saying "I've tried that and it doesn't really work, they just call me a fag and then stop hanging out with me."

And yeah, given that the left and right are more divided than ever it is kind of strange to assume that a male feminist is going to be hanging out with a bunch of sexist dudebros who will take it to heart when they make a rape joke and he says, "dudes...that was fucked up." That's not how it works.

(Also, yes, I realize that "the right" and "sexist dudebros" are not really the same thing but there's an area of overlap that is specifically being focused on in a lot of this discourse.)

I've been in sort of the Mirror World version of that scenario: being in heavily left-wing spaces, hearing people say fucked up shit about men and being the one who says, "uh that's kinda fucked up why would you say something like that?" and can confirm, yes, this kind of pushback does not work in that context. They just ridicule you and double down on whatever they were saying. Pushing out dissenting voices is a time-honored bonding ritual for these types of groups.

On the other hand, when I am alone with an actual friend, someone I care about who also cares about me, and they say something fucked up and I respond with shocked silence or a quiet "hey now," they usually backpedal pretty quickly.

So I guess if you're trying to stop someone from going down a rabbit hole my advice is not to confront them in a group setting or online where other people can witness the confrontation, especially if you are in a setting where most onlookers are likely to side with them. Talking to them alone, and in a less confrontational way, is what actually gets results.

[broadwaybalogna]

This is so interesting to me because it’s technically canon that Katara was reduced to being “the avatars wife”. Like, A@ng was always the breadwinner while Katara just watched from the sidelines.

Also, Zutarians will more commonly say that Katara being fire lady gives her the same kind of political power as Zuko, or he would give her such. So it would be a relationship where both are important figures and neither are living in the others shadow.

[forthegothicheroine]

Miss Manners is adding denouncing political correctness to her list of conversational prefaces from which no good ever follows. When people announce that they plan to abandon the rules of civilized discourse, they should be taken seriously. The response should be "Well, if you are in favor of being offensive, I'd rather not hear more."

Judith Martin, Minding Miss Manners In an Era of Fake Etiquette

[stardust948]

*Tired sigh*

[toweringclam]

These takes are so exhausting.

Because nudity = fanservice = hates women.

Nevervmind that Okarun and Jiji are naked just as often and often more naked (girls at least keep their underwear.

Never mind all the awesome female characters, including the fucking Granny Special Forces unit.

Never mind all the flashbacks that highlight gender-based injustice and oppression.

Never mind that the only actual source of real overt fanservice is Granny Seiko.

Nah, none of that matters. The mangaka who said he set out to create a genuine girls' shonen and only added Okarun to appease Shonen Jump editors* must be a virulent misogynist. Because underwear.

[pepperf]

Listen, with all due respect, I don't give a fuck about what Five would or wouldn't do. It takes two to tango, and I don't believe that Lila would change so fundamentally from a chaos gremlin who loved Diego to distraction, into some lobotomised cottagecore manic pixie dream sex toy. This was all set up so that Five could get laid, lbr. They could have given him a mannequin and a Fleshlight for the same effect.

And if, as Steve Blackman claims, she and Five are so right for each other bc they have such similar experiences, blah blah blah, why did he need to shoehorn them into a situation where they're stranded alone for 7 years to even reach the point of having sex? He couldn't even convince himself that it was plausible without cooking up the most extreme nonsense - and even then, like 90% of the fandom has called bullshit.

As if the degree of similarity of experience is such a key factor in a romance, anyhow. All the Umbrellas had a background more similar to Lila's than to Joe or Jane Public, but those are external factors, they all responded differently. Hell, by that argument, why didn't he make Lila and Allison the endgame ship: after all, they were raised by sociopaths who turned them into weapons, they experienced life in the 60s as WOC, they were both parents...

(And that's not even getting into the fact that this was all a writing choice, as others have said. It wasn't inevitable, it didn't have to happen, it added nothing to the plot and contradicted past characterisations. It's just masturbatory.)

[maikingsenseofit]

I think almost all of the anti Mai discourse from namely Zutara shippers boils down to this.

You can try and deliberately misconstrue the writing to say Zuko forgot Mai, was never happy around her, never loved her, etc etc

But not once can you say Zuko ever looked at Katara, Jin, or any other female character you ship him with the same way he looks at Mai in these four panels.

What I love about the art of animation is it conveys so much when words can’t.

The eyes, Chico. They never lie.

This single scene conveys so much love, adoration, and the happiness of finally reuniting with your soulmate. And no amount of dissertations on how a fanon ship would’ve made a children’s tv show more enjoyable to you will never change that.

The curse of canon weighs on Maiko and Kataang shippers, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

[reachartwork]

I'd love to know how you can advance AI art ethically. I'll be perfectly honest and say I'm of the opinion that there's no way to make AI art ethical but I genuinely would like to hear your thoughts on this since it's something you clearly have put a lot of thought in to. Not trying to hate just curious about your opinion.

i reject the premise that it is inherently unethical to perform any of the operations required to do image synthesis. almost every single assumption required to start from the baseline of "it's unethical" (it's plagiarism, it requires no creativity, it smashes two images together, etc.) are all just straight up incorrect.

unless you can explain to me how to fit two (or more) billion images into 2 gigabytes (i'll let you do the math) in a way that preserves their features for later "stealing" (you can't) then i am rejecting the premise. because even if it were some sort of database that smashed pieces of images together (it's not), if your argument is that it's unethical to do that then you have a whole lot of collage and blackout artists that you need to contend with too. (if you think collage is also unethical then you are internally consistent, good for you, and then we just have a garden variety disagreement). generally speaking there is no argument one can take that can meaningfully separate ai art from other forms of transformative artwork except via special pleading, which doesn't convince me.

so yeah, basically, you (the general case you, not You Specifically, Fish Of The Woods) have to do the work to convince me that it's unethical because i am not starting from the premise of "it's inherently evil, except my one exception", i am starting from "it is neutral and you have to convince me that it's bad". and so far nobody who is anti-ai has managed to do so, primarily because (this is not a dig at you) nobody who is anti-ai actually bothers to understand how it works, and thus all their criticisms don't sync up with actual reality. while i'm sympathetic to labor arguments i.e ai art will put people out of jobs (definitely much more salient than the other ones), that is regular old capitalism abusing automation, and not an inherent flaw in the technology itself that renders it Ontologically Evil From Birth.

i get like five of these asks a day so i politely request you send future inquiries to the AWAY Discord, which is full of people who have significantly more patience than i do.

[wufflesvetinari]

controversial, but as someone who's spent the last year tearing her hair out adjudicating student conduct cases involving AI misuse: i'm never going to be impressed by an anti-AI post that sounds like an abstinence-only educator wrote it

it goes without saying that AI as implemented has many problems.* it fills me with a low-level sense of dread! but some of you seem to think that if we teach the children to Just Say No, it will go away. which...maybe this is because i work with engineering students but that sounds about as likely as email going away (and that message is just about as likely to resonate with kids as The Internet Is Evil So Stay Off).

students are graduating into a workforce that requires them to use AI. it is, in certain contexts, an appropriate tool. so between an engineer who's never touched AI in their life and one who's had a thorough education in it--who knows what it can and can't do; what it can and can't be trusted with--i'd pick the latter every time.

like, they're going to build the airplanes for christ's sake. they're going to be handed AI, usually of higher quality than public-facing chatgpt but still. i don't want them graduating with the sense that AI is a Forbidden All-Knowing Cheating Machine instead of something they've spent time understanding the limitations of. i want them to understand which programs work for which tasks, and which don't work at all. and that requires active education on the tool, the same way you'd teach about internet safety or how to detect fake news

(this goes, imo, for people trying to make AI safer and more ethical as well. if you consider it unethical by definition to work on AI, the only people working on it will be the ones who don't care about ethics.)

-

*i will say it. misinformation, algorithmic bias, disruptions for the labor force, shoving it into tasks it's not good at LET ME SCHEDULE MY OWN DAMN VET APPOINTMENT, unethical sourcing for datasets, environmental impact (the data center planner in my life is VERY skeptical of DeepSeek being more efficient but one hopes)

[tyetknot]

*carefully tosses a golden apple labelled 'TO THE LEAST PROBLEMATIC' into the middle of witchblr discourse*

[sokkastyles]

For some reason I'm seeing homophobic/biphobic Katara on my feed and fanart of it (I don't know how the algorithm thought I liked that shit) but I just don't understand how that trope even came to be especially since it seems like a vast majority of the people who are into that are Zukka fans or either think she would specifically be homophobic to Zuko. (Which doesn't make sense in the first place due to their relationship in Canon. Also isn't it canon that Aang is the only one who lived in a "open-minded" and "accepting" society while everyone else was discriminatory?)

Homophobic Katara has been making a resurgence lately and it comes from misogyny (and homophobia itself). For a couple of reasons.

In the show, Katara actually points out and makes fun of Sokka for his homophobia and misogyny. Zukka fans decided that since Sokka was gay/bi, this meant that Katara was being homophobic towards him. Which wouldn't even be true even if Sokka were canonically gay. Gay men acting on internalized homophobia is still homophobia. And in reality, Sokka is like, the straightest person in the series. Either way, Katara is right to call him out.

Katara is the only character who holds explicitly feminist views and cares about social justice. Not just "girls can fight, too," I mean that she actually uses the word sexist to call people out. So naturally, people decided that meant she was a bitch. And the person who most gets called out for being sexist is her brother.

Part of it also comes from fear of zutara. Some people feel the need to go out of their way to make Katara be extremely antagonistic to Zuko (who they headcanon as gay and back up with extremely homophobic evidence, like one time he moved his wrist a certain way, or he has a slight lisp). Which also comes from misogyny, ignores the actual valid reasons Katara was antagonistic to Zuko, and also ignores that they became close friends and allies. Besides, even when they were enemies, when Katara realized she had said something unintentionally ableist about Zuko's scar, she immediately apologized. No way would she make homophobic jokes about him.

I've also seen people say "oh, Katara and Zuko are friends, she just uses slurs against him all the time, and only him." Which also mischaracterizes Katara and is also still homophobic. Katara does tease Zuko once after they become friends, about his portrayal in the play, but when she saw that he was really bothered by it, she became serious and asked him what was wrong. The idea that she would call someone she was friends with slurs as a joke is complete disrespect to her character. And like always, I tend to think people on tumblr don't actually have friends if they think this is an acceptable way to treat people. Remember when we talked about how gay people can still be homophobic? Casually throwing around slurs and saying that straight people can use slurs against gay people "but it's okay because they're friends" is homophobia. Saying that it's okay for a straight person to call a gay person a slur because she specifically doesn't like him, "but she's not actually homophobic, it's just him" is homophobia.

It's also funny that people cry about how we need to respect Zuko and Katara's platonic friendship, but also need to headcanon them as sexually incompatable to ensure that they remain six feet apart at all times.

Anyway Zuko and Katara are both bi and friends can make out with each other sometimes, as a treat.

I don't think it's actually canon that the Air Nomads were more "open-minded," at least not in the original series. I know that was added later to the comics, but the show describes the Air Nomads as living in gender segregated temples, which is not something that a society that is open-minded about sex and gender does. Aang doesn't notice when Sokka is making homophobic remarks towards him sometimes, but that's more about his age, and he gets extremely insecure in his masculinity during the Ember Island play and takes it out on Katara as a result.

And isn't it a fun coincidence that Katara is yet again the victim of misogyny in a situation where another male character gets labeled as more progressive than her? Interesting, that.

[imperiuswrecked]

I simply do not care what Marvel says is official about the Magnet Family that removes any aspect of them being Romani/Jewish, so why would I care if anyone goes "Billy and Tommy are white because blah blah soul magic whatever but they have white/non Roma parents" lol, like sorry not sorry but if you are gonna claim them as the Minimoffs, and as Wanda Maximoff's children then they are Romani, full stop. You do not get to have the aesthetic/connection without the background, fuck that.

And it's just so fucking tiring to have to see these old and new shitty takes that keep trying to divorce the Maximoffs or Minimoffs from their Romani background.

Why are you, a fan of the Maximoff or Minimoffs, doing Marvel's whitewashing for them??? Why are you deep throating Marvel's boots??? Grow a spine and a brain and stop trying to "but the comics-" you mean the comics that were literally rewritten on a whim because some corporate cry babies were mad that XMCU decided to use Quicksilver (who was whitewashed!!! or the MCU also whitewashed!!!), and I'm supposed to accept their word on it over 40+ years of collective canon stating that the Maximoffs are Romani and Jewish? lmao.

[broadwaybalogna]

zutara is BOOOORING azutara is better 🤑🤑🤑🤑

For the past few days I’ve been searching far and wide, going on journeys over the tallest mountains and longest rivers, hiking through the most dangerous forests. Everywhere I look, however, I just cannot seem to find a fuck to give. So sorry :(