#There's fucking apologists for characters that are irredeemable assholes and they act

[pupperish]

Anime fandoms are the worst type of fandom

[something-about-sunflowers]

The thing is, though... Izzy is meant to irredeemable and unlikable. He was written with zero sympathy for him in text, he was written as an asshole who is malicious, disloyal, and cruel. He is ABUSIVE. He is emotionally manipulative, he gaslights, he makes verbal threats and physical assaults. He deliberately and strategically isolates Ed from his crew. He deliberately disobeys a direct order (an act of mutiny) against Ed when he doesn't stand down and duels Stede. He turns around and betrays Ed when he doesn't get what he wants. VIco is an abuse apologist Izzy stan just like you. And they, just like the rest of the cast, know that you disgusting cultists only care about Izzy. You don't give a shit about Ed, or Stede, or anyone else. You literally just flick your clits to Izzy being unpleasant and abusive. He has no redeeming qualities that weren't stolen from other characters or completely made up by fandom. He's not a good person. He's not a nice guy. His motives are selfish and cruel. He's lazy and he's racist. So you can like him. Because you're a piece of shit abuse apologist. And you and all the other Izzy cultists can hold your breath until you turn blue about how he's not the character he is. But he is. Izzy is not secretly the third protagonist. He's not going to turn around and save the day. He doesn't have a decent, self-sacrificing, genuinely good bone in his body. If there is a Jim/Izzy kiss, then you are hoping for the dissolution of Jim/Oluwande (I guess an ample-bodied, dark-skinned black man isn't good enough for you? But then again, all Izzy stans are ultimately shallow and stupid), and you are disgusting. You would rather Jim be with a man who is racist and cruel than a man who adores them. And you know what, you stupid cunt? Even if it does happen, it WOULDN'T automatically mean good things for Izzy. If Jim kisses him to distract him while other people escape, he's still a piece of shit abuser. But he'll be that regardless. Because he abusive. And he is the villain. There is no redeeming him. The show has made that perfectly fucking clear. He betrayed Ed. He threatened to kill Ed if Ed didn't do what he wanted. He is the thing Ed will have to overcome to truly be happy.

And you're disgusting.

Ok, first of all: Big fan! I've heard so much about you Anon! Second: this made me laugh so fucking hard. I needed a good laugh so thanks Anon! ❤

(Read-more for the sake of my followers dashes, I'm writing essays again lmfao.)

So like. You must hate Mary then too, yeah? Since she's meant to be Izzy's parallel? What do you think of David Jenkins telling us that 'Izzy is the one to watch on a re-watch'? Do you think he's worried we missed him being 'irredeemable'? See, cause I took that as 'see that there's nuance to his character and he's got pretty reasonable motivations if you pay attention' but now, well, I'm just not sure, Anon 😰.

Tell me, where is he malicious outside of, like, regular piracy business? When someone else instigates? Yeah, sounds about right, so cruel of him to not worship at a rich man's feet when said rich man acts like he's the scum of the earth before knowing a single thing about him. How malicious of him to not be buddy-buddy with people his boss has taken prisoner, who are actively antagonizing him. How disloyal of him to *checks notes* uh. Hm. Well. There's just- there's nothing here? Oh! Oh do you mean the thing he did to get to Stede? The thing that Calico Jack (hi, I also love him, does that make me extra problématique?) and Spanish Jackie helped him do? The thing he did because he believed it was in Ed's best interest, since he was acting wildly out of character and incredibly irrationally considering their dangerous profession/lifestyle? That must be on a different list, I don't have that listed under 'disloyal', strange.

Izzy can't even manipulate his own emotions lmfao. Gaslighting? Anon, you must be misremembering, gosh you're so silly. Can't keep anything straight in that head of yours can you? He lies sometimes, I'll give you that, at least by omission, but that's not gaslighting. I'm sure you'll not like this but Ed's actions with regards to Izzy are closer to gaslighting than anything Izzy does to Ed. Or the crew, which I'm assuming you're including in this since you mention 'physical assault' and Izzy's never laid a hand on Ed?

The same crew that he, as far as he was aware (because Ed was *gasp* manipulating him by withholding information), was to treat as prisoners who, upon completing their task of 'repair the ship so we can take it from you, since we're pirates' would be given 'the uzsh' treatment of execution? The crew that he doesn't lay a hand on at all afterwards? Ooh, or do you mean when he grabbed Fang's beard? When Fang was openly questioning his captain's orders? Something that, if unchecked, can lead to a mutiny?

Funny thing about 'he disobeys a direct order' is that, well, Ed doesn't give him a direct order? 'We're not doing this' does not equal 'stand down'. He also doesn't try to stop it. Like, at all. He doesn't even tell Stede to stand down. He may not have wanted it to happen but he didn't do anything to actually prevent it when he's literally the only person on the ship with the power to prevent it. 'Izzy I no longer want him dead', all he needed to say since Izzy was operating on 'Izzy I want him dead but I can't do it myself because I'm conflicted about killing and especially killing things I'm attached to'. If Izzy had ignored that, then we could talk about 'disobeying direct orders'.

Also, he's first mate, its his job to push back on questionable orders from the captain. That's not mutiny that's how you prevent a mutiny.

'When he doesn't get what he wants', being. . . What? What he thought Ed wanted because he didn't communicate otherwise? What he thought was in Ed's best interest, because he's acting irrationally and out of character (which is confirmed by Fang and Ivan, by the way)? He's wrong* about what Ed's best interests are but that doesn't change the fact that he was trying to help rather than harm.

*Arguably. Ed indulging Stede was dangerous. Even without the threat of the navy on their backs (Stede's fault), there was no coasting on Blackbeard's reputation on the Revenge. They'd have to deal with every threat instead of just the one's who'd go after Blackbeard anyway.

So, wait, is Vico one of us or nah? Cause, like, I'll gladly join a cult if Vico is there. What do you think about David Jenkins though? Since his favorite character seems to be Izzy as well? Anyway I'll grant that Stede isn't my favorite character but that hardly means I don't give a shit about him. As for Ed. I love him so much, Anon. I love him so much that I don't infantilize him for the sake of demonizing another character so that I can use that to justify sending anon hate to people with differing opinions to me. I love Ed because he's unpleasant and- *ahem* well.

Some nice misogyny there, by the way. Gonna go out on a limb and say a bit transphobic as well, since I know you're presuming we're all women, some of us are men, some of us are neither or both. Has some notes of sexual harassment too. No, I'm not kidding. You're fantasizing about a group of people, sexually, and sending them messages about it. That's like, textbook sexual harassment. Not cool Anon.

Anon. They're pirates. None of them are good people. None of them are nice guys. All of their motivations are selfish and cruel.

Ed 'loves a good maim'. He's Blackbeard. He's not Robin Hood. He doesn't have secret (or explicit) good motivations for piracy and torture and murder. Stede is a deadbeat dad who chose piracy. Which includes stealing from people, even the poor (do we forget the plant so easily?), despite him. Y'know. Being rich? And like, selfish and cruel are Stede and Ed's middle names, Anon. Turtle vs crab? Setting a ship on fire with everyone still inside? Doesn't matter if the fire was the one who killed them if you're the one who set the fire, Anon. Swede losing teeth/fingernails? But I wanna go on a treasure hunt! And let's not even bring up Mary and the kids.

'Lazy and racist', where? I am legitimately asking, Anon, where? Is it where he makes the crew do their actual jobs? That's his job. Oh, how about where, instead of getting captured by the native people for being a colonizer, he does business with them? (You know, the people who explicitly call out Stede and Pete for being racist?) How about working under and with BIPOC? You think Blackbeard would keep him around if he was being racist? You think Jackie would have given him the time of day if he was racist? You don't think Fang and Ivan would have had some comment about it during the mutiny/planning scene?

I'll do you a solid, you don't have to point to any particular scene that doesn't exist. The writers themselves have said that they're not trying to tackle racism in the show the way that having Izzy be anything but 'white person who is, by virtue of being white, some level of racist' would be. If you don't want to call literally every other sympathetic white character on the show racist, you shouldn't be saying it of Izzy either. Izzy isn't the one who owns a fucking plantation.

Anon, I'm so glad you're giving me permission to keep liking Izzy! Thank you so much! I'm so grateful the fandom has you here to delegate what people are allowed to like and do! What would we do without you?

Nobody thinks Izzy is 'secretly the third protagonist'. Not anymore than people think that of Jim or Oluwande or Frenchie, since they all have side-plots going on as well. As for whether or not he's going to turn around and save the day? We'll see. Obviously he's not going to do everything because he's not the protagonist(s), but he has the potential to try and help just as much as everybody else on either crew. You're certainly entitled to your opinion/interpretation of his character but I can just as well say 'I think you're wrong', especially when you come into my house and throw a fit about it.

Did you forget that Jim and Lucius kissed as well? Are you forgetting 'we don't own each other'? Hell, Anon, I specifically said 'I don't ship Jim and Izzy', but well. Something something 'people on this website piss on the poor' etc. (Anon, you can just say 'fat', its not a bad word. I'm fat, Oluwande is fat, I fucking love that he's fat. I'm also not the best suited to speak on BIPOC representation but I'm also super happy that they're not shying away from including dark-skinned actors like Samson and Leslie. But that doesn't fit into your narrative so 🤷‍♂️.) You can call me all the sweet things you like but it doesn't change the fact that the show has, pretty explicitly, said 'yay polyamory' and Jim (and Oluwande) has two hands. Leave alone the fact that Jim can kiss Lucius and just be friends with him, same as they could with Izzy.

Gosh, Anon, you're really hurting my feelings here. You really think I'm a stupid cunt? That hurts. Genuinely, I'm gutted. I don't think I'll ever recover.

Given that you're literally talking hypotheticals, as we all are, since we don't know what is going to happen in season 2, I'm not going to argue if it would 'mean good things for Izzy' if Jim kissed him. Though I will say, if Jim needed him distracted for people to escape (I'm assuming you mean escaping him, rather than Ed who is the proper threat to anyone in need of escaping right now) they could find easier ways to do it than kissing him?

And the sky is green. And cats are witches. And women have crystals in their bodies. I can say stuff too, Anon. I think you fundamentally misunderstand what redemption means, if we're being entirely honest here. Redemption has less to do with your previous actions and more to do with what you choose to do going forward. Clearly we disagree on his capacity for doing better going forward, and that's fine, its alright to be wrong Anon I won't judge you for that, but him having done bad in the past* has no bearing on his redemption if he chooses to do good in the future.

*'Bad' here being used both generously and ungenerously. Generously towards your definition of bad and ungenerously in the face of his rationale. He had perfectly valid reasons for doing the things he did, regardless of whether or not he should have done them.

I love you too Anon! I hope you have a good day at school tomorrow- er. On Monday, sorry, adult schedules don't always follow the 'weekends off' rules that kid's schedules do, I forget sometimes. Bye bye!

[balillee]

my unpopular dsmp opinions, some of which genuinely should be popular

c!dream has crossed the moral event horizon and is irredeemable. once you cross that threshold, you're no longer a 'morally grey' character.

pre-recorded, heavily produced lore killed the lore. it was cool, sure, but you completely misunderstand the magic that the smp had when people watched it initially. the story is improv and that's how we like it. we can tell the cc's have lost interest in it, you can admit that to us, we'll understand, just stop lying to me.

c!dream's pov isn't necessary to understand his character or his motivations. if you've watched literally any c!primeboys stream he's basically spelled it out for you.

i don't understand how fans can dislike l'manberg or have claimed to be against it since the beginning. i honestly don't get it. what's so bad about wanting your own spot where you make your own rules and skirt accountability that has been used to technically oppress you before - and, before someone who never saw the earlier streams tries to disagree with this, the og l'manberg crew were imprisoned for shit that everyone else on the server was practically encouraged to do. also, what do you have against fun and happiness?

i think some of you forget that 'hybrids' aren't a thing, discounting c!ranboo. there's no piglin hybrids, c!techno is just a pig. there's no avian hybrids, c!phil is just a man with wings. there's no creeper hybrids, c!sam is just a creeper who's indecently exposed from the hips down. canonically there's no hybrids, and therefore no hybrid discrimination. people ran with that concept too much.

the loss and the fanon rewriting of the early lore up until pogtopia has ruined fandom perception of c!dream and the og l'manberg boys. c!tommy is more morally white than you think he is, and c!dream has always been a villain - he massacres and he kills and he destroys and he schemes and he always has broken his own rules. no wonder the boys wanted their own space after how they were treated.

i think ranboo oftentimes forgets his own lore. he brings stuff up that c!ranboo may have done, such as exploding the community house to frame c!tommy, holding onto Cat, and it goes absolutely nowhere. we've gotten all of these developments in his story but they have never been expanded on, and we're nowhere closer to figuring out his relationship to c!dream and what his other side is and honestly i see no hope that we'll be any closer to knowing even by the end of the year.

your characters don't all have to be morally grey for the story itself to be morally grey. this is fiction - some people can be nothing but evil and others can be nothing but good. being purely good or evil doesn't mean that you're one dimensional, either.

c!dream apologists have ruined c!dream for me. he's not a good person. how about you let me enjoy a villain for who he actually is, rather for than your percieved woobified ragdoll you pass off as c!dream.

the story was better when there was a central writer. it was brilliant back when wilbur wrote it to be that the environment drives the characters and the story, and it was really good in early s2 up until techno's execution day when it was more character driven. since then, the amount of autonomy people have over their characters without any central 'director', as it were, has been a detriment to the story overall. there needs to still be one overarching figure or director or writer.

not everyone is a main character. just because they have a pov, doesn't mean they're a main character. some characters have such little impact on the overall plot and describing everyone as a main character oversaturates the story and makes some characters seem more important than they are.

the egg lore had so much potential up until it didn't. all that built up threat that we were expecting and we still don't even know what the egg wants really other than just controlling people. does it hatch?

genuinely, if there's no major plot developments by the end of the year (and let's be honest, it's a very big possibility at this point), a few of the more prominent members of the server should do a podcast style stream talking about where the story would have gone, because at least then we would have gotten somewhat closer to a conclusion.

c!techno is a villain and an asshole and a bad person. he stops caring for people once their interests don't align with his or if they look at him funny. he makes meta-jokes about his own tyrannical and oppressive nature. stop taking that away from him. he's a bad person. cc!techno does a fabulous job portraying that in a comedic manner and the balancing of him being a deeply flawed person with deeply flawed morals and ideas with his comedically-portrayed stubbornness and lack of willingness to hear out opposing viewpoints is incredible. i want to like characters who are arseholes for the sake of being arseholes, and who refuse to take into account the hurt they've caused either out of self-righteousness or because they don't care, so let me. he's the anti-peacemaker, LET ME HIM ENJOY HIM FOR THAT!!!!

i think tommy and wilbur's way of doing lore is my favourite. relies heavily on improv, voice acting, sprite acting and facial expressions. really shows off the acting props and they pull off the emotional moments well for the insanity of the creative medium.

i'm not a fan of fan-music. i find songs about media i'm into difficult to listen to. coincidentally i'm also not a fan of shit like slam poetry or live music/musicals/pantomimes.

the death of l'manberg killed people's motivation to go on the server casually. i've talked about it more in depth before, but destroying what was a central, driving environment for the story killed momentum and motivation. imagine in an episode of she-ra, the princess alliance just nuke the freight zone and all of the members of the horde just have to deal with it. that would be shit.

until season 3 has some momentum, i'm counting the end of the smp as january 20th. that had a conclusion. season 3 has... whores, technoblade and tommyinnit. that's about it.

i wasn't a fan of the development of c!tubbo joining las nevadas. i preferred snowchester and the walled city conflict. give c!tubbo some backbone and some badassery. also tubbo where's the fucking nuke bro if you're shelving that plotline just tell us on like an alt stream what the plan was i beg

add like 2 or 3 new people to the server so that michael mcchill has someone to talk to and so that there's something always happening on the server. it gives the og's more motivation to return if things are happening in and out of canon and it'll help with momentum, and who knows? maybe they can write their own story/stories.

i really think that c!sam is an underrated character. he's multilayered, extremely interesting, and the dichotomy of his loyalty to his job and how far down the rabbithole that's taken him versus the genuine love he has for his friends that drives him to do what he does out of wanting to do right by them is brilliant. i don't talk about c!sam enough.

STOP HAVING FUCKING VILLAIN ARCS!!! I'M FUCKIN SICK OF IT!!!! i want to see more characters who see everyone else being absolute selfish, abhorrent cunts and go 'if nobody else is going to be a good person, i fucking will'. GIVE ME SOME MORAL WHITENESS!!! IT'S INTERESTING AND MORALLY GOOD CHARACTERS ARE FUN!!!

let tommyinnit build cobblestone towers. everyone bullied him too much for how ugly they were and the one he built outside of the prison looked genuinely really nice. it gives the boy something to do.

i'm a fan of the revive book and the canon lives system. don't ask me why, but i think it might just be the morbidity of it. it adds to c!dream's god complex persona, and i think the fragility of death itself is a really fun concept. not enough fan cc's have made connections with that and c!mumza, and it could make for cool fanfic.

ranboo your house is fucking ugly. it's an eyesore

c!niki, and to some extent now c!jack and c!fundy, are boring me and ruining my mood. i think c!jack is the closest to being an actually interesting sympathetic villain, mainly because nobody else seems to realise that c!niki is a villain. not a good one imo, but she's a villain. c!jack just has the problem of starting a new project over and over and over and over again and because of the slow in momentum for the primary cast, there hasn't been a lot of recent development for him.

not really a dream smp opinion, but if philza went full geordie accent, i would love it. i want him to, in canon, say shit like 'me n ye' instead of 'me and you' and use geordie dialect. i want him to be physically unintelligible because it's funny.

i don't really know what's up with c!foolish but i think he's a dumbass. he had a while to think about c!q's proposal and then changed his mind about joining the guy to admitted to letting him die just because. moron

i wish there was more c!eret lore. i wish he was an actual king with an actual kingdom and actual subjects and royal advisors. c!eret is far too fucking cool to be the king of nothing and nobody. fatten up the kingdom and the castle with people who work with c!eret, and don't just make it tyrannical and dictator-y to prove the point of the server's 'anarchists'. make it a healthy working environment, please - if you want moral greyness, have 'anarchists' who claim to care about the welfare of the server oppose a kingdom of happy people under a fair and just ruler because their ideologies clash.

the server needs more characters who oppose anarchy in more peaceful ways, or passively wish for systems to be a part of. i think a chaos vs order conflict ending only in mutual understanding where everyone understands that they should just leave each other alone would slot nicely into the story that's been created so far.

you need to have watched all of the previous arcs to understand the story. i've seen people argue that they don't need to know about earlier lore to understand the prison, but that's the equivalent of only watching the final season of pretty little liars and expecting to understand the context of what's going on.

some characters aren't that morally grey. some characters, take c!tommy for example, are definitely on the whiter side for the morality scale, he's just an asshole. he's abrasive and rude and a dickhead but he also doesn't agree with terrorism, he's patriotic, he strives for a better world, he's apologetic, but he's also a fucking BITCH.

you can add onto this if you want, but not if you're a c!dream apologist. nobody likes your opinions

[ms-demeanor]

Some meandering thoughts about jokes about rape and cultural changes in the last decade and a half

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad we’re in a place now where we DO question rape jokes and it would be much harder to get away with “raping Jonah Hill is incredibly amusing” as the center of a scene the way that you could in 2007-2013 but I do kind of feel like we don’t talk about how sudden that change was enough.

People talk about how you should have always known that awful things are awful but if you’re surrounded by rape jokes and pedophilia jokes all the time and that’s what’s funny to the other kids around you and the adults in your lives and what makes up the jokes in the movies you watch then it’s hard to act like you always knew it was wrong.

Dead baby jokes were a HUGE thing when I was a teen and in my early twenties and sitting around swapping dead baby jokes was just a thing we did, and tossed in among them were things like:

A joke about incest with the punchline “Get off me pa, you’re crushing my smokes.”

This joke about a pedophile murdering a child.

Let’s not turn this rape into a murder.

And hell, look at the activity graph for “soap on a rope” on urban dictionary:

2014 starts a significant taper.

Letterboxd has their “sexual assault against men played for comedy page” and if you sort by release date there’s a downward trend with 2014 as a really stand-out year for rape jokes about men in popular movies:

2010 - 10

2011 - 12

2012 - 14

2013 - 12

2014 - 18 (jesus, which includes a prison rape joke in “Paddington”)

2015 - 9

2016 - 9

2017 - 11

2018 - 15

2019 - 4

2020 - 1

(this is of course with the caveat that this is only what has been documented so far)

Shock porn sites used to be a thing and they used to be a COMMON thing. A thing that would get remixed and have late night hosts make jokes about them and that got parody music videos.

So on the one hand I was really glad that in 2010 the hacker conference WASN’T asking me to make a rape joke on their tee shirt, but since Pool 2 Girl came up at every single “this is what defcon is about” discussion and some of the guys from the con had printed up “lemonparty.org” stickers to slap up around town it wouldn’t have been *surprising* if they’d been asking for that.

If you were a teenager in 2005 would you have known how much of a dick move goatse-ing people was? We didn’t have the same culture of trigger warnings (not that I disapprove of trigger warnings, they are good and I like them) and there was very much an attitude online at the time of “if you can’t handle it log off.”

I think the fappening was the turning point for a lot of this stuff - I think that was a big cultural moment that changed a lot of people’s attitudes really quickly and I’m seeing echos of that with what Chris Evans is dealing with right now: people are a lot faster to say “oh, that sucks, don’t be an asshole, report people for posting the pics” while I remember sitting and arguing in an imgur thread because there were a bunch of people saying “if you don’t like it don’t take nudes” about the celebrities who got caught in the icloud leak.

People look at Shane Dawson’s (admittedly gross and incredibly inappropriate) behavior with a poster of Willow Smith and act like it’s unprecedented***** but as someone who remembers not only Olsen Eighteenth Birthday countdowns but ALSO the jokes about fucking the Olsen twins that came BEFORE they were legal that’s just bizarre. Seeing people my age and older react to James Gunn’s pedophilic twitter jokes like they’re worse than Jay Leno’s jokes about Michael Jackson (which were made on TV! Across America! On a major network!) is just. It’s bizarre.

I’m glad we are where we are now, I’m glad that making rape jokes in public or jokes about incest or pedophilia (or murder or abortion) is less common and less okay (especially in children’s media, jesus fuck) and more likely to get criticized.

But I’m also pretty sure I’m going to get called a rape apologist by *someone* for saying “2010 was a different time, rape jokes were more common and we didn’t realize how shitty it was” when it really was a different time and rape jokes were more common and most people didn’t realize how shitty it was. I sure didn’t. I do now, and I’m glad I do now. But pretending that we should have ALWAYS known this, pretending that this was NEVER acceptable, pretending that it WASN’T a different time is ignoring the fact that for over a decade there was an entire genre of pedophilic rape jokes (that were frequently also racist) centered around one celebrity and that people told these jokes in public and in pop culture *all the time.*

Does that make it right? Fuck, I don’t know, shit is relative. It was still largely acceptable to electrocute gay kids and people tossed around the word “faggot” pretty freely. Mean Girls is full of jokes about how awful it is for people to think you’re a lesbian and Superbad is full of jokes about getting people shitfaced so they’ll sleep with you (so date rape) and there’s an entire “cute comedy” from the 80s starring Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn that’s an extended rape-by-fraud joke. I think that as a whole we’re better now as people than we were in 2010 and the 90s and the 80s and the 50s and I don’t think that someone who made a sexist joke in the 80s is irredeemably evil and I don’t think people making rape jokes in the 2010s are rape apologists in 2020 and I wish there was a lot more understanding of both history and nuance in these conversations.

*****to be very, very clear Shane Dawson has been filmed kissing underage fans on the mouth and having explicit sexual conversations with his very young cousin - Dawson has done things that go beyond “inappropriate” and fall clearly into “wrong” “bad” “dangerous” “illegal” etc, which is all the more reason that it’s so strange to see people focusing on him fake masturbating on a poster of Willow Smith. YES doing that was gross but why is it even being compared to the way he’s been filmed interacting with fans? The lack of nuance, making “fake masturbating at a poster” and “creating a sexually abused puppet character” the same as “inappropriately touched and kissed minor fans and engaged a young child in explicit sexual conversations” is NOT GOOD. That is a bad thing. Two of those things are tasteless and two of those things are actively harmful and it’s the actively harmful stuff that we should be focusing on and part of why it’s really weird to see shit like “pizzagate conspiracist accuses James Gunn of making inappropriate jokes” like yes Gunn please don’t but can we maybe refocus and talk about the dude who can be pretty significantly assigned blame for a fucking shooting? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/james-gunn-alt-right-marvel-film-director-tweets

Actually, you know what, I thought I was done ranting, I’m not.

It’s purity culture.

YES you should attempt to do less harm with your language, YES you should attempt to not use slurs, YES you should try to avoid making rape jokes. But there’s an entire huge group of people who are willing to drag up rape jokes from a decade when rape jokes were REALLY REALLY common in order to say that nothing you say or do today matters.

And that same group is ALSO really interested in expanding the concept of what pedophilia is to include age differences in adults or liking the wrong style of drawing and it’s a purity culture silencing tactic and can we PLEASE stop pretending that gross, tasteless jokes are the same thing as actually sexually abusing people? Can we stop pretending that pointing out “rape jokes were more common fifteen years ago and I feel bad about it but that’s just the way it was and I don’t make jokes like that anymore” is the same as saying “rape isn’t bad and you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

It’s always good to try to be a less shitty human but if you’re only allowed to grow and improve and be less shitty if you never fucked up in the first place then it’s all just calvinist bullshit and none of us could ever really be saved in the first place.

I dunno, dudes. We got so careful about disapproving of the wrong kind of language that we let a white supremacist concern troll Disney into firing a director who caught the attention of the alt right by shit-talking the president.

I think perhaps we need to reexamine some strategy here.