#after that guy gets criticized by all sorts of people around the world with experiences with fascism and white supremacy and all that shit

[solahsaavan]

Some of the criticism of the show is valid and some of it is just...people lacking any sort of nuance or comprehension skills.

1) "They are stupid and irresponsible for being together in the public". Yes, but also the public doesn't know ji han is a chaebol and ah jeung is a no name actress. The public also doesn't know who Dohan's financee is. Only the wedding has been announced. It's not surprising at all that the two dumbasses thought they could be together without being seen. Ji han has no reason to believe his step siblings would send a reporter after him knowing it's Dohan's position they are after. Something so obvious shouldn't be have to be spelled out by the writers for you lot.

2) "How could that bitxh Ah jeong have the audacity to have feelings that don't revolve around Dohan? She should have continued being miserable and uncomfortable because it is only Dohan's safety and comfort that matters." No woman should put herself through so much pain for another man not even for her gay best friend. If you want to watch women make decisions centered around their relationship with a man then plenty of shitty BLS and works by incels with one dimensional fl characters exist.

3) Dohan, ji ahn and ah jeong are flawed human beings. None of their mistakes deprive them of their humanity and their right to love and be loved.

4) kdrama viewers have a meltdown every time a character makes decisions that are not the most ethically, culturally or rationally correct. It's not bad writing if a character makes a terrible choice CONSISTENT with their character.

5) But the outrage is always more loud for a FEMALE character every single fucking time. Like clockwork. Not only are you guys consistently boring with the demand for characters to stay conventional but also consistently MISOGYNISTIC.

6) Both ji han and ah jeong fought their feelings for each other before finally giving in. It wasn't immediate. They both are clearly guilty. Both of them wanted to talk to Dohan about this. He was the first person they wanted to talk to. He was on their minds on the date too.They only went out together as a couple to a STRANGE PLACE for ONE DAY where they thought they would be safe. Why are people acting like they have been hiding their relationship for ages? They didn't even get the chance to be public yet. NO, THEM ROAMING IN A STRANGE PLACE DOESN'T COUNT AS PUBLIC BECUASE NO ONE AROUND THEM KNOWS.

7) MEDIA SHOULD NEVER CATER TO YOUR MORALES OR FEELINGS. This world consists of average people who make horrible choices and who hurt themselves and others. I like watching them on screen. Hope more kdramas are courageous enough to experiment with genuine character flaws that aren't just being 'quirky' or a 'tsundere'.

8) None of the characters one this show are 'morally dubious or gray'. They just are people with flaws. Idk maybe read a book or two or watch peaky blinders.

[witchthewriter]

What would spike be like as a boyfriend, specifically maybe to a reader who's really short (like 4'11 to 5 foot short)...

Please don't say drop kick, that's what I got last time I asked for a comfort thing :)

Your writing is wonderful 💛💛

a/n: that’s absolutely awful that they said that, I don’t believe he would do that to be honest! And thank you so much for the kind comment, I’m completely open to criticism for my writing xx

Also I feel like it needs to be addressed his actions in season 6 - I would love a discussion about how others feel (I’ve only JUST finished watching buffy lol) and I love Spike but that episode was a mess? And I don’t want to disrespect anyone ... do we pretend it didn’t happen? do we accept him because he got his soul back? 

𝑴𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕

𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐬/𝐨

⸱ I definitely think you guys have a pride & prejudice beginning. He feigned hatred and tried to ignore you. You were nothing but a mere human to him. You’re close to Buffy and her gang of merry vampire slayers, which automatically made you an enemy

⸱ And yet, there was something about you. The twinkle in your eyes whenever you look up at him, the way you smiled when the world seemed it would end in a second.

⸱ He always considered himself, the Big Bad, but when an ancient vampire named Erylis came to Sunnydale, his reputation shadowed all else. No one knew where he came from, what he looked like. But he was someone to be afraid of.

⸱ You had been captured, drank from, but given something, that once rescued, no one could understand. You did not turn, but some of Erylis’ power seeped from him to you. You were faster, stronger, keener; more awake. Any wounds healed quickly and you were able to foresee a semblence of the future.

⸱ The group helped you the best way they could; Willow was always there to listen. Xander for a shoulder to lean on, Giles for information and Buffy for strength. They still accepted you, but wanted to know what exactly you were now. Some sort of superhuman?

⸱ Spike helped resue you from Erylis; after he had the chip inplanted in his head, what else was he supposed to do? Where else would he go?

⸱ He had pulled Erylis from your neck, and although tempted himself, he saw your paled face and something in his chest changed. Cracked open? Blossomed?

⸱ Now that Spike was ... sort of apart of the gang, he spent more time with you. Especially since he was the only one who wasn’t frightened of you. (The group still loved you, but they did have some apprehension, would you hurt someone? Did you need to feed?)

⸱ Spike was there when some of the questions about your change were answered. In short, there was small experiements. Like eating usual food; did it fill you up the same? Were you craving something else? Nope, it was like before. Except what you had liked before (possibly sweets, or chips etc,.) were intensified. And what you didn’t like seemed repulsive.

⸱ You had no desire to hurt other people, except those who had wronged you. You felt things more deeply, and the things that helped humans seemed to help you x100.

⸱ You always carry lavender and chamomile to help calm you down.

⸱ After getting to know you, he was smitten. He would try his best not to show it, but there was his possessive side that wanted to jump out whenever someone showed any type of interest in you

⸱ And you know what, you felt the same way. When he would be around any other girl, there was a flash of pain in your chest. You cared so deeply for him. But you tried not to show it; I mean Willow caught on. She caught on fast, then Buffy and Giles. Xander was completely oblivious. 

⸱ When you had your first kiss, he would’ve leant down, while you were on your tippy toes. 

⸱ He’s is vERY protective of you, even though you’re more durable than he is. Every demon knows there will be hell to pay if they go anywhere NEAR you. 

⸱ So, it’s actually a good thing for you and the gang... that you and Spike are together, it’s like they have an extra layer of protection. 

⸱ However, that does put Spike at risk. But he has plenty of enemies anyway, so he’s used to it

⸱ He likes it when he’s laying between your legs, head resting against your chest as you stroke his face. 

⸱ “Ya know pet, I wouldn’t of thought you and I would get along so well.” He mumbled one night, your head resting against his chest.       “Sometimes we don’t,” you replied teasingly.  “Well love, you know what they say.”      “What do they say, Spike?”  “Opposites attract.” 

⸱ You always wake up before him, but on the odd day that he wakes first, he’ll bring you in a cup of tea. 

⸱ Also I don’t want anyone saying this is out of character because we haven’t seen Spike in a positive relationship. So I do think he would be thoughtful to his significant other (also he’s british, they love tea)

⸱ His favourite thing to do together is when he has his head in your lap, and you’re reading out loud to him

⸱ He tells you tales of the lives he’s lived

⸱ Doesn’t like other people making inquiries or jokes about your relationship

⸱ There’s still tension when he’s around the group, but he is changing with you. Becoming softer, kinder

⸱ You’re becoming more ... sassy? If that’s the right word to use...more in tune with quick-witted comments

⸱ He knows a lot about you, not just because he listens to you talk but he has been watching you for a while. Noticing your quirks in conversations and likes/dislikes 

⸱ He knows your favourite movies and books

⸱ Spike loves taking you on adventures, especially when there’s chaos... have probably robbed a place together I won’t lie (it was pub with a sexist bartender, what else were you supposed to do?) 

[atelier-slime]

DRAGON QUEST'S LOCALIZATION SUCKS, ACTUALLY. PART 1

There's a thread blowing up on Japanese twitter right now about the poor quality of localization. It's the first time I've ever actually seen a japanese perspective on the topic, and it's been extremely gratifying to see a ton people from over there talk about specific translation issues they've seen or learn for the first time that japanese media is often given the short end of the stick here in the USA.

Most of the time over here in the US, criticism of localization gets shouted down as whiny fans who think they know better than the translators. It's been heartening to see that people from japan are also annoyed by it, and its inspired me to write up a whole long-ass rant I've had simmering in the back of my mind for years, so buckle up, long post(s) incoming:

Let's start at the beginning with the first thing that ever caused me to start thinking about localization. This little guy:

If you've played Dragon Quest in the past 2 decades, you probably know this guy by the name "Spiked Hare." Not me though! I got into DQ on the game boy, in the brief window of time where DQ's localization was handled by Nob Ogasawara, the same guy responsible for translating every pokemon game up until Platinum. In the DQ games Nob worked on, he chose to translate this guy's name as "Almiraj." Why the huge difference in translation? I'll get to that in a minute.

The almiraj is an extremely minor enemy in Dragon Quest 3. It's pretty weak, and it's only real defining feature is that it can occasionally cast sleep spells on your party members. It's just one of hundreds of monsters in that game, and aside from it's cute design, it's pretty forgettable. As a weird kid overly obsessed with linguistics though, its name always seemed odd to me. You don't really see words that end with a "J" in english. It stuck out enough that one night, when I was bored, I decided to google "almiraj" to figure out what the name meant. It sent me down a rabbit hole (almiraj hole?) that taught me all sorts of cool shit, and permanently altered the way I looked at localization. The path I tumbled down that night went something like this:

The Dragon Quest almiraj is named after the almiraj, a "real" mythical creature described as a hare with a large horn on its head.

The original inspiration for accounts of the almiraj (as well as the jackalope, wolpertinger, etc.) is likely the Shope papiloma Virus, which causes rabbits to grow weird, horn-like growths on their face and head.

It was described by Zakariya al-Qazwini, an Iranian lawyer, author, and all around knowledgeable guy who lived in the 13th century.

al-Qazwini described it in the Aja'ib al-Makhluqat, a massive cosmographical treatise that attempted to describe basically everything in the known universe at the time. It was so popular in the Islamic world that it was copied and translated into dozens of languages, which meant plenty of copies have survived intact to modern times.

The almiraj was brought into the limelight in modern fantasy when it was introduced in the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, as a relatively weak and unassuming monster as part of a campaign to expand the game with monster suggestions from fans of the series.

Dungeons and Dragons-style role playing games were brought into the digital world with the release of the first Wizardry game in 1981.

Yuji Horii was a massive fan of Wizardry, which he first discovered as part of a developer exchange program when he visited America in 1983. Three years later, he decided to try and recreate the things he loved from the series for console gamers in Japan, and the the original Dragon Quest was born.

One little name was all it took to open up this entire through-line of history that I had no idea even existed before that night. It's a tapestry of human experiences over 800 years in the making, spanning continents, cultures, languages, and medium. It's probably because I'm the type of person who sits around thinking about stuff too much, but I honestly get a little emotional wondering what al-Qazwini would think if he could see the mythical creatures he described all those years ago as little dudes hopping around inside a computer.

And the thing is the tapestry doesn't end there! Dragon Quest is still pretty niche in the west, but in Japan it's fucking titanic. There's an urban legend that the Japanese government banned Square Enix from releasing Dragon Quest games on a weekday, because so many people would skip work or school that it would impact the economy. (It's not true by the way, but the fact that the rumor exists at all is a testament to how huge the series' influence is over there.) I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that what Lord of the Rings did to modern western fantasy, Dragon Quest did to modern Japanese fantasy. Almost every JRPG, manga, or anime with a fantasy setting has the fingerprints of Dragon Quest on it. Countless other works have been inspired by DQ, and those works will go on to inspire others. A million different threads weaving tapestries back and forth across time and borders, all over the globe. And the almiraj is a part of that! It might just be a single, tiny, white and purple thread, but it's still in there helping to tie things together.

So back to the question I asked earlier: Why is it "Almiraj" in Mr. Ogasawara's translation but "Spiked hare" in the current one? Simple: Nob actually translated the name.

You can see on the DQ wiki that the original japanese name of the monster is "アルミラージ" which is literally just "almiraj" written in katakana:

The current DQ team has instead decided that all monster names should be puns. I'm not against puns or anything. "Spiked hare" for a rabbit with a horn is great! I might even raise my eyebrows and exhale slightly if I read it for the first time. Dragon Quest in general tends to have a lot of goofiness in it, so it's not like puns are out of place or anything. My problem is that, by deciding to replace monster names arbitrarily like this, all the little threads start to come unraveled. You lose the ability to look back down the line and discover all these different connections to history and nature and art that you might not ever learn otherwise. The almiraj isn't the only monster to get this treatment. A huge portion of the monsters in Dragon Quest are taken from mythologies around the world, and many of their names are literally already in English, just written with katakana.

The almiraj sticks out in my mind as a particularly egregious example because of just how much I learned because of the foreign-sounding name, but there's plenty of other name changes that have resulted in straight up confusing, ambiguous, or otherwise stupid outcomes in the current localization.

CONTINUED IN PART 2

[elliewiltarwyn]

I have to ask top 5 npc 👀

well if you guys insist 👀 this will get extremely long, i'm sure, so i'll throw it under the cut to save your dashes lol

-----------------------------------

5. Emet-Selch

yes part of me is a basic bitch and is in agreement with everyone that damn, that villain of the award-winning expansion of the critically acclaimed MMORPG do be written ridiculously well. part of me is such a basic bitch that i am among the many who made an ancient OC named Persephone. (She isn't Ellie's ancient, and therefore not Azem, for whatever that's worth. :V)

but I mean. damn, he's written well. and I really feel his influence in nearly every corner of the ingame universe. Ellie stands firmly against him, but also can't say for certain she'd make any different choices if she had been in his position, having lost everyone she ever loved. honestly one of the best implementations of the "everyone is the hero of their own story" concept I've ever seen.

plus he's just such a rude, uptight little bitch, and it's amazing to watch.

4. Alisaie

Both of the twins are really good, and I am definitely among those who, despite their less-than-stellar introductions, eventually ended up going all "I'm having children. it's you. sign these adoption papers." but Alisaie in particular has the fierce drive and endless capacity for love that connects with Ellie so well. they're both fiery and vivacious and searching for some sort of purpose in a world that doesn't care and eventually find that meaning in the people they love. Straightforward, hates beating around the bush, so eager to cut to the point that she pops the LB immediately every dang time on like the GCD right before I try going for it--

yeah she's just really good and she feels like a sister after everything we've been through.

3. Lyse

So, I grew up in the shadow of an older brother; he was immensely popular, very self-confident, and knew what he wanted to do with his life ever since he was a kid. Everyone loved him, everyone admired his clear sense of purpose... and more than a few people looked at me in his wake and literally asked "why aren't you that cool? you should try and be more like him." not even exaggerating.

thankfully, I've done a lot of self-growth and am on very good terms with him these days. A lot of that sense of self-growth came from finding the courage to strike out on a path he hadn't laid down before me, find ways to define myself that aren't just carbon copies of his own traits. It was better for everyone for me to figure out what I wanted and how to achieve that by becoming the best version of myself -- not anyone else.

is it any godsdamn wonder Lyse resonates so much with me? plus she's a beautiful kinda-dumb punch girl, and I live for that archetype. In my canon, Ellie drops reaper after Endwalker and trains up to be a monk under Lyse, because albeit for different reasons, Ellie also empathizes a ton with Lyse's struggles and development. to the extent of fairly severely crushing on her for a long time imma be real.

2. Esteem

you ever just *clenches fist* become so traumatized that in order to cope you manifest your own inner darkness that wants you to love yourself so much that she tries to subsume you into herself so you don't have to suffer anymore, only to come to terms with the weight of all the traumas you are carrying and learning to love yourself through it all anyway, in a way that helps you master the darkness and bring it to bear against those who deserve it? is-- is this not a common experience? oh. well I mean. it was very cool to have that happen.

Ryne

i made a meme a long time ago for this exact purpose:

i love my beautiful gay daughter

thanks for the prompt and the excuse to gush, @oneiroy and @alliezweihander!!

[twilightmalachite]

2×2 - Children on the Streets 13

Author: Akira

Characters: Yuuta, Hinata

Translator: Mika Enstars

"(There you go, criticizing yourself in the mirror again…)"

[Read on my blog for the best viewing experience with Oi~ssu ♪]

Season: Spring

Location: 2×2 Program Set

Yuuta: (Well alright, so? So you have a lover, but no close friends. So what are these kidnappers to you, Aniki?)

Hinata: (If you’re calling Anzu-san my lover, then you’re mistaken! She’s the number one most irritating girl in the world to me!)

Yuuta: (It’s rare for you to have special feelings towards someone, positive or negative, so I can’t help but find it a lil’ intriguing, though…♪)

Hinata: (Don’t concern yourself over it. Because it’s seriously nothing. Aw man, I’m not good at these topics…)

Yuuta: (Hehe, you’re very capable Aniki, so I’m sure you’ll be able to overcome anything even if you’re not good at it in no time, right?—One way or another.)

Hinata: (I’ll try my very best, then.)

(…Those kidnappers who took me away are the very delinquents that were rumored to be terrorizing the town lately.)

(But y’see, although they’ve only recently become a topic, they’ve been living there in that town for a long time.)

(And they haven’t even been doing anything bad. They were labeled a color gang and we were warned about them, but there was nothing ever said about anything like actual damage, right?)

(That’s because they genuinely didn’t do anything bad.)

(The reason the police were so lax in their response was because it was a nonissue, there was very little real danger.)

(In fact, it was more like it was the residents who overreacted and attacked them. Apparently the police had to devote a lot of manpower to deal with it.)

(Change your perspective, and the entire world will change, right? Hehe, that's just what Sora-kun says, though.)

(You do have close friends, Aniki. You have those who have taught you important things.)

(Yeah. Maybe… I guess I really had no need to feel so lonely.)

(But, that aside. All the talk about delinquents causing trouble around town was nothing but a nightmare imagined by people who were feeling depressed over the recession.)

(In reality, it was nothing but a group of people with no place to go, surviving by supporting one another.)

(Just like us, back when we had run away from home.)

Yuuta: (It was less supporting one another, and more Aniki supporting me one-sidedly, though.)

Hinata: (I got a ton of support from you too, you know, Yuuta-kun. Just mostly in a mental way.)

(Anyways, those people who we used to be like back then, they were all scared, being called delinquents.)

(They were anxious that they might get targeted by these hypervigilant residents. Turns out, an anti-delinquency movement of sorts was even about to start…)

(I was asked if I could do something about it.)

(Well, “asked”. It was a rather rough means of doing so, it basically was a thread.)

Yuuta: (So they did do something bad, after all!)

Hinata: (Doesn’t that just go to show how cornered they were? And, truthfully, they probably hated me, too.)

(You know, Yuuta-kun, they told me I wasn’t being fair.)

Yuuta: (You’re never being fair, though.)

Hinata: (Right. Even though I too was a stray cat with no place to go, back then…)

(I became happy. I was given protection from Master and built a career on the street performance skills I had built up there—)

(And now here I am, a sparkling idol up on the big stage! ♪)

(But we were all supposed to have been the same. Why only me? …That’s the grudges they spat at me. It was pretty rough. It had been a long time since I had felt so bad.)

Yuuta: (“Why”? They’re just unhappy because they didn’t try hard enough. It’s their just deserts.)

(How come everything bad is our fault? It’s just not true!)

Hinata: (There you go, criticizing yourself in the mirror again…)

(I understand where you’re coming from, Yuuta-kun. And in fact, it may be their just deserts, to an extent, but…)

(The unkind God never gave those guys an “opportunity”. A spider's thread was never lowered into hell.)

(We had grabbed it. We just so happened to catch the attention of some kind people.)[1]

(Looking back, I think it was the luckiest thing in the world. Y’know Yuuta-kun, you might hate everyone in the world, but…)

(Among that “everyone”, there are kind people who have helped us, you know.)

Yuuta: (… …)

Hinata: (So, I hope you won’t hate the world anymore, Yuuta-kun—)

(That’s the kind person I want to be.)

(I want to be like Master and like Sakuma-senpai and the others, who picked us up when we were stray cats, and loved us.)

Hinata: (I decided to forgive those who kidnapped me and spat those resentful words at me, with that in mind.)

(It’s instinctual for stray cats to bite, because to them, everything around them is their enemy.)

(And if you don’t bite, you can’t protect yourself and the companions important to you.)

(But. This world needs someone kind who will forgive even if they are bitten, and pick those up and bring them somewhere warm.)

(“That” is who I want to be. That is why I gave them jobs this time around. And I will continue to do so. I want to help them earn enough money to get themselves through the cold winter.)

(Waaay back then, I learned how to live on the streets, thanks to their guidance.)

(I’ll repay that favor.)

(Hatred creates a ripple effect, but so does kindness.)

(I want to continue carrying on that torch, and spread it across the world.)

(That’s what I’ve wanted to do, since the very, very start.)

Hinata: (I wanted to protect what was important to me. I wanted to bring them somewhere warm so they wouldn’t have to be hurt anymore.)

(So that’s what I’ll do. And what I’ll continue to do. Even if you don’t like it, Yuuta-kun, because it is what I truly want to do.)

(I’ll fill the world with love and kindness.)

(If I do that, Yuuta-kun, then you won’t have anyone to hold a grudge against anymore, right?)

Yuuta: (…You’re really arrogant.)

(But it’s fine. You and I are twin brothers, Aniki, but we’re two separate people. I have no right to stop you from doing what you want to do.)

Yuuta: (Sure, there may be kind people in this world out there. But, the number of them is still overwhelmingly small.)

(If you ever get devastated by that cruel truth and frustrated by that reality, Aniki… I’ll be watching you from the side, laughing.)

(And when you hit rock bottom and become the same creature as me, we’ll fight side by side for the “same cause” together again.)

Hinata: (That day will never come. No, I’ll do whatever I can to ensure that.)

Yuuta: (Then it’s a match to see which of our desired futures will come to be first, huh?)

(I won’t lose, Hinata-kun.)

Hinata: (I have no intention of losing either, Yuuta-kun.)

Yuuta & Hinata: “♪~♪~♪”

[ ☆ ]

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A reference to The Spiders Thread, a story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa where a spider's thread is descended into hell by Buddha, giving the protagonist a chance to climb himself out. Upon seeing others grab onto and try to climb the thread behind him, he shouts that the thread is his alone; at that moment the thread snaps, plunging them all back down. The story is about compassion.

[runthepockets]

Extremely bullshit personal ramble under the cut

I was reading this article on Chevy Chase yesterday, and it talked a little about his time on the tv show Community, and how he once left creator Dan Harmon an angry voicemail after the latter had embarrassed him very publicly at a party. And Harmon's response was to....play the voicemail at a small gathering, which just felt really unnecessarily cruel and exploitative for a guy in charge of a successful sitcom.

"This is a pattern people have with my father" Chase's daughter says, "whenever they get hurt by him, the run to tell their friends and call up TMZ and gossip about him, make him a laughing stock, put him on blast in front of the whole world". And look, I know the guy is an ass. He's a racist, xenophobic, sexist, and every other outdated ideal rich white guys are prone to under the sun, with a huge ego. But a lot of me is still like....why this? He's just a guy, he's still human at the end of the day. You're both adults, and Harmon was clearly the one in the wrong, why didn't he just call Chase and apologize for embarrassing him in front of his family and coworkers? That doesn't seem unreasonable. I believe in accountability, and all, but kicking a man when he's down and making a huge spectacle of it for a cheap laugh is just low hanging fruit, and wraps back around to being pretty devastating and pathetic, even if he sucks as a person.

I've been bitching a lot about queer spaces lately, and I feel pretty bad about it, even if I feel a lot of the criticism is warranted. In the midst of all my bitching, I should clarify that I'm not one to sell people up the river for cis approval, or to judge people unfairly for being different than me, or any of that stuff. I'm an adult, I grew up in the 2000s and 2010s. I remember all the stupid jokes at trans women's expense and a lot of "shock humor" revolving around making a mockery of gay men's sexualities. I remember how people hated Brokeback Mountain when it first came out. I remember Matthew Shephard. I remember how simply wearing pants that fit could get a guy jumped after dark. I think about all of that stuff all the time. I'm stealth and unwilling to compromise this, but even while navigating the world as a cishet dude, I still operate as an ally to the queer struggle and liberation. I'm not an idiot and I'm not heartless, I know it's rough out here, I can still afford people a lot of grace and empathy, I'm genuinely a pretty smart and patient guy.

But lately I feel my patience is running thin. I wish it wasn't, but it is. Every time I try to open myself up in queer spaces I just end up getting manipulated or abused or backstabbed or assigned some sort of mediator role that I never asked for. And look, I'm no saint, and I know I can be pretty polarizing at times. I often struggle to find the sweet spot between amusement and comedy and just being a douche, and at the end of the day not everyone in the world is going to like me, cis or trans, gay or straight, and goddamn if there aren't people I couldn't give less of a shit about. I honestly couldn't care less about being in everyone's good graces, that's just not how being an adult in this life works.

But I digress. I'm not a damn mass murderer, I've never raped or sexually harassed or killed anyone. I'm just kind of awkward at times. For all my jokes and how much I revel in being a bad boy and giving little to no fucks about any trivial bullshit, I do have morals. I do try very hard to make sure no one feels left out or alienated or uncomfortable by my actions, and if I do it's almost never intentional. It isn't fun. Being the only black & neurotypical dude in a lot of queer spaces isn't too dissimilar from Mr. Chase's experiences on Community; if you fuck up, you're pretty much fucked. Queer spaces are too small to avoid everyone you've ever fucked up with, and you can't throw a rock in a queer space without hitting like 12 people with trauma responses that lead them to blow a lot of things out of proportion. By no fault of their own, of course, but they are still in control of their actions and that more often than not leads to me being treated like some sort of pariah rather than just being told what I did wrong and deescalating conflict in a casual way.

On a more menial and petty level, it also sucks being ignored. Seeing people's eyes glaze over and watching them reach for their phones any time I talk about my interests and passions for improving malenes or how much I like being a straight guy, cus that doesn't blend very well with people's ideas of queer identity / conflicts with their priorities. It sucks. I'm chopped liver. I wish I could pin it to white queer spaces (and they are the most egregious offenders for most of this), but I think it's just the state of nonblack queers in general and the sad reality of queer spaces being molded as a "safe space" from masculinity since like, the 70s (many trans men and masc gay men will agree with and testify to this). That's a good 80% of time I just spend being an after thought, both interpersonally and in broader political conversations. It sucks ass. I get that being stealth isn't for everyone, but I really don't see how anyone can fault me for my decision. When I'm in the cishet world, as a black dude, things aren't perfect either, but people are more likely to understand where I'm coming from and the things I have to say, at the very least, because the majority of their experiences are the same and the lack of stigma and trauma around their identities makes it a lot easier to communicate. Again, this is not a personal failing of queer spaces, but the material reality is....yeah, it's just easier for me personally to deal with cishet people. Black trans people, too, but realistically black people as a whole only make up about 13% of the population and only like, 6% of that is trans, and I'm not gonna spend all day every day weeding out people to hang out with, I'm gonna chill with whoever is cool to be around.

Idk man. Lately I've just been feeling this strong sense of "if I weren't trans, I wouldn't matter to any of these people, pretty much everything between us is conditional." Like, if people react this poorly to me as a black dude who presumably doesn't have a dick or isn't struggling with a lot of the hang ups and traumas cis black dudes have (you know, the kind of shit that lands you in jail or addicted to meth, instead of just being kind of rude and dismissive sometimes), imagine how they'd react if I actually was a cis black dude. I'd probably be torn to shreds by now. And the fact that I'm feeling this way means it's probably time for a huge change. I try really hard-- to accommodate for people, to find new friends, to learn and keep learning and always try to do better, and it all always ends the same. It's gotten to the point where some of my friends think it's all online nonsense. It's not. Being a black man really just sucks that fucking bad, and it really is just this fucking hard all the time. I mean don't get me wrong, I fucking love being black and I love being a man, but there is no reprieve, and it's idiotic to act as if all men have the same privileges that white dudes do.

I don't think I can ever fully leave queer spaces behind; I mean, I love trans women so much, romantically platonically and sexually, and black trans people in particular give me so much joy and hope in a world that feels very stacked against me a lot of the time. But I do think it's time to be more selective with my time and energy and who I interact with, cus it's very apparent to me that a lot of people don't have my best interests at heart, nor do they really know how to deal with problems beyond very surface level and biased understandings of gender and being trans.

At the end of the day, I really really love people, which is maybe why it always hits so hard when they don't always love me back.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/15/2022: A personal essay on THE BEYOND (1981)

There is a lot to say about THE BEYOND as a work of art, and it's been said by smarter people than me—including Tenebrous Kate, a writer and critic who handily kicked off the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival's Fulci retrospective with a compact, insightful introduction to the prolific director's genre-spanning career. Besides situating his work historically, and breaking down his key themes, Kate also reflected on what it was like to discover someone like Fulci in a pre-internet world where you really had to care and network and sleuth out movies like his, and you could often be surprised—traumatized, even!—by stumbling upon films you never saw coming. THE BEYOND was like that for me, and Kate's observations sent me spiraling into old lady reverie and musing about whether that kind of mentally revolutionary discovery can still happen in this day and age. So, this piece is more about that, than it is about THE BEYOND specifically.

Just to be clear, I was never some sort of tape-trading hero. I made most of my discoveries in mom & pop video stores, and then later in more esoteric rental places where there was an escalated risk of experiencing something that I was in no way prepared for. When I was 14 and had my first personal membership at our local shop, I picked up something that looked for all the world like an old F.W. Murnau movie. When I took it home and pressed play, I realized how wrong I was; it was DER TODESKING, an explicit essay on suicide by Jörg Buttgereit, the director most famous for the still-shocking NEKROMANTIC. About 20 minutes later, after a segment that suggests a hardcore version of ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS including graphic castration, I took the tape out, returned it, and spent the rest of the afternoon crying. Many years later I found a love for Buttgereit, who makes intelligent, satirical art that tends to target past and contemporary German culture—but at the time, I was REALLY not ready for it. I didn't even know anything like that existed. And actually, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world. It made watching movies an adventure, with a real sense of peril, and it encouraged me to take them very, very seriously.

When I was a little older but not necessarily wiser, I took a semester off college in Portland, Maine, where there was once the greatest video store I've ever been in to this day. I would beeline for that place every day or three and grab a handful of movies—typically, anything that I couldn't sort out just by looking at the box, or even anything that seemed potentially threatening. This is how I first encountered CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. It was the first movie of its kind that I had ever seen. I didn't even know that it was a whole category of thing, let alone the most challenging and feared version of the type. So, with absolutely zero context, I met with a movie around which probably the most people have drawn lines in the sand. It completely blew my brains out of my mind. I returned it the next day in a daze and sheepishly asked the clerk, "What……..is this?" The guy rolled his eyes and gently assured me, "It's just one of those Italian endurance tests." I still like to use this phrase, and I still like to maintain my initial, naive impression that what I had seen was, in fact, a snuff film. Not that I think it's cool to, like, kill people, or that I like the idea of filmmakers having their work literally put on trial like Ruggero Deodato's was. I just love that I had that folkloric kind of experience where I really didn't know what had happened to me. Years later, I came to really like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST—which feels weird to say, it definitely doesn't strive to be liked! But I do think it has a certain kind of editorial intelligence that becomes clear if and when you can get passed the visceral shock of the images.

Anyway, in between DER TODESKING and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, I was enduringly shocked by THE BEYOND. It was the end of high school, and Quentin Tarantino's distro Rolling Thunder Pictures was circulating a print of the movie that turned up at our nearest theater with a midnight program. I had seen ERASERHEAD and PINK FLAMINGOS there, and as challenging as those can, they came with a certain reassuring reputation establishing their position in the art world, and those screenings were joyful experiences. Still, my friends and I didn't know a thing about Fulci. We had no idea what we were in for. The whole audience seemed to anticipate that we were in for a fun time, as it was the late '90s, and our collective ears had pricked up when we heard the name Tarantino. We thought THE BEYOND was probably going to be a charming thrill ride like EVIL DEAD 2 or something…and we quickly found out we were dead wrong.

As soon as the movie began and the warlock Schweick was being chain whipped to death in a swampy basement by a sweaty mob, a very, very bad vibe descended on the theater. It was grim, and grimy, and unforgiving, and it just got worse by the second. Fabio Frizzi's perverse, spidery score was also something the most of us had never heard anything like before, and we were experiencing the evil, perverted potency of italo disco in the best/worst possible context for the first time. As the movie unspooled, a thick pheromonal fog of fear and misery gathered in the air around us, and no one made a sound. We were trapped with this film, unable to escape it, compelled to see how much worse it could possibly get. Finally in the middle of the movie, as someone was being protractedly pulled apart like so much monkey bread by a swarm of tarantulas, my most sensitive friend simply couldn't take it anymore, and screamed out loud: "OH MY GOD THEY'RE RIPPING OUT HIS EYEBALL!" It was exactly the icebreaker the audience so badly needed. Everyone laughed, and that midpoint catharsis helped us survive the rest of the movie. But still, we all walked out marked by an experience we would not soon forget, whether we all liked it or not. (Of course, I really, really liked it)

I definitely don't mean to complain about the availability of movies and information that we enjoy in today's computerized environment. To me, nothing beats the pleasure of movies and the stories about how they came to be. But I wonder how often people still get to experience the thrill of seeing something that they are truly, completely unprepared for. If you have a story like this, past or present, please feel free to ad it to this post.

[wizardlyghost]

alright i've finished the intro again. thoughts:

- this VAULT-TECH SALESMAN showing up like ten minutes before the bombs go off is hella sus. possibly this is just because it's a video game but i'm gonna bookmark it as a potential chekov's gun anyway.

- also i didn't notice last time but they locked him out of the vault to die in the explosions. damn that's cold. VAULT-TECH needs to unionise.

- my character (whom i have named CAT in a moment of panicked decision making) is apparently a LAWYER? this seems like maybe the least useful skillset to be taking into a LAWLESS WASTELAND. am i gonna take the fucking BROTHERHOOD OF STEEL to court and phoenix wright them to death? is that a quest that happens?

- i made AGILITY and PERCEPTION my highest scores, with INTELLIGENCE and LUCK close behind. spoiler alert: i am Bad At Video Games, especially anything that requires complicated button combos and precise rhythm, so my playstyle overwhelmingly favours distance, stealth, and racking up those sweet sweet sneak attack criticals. i put one point above minimum into ENDURANCE so that i'm not completely made of damp cardboard, but left CHARISMA and STRENGTH at one point each. ANTISOCIAL ASTHMATIC STICKWOMAN wasn't the character i set out to make, but i'll make it work.

- my DARLING HUSBAND HOWARD-TODD has a folded AMERICAN FLAG in pride of place near the front door. i'm choosing to believe that this is purely because the military technically owns the house and they can kick us out if we aren't patriotic enough (idk how the american military works in 2077 but it seems more than plausible). don't worry boo i know you hate the Man on the inside.

- MISTER CODSWORTH the ROBOT BUTLER came in a box, which is still in the laundry so it must have been very recently. i'm choosing to believe that i put him together myself as DARLING HUSBAND HOWARD-TODD couldn't change a lightbulb to save his life, bless his heart. this also means that MISTER CODSWORTH is less than a week old when everyone he knows disappears for hundreds of years. i am automatically sympathetic to most robots but this guy already has my heart.

- there are only like two dozen people who make it into the VAULT, most of them GUARDS, and the facility seems to be stretching its capacity with just that many. above table i know that this is because this is all a FUCKED UP SCIENCE EXPERIMENT, but how did nobody notice how small the place was? did VAULT-TECH just lie about how deep they were digging the bunker? maybe that's my LAWYERLY OBJECTIVE: prosecute VAULT-TECH for fraud and tax evasion.

- although come to think of it there's a concerning amount of indication that the VAULT has been advertised as some sort of luxury cruise equivalent. "Survive The Apocalypse In Style, With All Your Needs Taken Care Of By Our Fully Qualified Staff". i suppose VAULT-TECH technically didn't deliberately carry class divides into the brave new world - i'm pretty sure i remember that the GUARDS had to cook and clean for themselves - but i somehow don't think it was because the Company was particularly invested in egalitarian values. i say again: VAULT-TECH Needs A Fucking Union.

- i tried getting to the end of the bunker and refusing to get into the POD, but unfortunately nobody tried to capture me after wandering around for a bit. was really hoping for a dramatic struggle but i couldn't even talk to anyone. disappointing.

all in all, a decent start.

[alltheselights]

I heard that uas aren’t updating some of the videos of Harry off-stage in latam? Why though? Some people said it could be because it was taken in private spaces but they have updated on that before still…

It’s funny because Harry in his off-time in latam is wearing clothes reminiscent of what he wore in 1D, tanks and jeans and casual clothes, etc. I’ve seen people say he is back in his frat boy era. Which I always found cute, when people called the boys as having a frat boy era. I wish frat boys looked as cute and clean and behaved as sweetly as the boys did 😕 Sorry, that’s generalizing, had bad experience with frat boys in the past. Louis in his casual time after or before a show often looked so different to Harry right now, Louis was all soft and baby in over-size jumpers and I just wanted to cuddle 😭 I don’t even know what I’m trying to say but there are “larries” who are saying this isn’t Harry, including him celebrating the football match and drinking alcohol, and it’s so strange because if they looked into Harry at all, they would know he’s a sports fan and that he drinks alcohol (which he references a few times in his songs too) and wears these sorts of clothes. Harry is almost more of a “sport” fan than Louis, only if you based it on a metric of how wide the range is of course. Louis is intensely passionate about football, likes f1, maybe basketball now? He didn’t seem to know what was going on at the game he was at earlier this year but he looked cute! Louis even said he focuses so much on football, he didn’t get as much into other sports. It just seems like these are the fans who decided Louis is one thing, Harry is another and there is no room for anything else. It’s so odd to erase an entire area of Harry’s interests. Even the whole buying the Ferrari thing, people insisting it was a gift for Louis, which it could have been but maybe Harry just likes cars? There was the implication that cars are a “guy” thing which it is why it’s definitely for Louis, with some larries, which is very backward. Harry and Louis both have a few, though we have mostly seen Louis be driven around in photos and footage over the years. He seems to like being a passenger, which I get because so do I!

Also the ones who were mad at Louis over the w.c. did not of course have the same energy for Harry, calling him baby and cute and saying they’re twinning now. It’s very transparent. Just be consistent. If you criticize it in one, have the same energy for the other

I think the videos and photos aren’t being posted mainly because they’re mostly taken without him realizing. It was the same for a lot of photos and videos over the summer when Harry was touring in Europe - I didn’t see most update accounts posting them.

But yes, agreed on Harry’s interest in sports and how some in the fandom seem to try to erase it. It’s been difficult for them over the past week because Harry’s making his interest very very obvious hahaha. They both enjoy sports and they’re both enjoying the World Cup and I hope they’re having a good time. I’m glad that those showing double standards when it comes to being mad about the World Cup with Louis and not saying anything with Harry got called out because it’s ridiculous. Millions and millions of people in most countries around the world are watching the World Cup and it doesn’t at all mean they condone human rights abuses in Qatar. The people saying that stuff are way too chronically online and really need to stop with the Twitter activism tbh.

[gray-warden]

.

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

So do you guys remember my post about Jedi meeting their birth families and being chill with it? 

I’ve been thinking a bit - a lot, for like a year - about all the headcanons around Jedi’s biological people, and there are really only two possible cases that seem to get explored: the pure of heart, flawed but loving, desperate parents who ‘had’ to give up their precious child to the Jedi and didn’t feel they had a choice (most commonly seen from the more Jedi critical parts of the fandom, but not always), and the horribly abusive no good parents at all who gladly dumped their baby onto the Order (which appears to be the way of some Jedi fans to ‘justify’ the adoption into the Order as legitimate, which really shouldn’t be the point because adoptions are just as legitimate without abuse factoring in).

What’s kinda sad is how little we’re willing to explore all the possibilities, maybe because we don’t want to be perceived as on the wrong side of the fandom by our own pals. We all deal with just so much bad faith discourse that we smooth out any sort of human drama and nuance to try and have clear cut narratives that are so black and white that they must prevent bad faith interpretations. Jedi have to be perfect pure angels that have never done anything wrong to be recognized as good, because we’re afraid that if we write them in an interesting way people will jump on the opportunity to accuse them of all sorts of stuff.

Well, I’m tired of vanilla fics and good guys vs bad guys when dealing with purely human everyday stuff. Bad guys are for the galactic battles, the epic clash of eternal forces. When dealing with how Jedi younglings come to the Order, we can have plenty of amazing, heart-wrenching drama and warm, happy moments where all sorts of good and regular people have different goals and meet and clash without anyone being at ‘fault’ or being to blame for it. I want to see (*sigh* to write) complex, difficult situations that can’t be perfectly resolved but where people do try and everyone feels like a *person*.

With that out of the way, what about:

- the unanimously proud communities, so honored that their daughter will represent their people and traditions among the Order, wear their clothing and bear their name

- the desperate mother with proud relatives, who doesn’t want to give away her child, but feels pressured into it by well-meaning relatives. The Master feels her reluctance and tries to reassure her, but she insists that it’s fine - and it is, she wants it to be, she wants to believe it’s for the best but it’s just so hard...

- Stass Allie’s parents, who saw their niece Adi GAllia go to the Order a few years prior. Their two families are influential on Coruscant, but with Adi already in the Order, do they need to send Stass too? Will people think they’re making a grab for power? Will Stass be better off over there, with her cousin? 

- Tiplar and Tiplee’s parents. How many children do they have, besides their twins? Is it easier to let your children go when you know they will be together? Did they make the Master promise they wouldn’t be separated no matter what? Did they dress them in matching outfits, or were the Jedi the ones to come up with that?

- the teenaged single mom who cries tears of relief when she realizes her baby will have a good life

- the single dad who can’t bring himself to let his daughter go, because she’s his whole world. The Master presses, not fully understanding, because she would would give up everything for the good of her Padawan, including her relationship with him if need be. The dad still says no.

- the struggling addict parent who is glad to dump that kid (but who still wakes up at night crying, cursing the Jedi, cursing themselves - who get their life back on track for their next kid, maybe? Who meets more Jedi and is thankful after all, or who never does and stays bitter, but better...)

- the family using the adoption for clout, and the consequences for the Order PR-wise, with the younger Jedi having to let go of the bitterness and the anger

- the communities with their own customs surrounding the Force that the young Knight or the wise Master’s inexperienced Padawan struggle to grasp and accept

- the happy parents who are mildly Force-sensitive themselves but didn’t know (or did know, and expected some of their children to be sensitive too), with the Master or the Knight pondering what their own life would look like as a civilian, maybe a parent themselves, maybe giving their own child to the Order like those are doing now. Would they do it? If they could met that hypothetical version of themselves, what would they say about the life they have? 

- the superstitious, incredulous or religious parents who are just glad to get a real explanation for the floating rocks, instead of all the theories and the judging and the gossip

- the ones who are desperately poor, and so very grateful, and the younger Jedi struggling with this, wondering if that’s why they were given to the Order as well. Struggling not to judge, because they wouldn’t be happy to give up their own younglings no matter what, right? Learning to be grateful, and understanding, and compassionate. 

- the parents who decide to give their child away against the community’s pressure, finding comfort in the Jedi’s genuine desire to support them

- the siblings struggling not to feel betrayed by their parents’ choice - and the jealous ones, the proud ones, the amazed ones, the ones who were just toddlers and spend their life holding onto faded memories

And on the flipside to all of that, what about:

- the Jedi who find a baby among dead bodies, like Mace and Depa, and are so thankful they could save this one tiny light

- the Knights filled to burst with warmth and pride as the three of them get this little toddler to giggle on the way home

- the baby who has been screaming in the Force for weeks, wanting to go home, and who finally gets to feel a presence caressing his mind gently, telling him someone is coming

- the Masters who hold the little ones at night, when those who miss their old home feel lonely or sad, rocking them and singing to them

- the Jedi who have their niece, nephew, cousin, or sibling arrive in the Creche, who call their birth family to reassure them that it’ll all be okay, and yes, ‘the child will know who I am, don’t worry, we keep our names. I’ll help them along the way, I’ll keep an eye on them.’

- the Knight who shows up somewhere and experience a supersonic boom because that’s the one, this little one will be his Padawan, he knows it

- the Knight awkwardly trying to comfort the parents, but she can see that they can see that the baby has already latched onto her, and she senses their turmoil

- the Master feeling that the child won’t be suited for the life of a Jedi, and saying that, even as it’s so hard to turn away from those sparkling baby eyes and that little mental tug 

- the Padawan balancing babbling triplets on his shoulders, because they’re from a species that makes a lot of babies

- the Master-Padawan pair visiting a child a lot during the transition period, and bonding with the other siblings as well

... Just... a mess of relationships and love on all parts, with understandings being reached, people finding peace and joy, and the opposite of all that, all acknowledging that there are no bad guys here, just complicated circumstances.

[luulapants]

Meta: Hawkeye and how Disney panders to liberal nerds

I just finished Hawkeye (pirating, did not pay the Mouse), and while it was enjoyable and had fun callbacks to the comics and exciting disability representation, I can’t stop thinking a lot about the group of LARPers they work with and how Disney is interfacing with fandom.

(Gonna stop here to say if you're enraged by criticisms of Hawkeye or Disney, stop here. Seeking out content that causes you emotional distress is self-harm, etc etc.)

The first element is the inclusion of LARPers at all, the acknowledgement of fringe nerd culture because they know part of their audience engages in it. Supernatural did the same thing with LARP and the Real Girl - a sort of fan service nod, a way to make fans feel included in the narrative, and that’s. Interesting. Half the appeal of fantasy and superhero narratives is that they are so outside of reality that they allow the audience to escape reality, too. Placing the audience into the narrative has a contradictory effect, half enforcing that escape (See? You ARE in the fantasy!) and half undermining it by tethering the fantasy world to reality. Hang on to that point. I’ll come back to it later.

Next is that the LARPers are specifically a police and firefighter LARP group. This choice, following anti-police protests, is also interesting. The MCU has (for the most part) favorably depicted police throughout the franchise, but usually incorporating them in the narrative context of their jobs. But here we were introduced to the characters as LARPers, as relatable nerds “just like you!” and then, “oh also they’re cops” was added after we’d gotten to know them. It’s almost a bait and switch, but they don’t narratively operate as police for the most part, aside from one minor plot point where access to evidence lockers is (illegally) used. It’s not your typical, blatant copaganda, but it IS framing cops as the “good guys” even as they break the law.

There’s something to be said about softening the role of police as a possible reaction to anti-police sentiment. But that would only stand to reason if police were truly narratively necessary. They’re not. They could have sidestepped that plot point entirely, so the inclusion of police LARPers was a very particular choice made, presumably, for a non-narrative reason.

Now back to that previous point: have you ever watched a movie where the good guys triumph over the forces of oppression and, as the credits roll, you as a member of the audience share in the feeling of accomplishment?

Those movies terrify me.

I find myself looking around the audience thinking, “Do they think we solved something here? Do they feel like we’ve actually conquered an oligarch through this story about defeating a wealthy supervillain? Do they feel like Wakanda is really coming to save Black people from their oppressors?” I get that representation helps people feel like they can do more and that those stories can be inspirational. But in the way they’re typically framed, I can’t help feel I’m meant to feel complacent in these fictional victories, enough to ignore that the problems persist in real life.

To my mind, finding ways to insert the audience into a fictional narrative, to make it feel more like reality, that reinforces the feeling that you, the liberal nerd audience, have conquered evil by watching this Disney movie.

I recognized a lot of my (beloved) gen-X nerd friends in those LARPers. LARP was invented in the late 70s, became widespread by the 90s, so it really is a gen-X and older millennial phenomenon, even if its popularity has continued to increase since then. Face-to-face nerd culture is less pronounced in new generations, in my experience. People who grew up on the internet are more likely to seek out virtual nerd culture.

Without getting into inter-generational shit-flinging, I will also say that my gen-X and older-millennial friends, while well-intentioned, are more liberal than leftist, eager to accept signs of progress without interrogation. These are generalities based on personal experience, but my younger-millennial friends and especially their gen-Z little siblings are mostly rabid commie leftists, favoring radical, disruptive action and refusing token corporate talk of inclusiveness. They are less likely to believe that meaningful change can occur within a broken system.

There’s been talk for a long time about how media continues to cater to the declining boomer generation, treating millennials like children long after they reached adulthood. But I saw those LARPer cops and I thought, “Huh, that’s copaganda directly targeted at a nerdy gen-X audience. Interesting.”

Add to that: Disney’s token or surface-level representation; the “first gay character”s who aren’t that gay; the unspoken Hayes Code against radical, subversive, or anti-corporate story lines; backing oppressive laws; violation of antitrust; and lobbying for copyright extensions and other corporate-favoring tax laws that make the rich richer while they skirt the Hollywood unions by using CGI for everything. Disney is not your friend, and they have a vested interest in manipulating you through their massive media machine.

So, to my (beloved) gen-X and older millennial nerds, please be aware of these messages. Be aware of how your fandom communities are being used to make you permissive to their interests. Think about how you feel about your boomer parents regurgitating FOX News propaganda and realize they want to do that to you, too. FOX preys on fear and racism. Liberal well-wishing and nerd culture can be pandered to just as easily.

[capricorn-stark]

Protégé

pairing: red hood!jason todd x robin!reader, slow burn 

warning: swearing

a/n: for context, this is somewhat loosely based off of Battle for the Cowl (2009) which I definitely recommend as a read! 

There was something about falling that you would never, ever get tired of. 

Ever. 

Probably.

With the wind whistling in your ears, your hair floating up in a million directions, and your limbs seemingly weightless as the buildings and lights blurred into one endless streak of color, the rush of adrenaline that ran through your body right before your grappling hook shot out and you landed quietly on the concrete was about a million times better than any sparring session back at the cave. 

You grinned as you straightened, rather proud of the fact that you had actually managed to land so smoothly without nearly paralyzing yourself. Again.The landing was something you had been working on for a while now.

You could practically hear Bruce’s voice ringing through your head after your little stunt, lamenting on and on about how you had more important things to focus on during patrols, and you let out a sigh as you ran down the backway of the nearly empty streets. 

The heavy man who had been bound up with a decently made gag and one of Bruce’s fancy tech pieces (Batcuffs, maybe? Something else with Bat smacked in front of it?) grunted beside you. 

“What? Not like you had someplace to be.” You grabbed the back of his rather tacky-looking spandex suit to drag him along back to where your mentor was supposed to be.

Despite your (many) disagreements and his (many) criticisms of your hand-to-hand combat skills, attitude issues, and pretty much everything else relating to you, Bruce had actually still allowed you to go off on your own tonight. It might’ve been because he wanted a few hours of nothing but beating up petty criminals by himself for stress-relief, it might’ve been because he had started trying out that whole independence thing with you a little more (even though you were still only permitted to be about five blocks or so away), it might’ve been plot-convenience - but either way, you appreciated the gesture.

It didn’t take long for you to pull your new friend over to what should’ve been your rendezvous point with Batman, letting the man drop with a dull thud and a grunt of protest against the concrete as you glanced around for the other man. You weren’t particularly concerned by the fact that the Bat himself wasn’t there yet - after all, he was the goddamn Batman. He’d show up eventually. In the meanwhile, you decided to go over the information you had gotten on the criminal with you. 

Just for the sake of it. Bruce would make you go over it anyways.

“Drury Walker, thirty-two years old, found him trying to mug someone in a back alley and make an escape. Called himself…” you paused, looking down at his sorry-looking outfit for a few moments while he looked up at you with murder and vengence in his eyes. “...Killer Moth.”  

“Killer Moth?” A completely new voice repeated in disbelief, causing you to immediately whirl around to face them in a fight stance, heart racing at a million miles per hour. The guy in front of you had his hands up in the air, his face concealed with some sort of red knock-off Iron Man helmet. He was gonna get copyrighted by Marvel Studios. “Shit, sorry,” he started at the sight of you, still leaning up against one of the walls. “I was supposed to make a wholeass dramatic entrance, but you said his name was Killer Moth and that-” The man made a noise that was either a sharp cough or a laugh of some kind. “-sounded so fucking lame I couldn’t help myself.” 

Despite the fact that you were definitely in some sort of major trouble with this new guy, he really did have a point. Even Killer Moth himself would’ve been embarrassed by how trash his name was, if not for the fact that he looked like he was on the verge of an aneurysm - understandably so, since the new guy had produced not one, but two guns out of apparently nowhere. 

“And let me guess,” he continued, pointing one of them at your head, his tone still all-too light and easy. “You must be the Bat’s brand-new Robin.” 

Now this is where most people would've shut up and proceeded to be complicit with the dude holding two guns. But Batman hadn’t seen reason and made you his (sort of) partner because you were like other people. Hell no.

“Do I look like a traffic signal to you?” It had been the very first of your amendments with Bruce. You would not be fighting crime looking like a literal traffic signal or, at best, a clown from Haly’s Circus. And the tiny green shorts had to go. “Or Robin Hood?” The guy had a rather awkward pause where his gun sort of dipped. Killer Moth was looking between you with wide eyes. “Do I?” 

“I guess you kinda got a point.” You huffed and he raised his gun again, getting more in-your-face as his already angry-looking helmet somehow managed to look angrier. You weren’t exactly sure how a helmet could convey so much emotion. “But you work with Batman. And I heard you went by Robin.” 

Okay, so you couldn’t make him change the name, but you had agreed it would be more of an honorary thing.

“It’s complicated.” 

Using such a phrase as an excuse to escape from situations you didn’t want to go into was one of the many things you had learned from Bruce in your five months of training. Somehow, that seemed to trigger the guy further.

“So you do work with Batman.” 

Before he could do something actually insane, you had managed to push the gun pointed at your head away from you, using his brief second of surprise to take it out of his hands, kick him in the chest, and round back on him with it in hand. 

“And what about it?” 

As cool as you thought you might’ve sounded didn’t cover for the fact that you were still nerve-wracked about what was happening right then. Especially after the guy started to dramatically slow-clap like some sort of evil thespian in a high school drama. 

“Not bad, Robin. Not bad.” He looked at the gun in your hands and grinned. “If you weren’t Batman’s new replacement sidekick, I might’ve believed you had the balls to use that thing.” 

Now, you were an excellent fighter. You had to be, after your excessive training with the guy who had literally mastered about every martial art in existence during his (give or take) five year-long mission to find himself. Plus, some personal experience. But fighting someone like this guy? Built like a tank and padded up in a whole lot of armor and packing an assortment of knives, guns, and even a damn taser you got a first-hand taste of?

You fought hard, but about five minutes and another round of the taser later, you saw the knock-off Iron Man helmet staring down at you before the world went black.

~*~

You woke up in what you assumed was the self-dubbed Red Hood’s safehouse of sorts. 

“How the hell did he rope you into this shit?” he demanded with what you could only assume was him glaring at you through the helmet. Probably some expression that made someone look all angsty and annoyed - which was fair, since he had been trying to drill you for information you straight up refused to give while bound (way too tightly) to a chair for quite some time now. Rather rude. “Let me guess. You watched your parents die.” You stared at him before shrugging.

“Nope.”

“Oh, so they just went ahead and died somehow. Untimely accident caused by some psycho bitch in a Spirit Halloween costume.”

“…nope.” 

“They abandoned you as a child.”

“No, they didn’t - does divorce count?” 

Red Hoodlum’s hands kept clenching and unclenching while he stood there, staring at the wall behind you in silence. From the way his chest kept rising and falling, you were tempted to believe he was practicing breathing exercises amidst his rather violent twitching. 

“Divorce - what the hell is your trauma supposed to be? Why did he pick you?!”

“Hey, just because my trauma doesn’t include people dying doesn’t make it any less traumatic,” you scoffed in response, knowing you were absolutely right about that. Your middle school guidance counselor had said so (and it’s true, ladies and gentlemen, trauma comes in many forms!). “Kinda rude to assume it didn’t affect me somehow.”

He seemed rather abashed at that and you heard him clear his throat a little. 

“...right, yeah. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted - can you loosen these ropes a little? It’s starting to kinda hurt.” 

“Do I look ten? That’s the oldest trick in the book, I’m not gonna-”

“I’m not going to run, just loosen the ropes a little.” He still looked like he didn’t believe you. “Come on, I don’t think I can outrun your guns.” As in his literal array of guns tacked up to the wall behind him, not his gigantic biceps. 

And you weren’t too worried about being held hostage by him, either. You figured you had ten minutes tops before Batman burst in through the doorway, ready to give you a lecture on why straying from the specifically designated parts of Gotham he had let you traipse around was a terribly stupid idea. 

“No.” He was already walking towards the door, because apparently, he had enough of trying to interrogate you. 

“Hold on, I feel like my wrists are actually about to start bleeding or something - where are you going?”

“Keep talking and I’m gonna get the duct tape.” 

“Is that a threat?” Sounding more confident than you actually felt should eventually make you more confident. Eventually. 

The Red Hood sucked in a breath, stopping by the doorway and turning to face you, reaching into his pockets to get what you assumed was either a gun or duct tape when you both startled from a sudden crash. The man in front of you was already whirling around with two guns positioned to shoot when you heard the familiar voice of someone else.

“Hold your fire, soldier. I’m not here for you.” A pause. “Or I wasn’t, but now I kind of am.”

Apparently, Batman was too busy to save you. Now, you got Nightwing. 

And as much as you liked Nightwing, that still kinda stung. 

[tossawary]

I need to know more about “SVSSS - Baby Brother Liu Qingge” bc I love tiny and very deadly baby LQG

I have a 3k-ish Shang Qinghua POV that was supposed to be the introduction to this fic concept! So... ah... baby Liu Qingge does not appear in this, but you can see the setup for how an 8yo-ish Liu Qingge was supposed to be introduced. My hope is that this will someday become a "Shang Qinghua and Shen Jiu go on a mission with Baby Brother Liu Qingge" one shot.

-cut-

Shang Qinghua didn't really have the words to describe what it was like having Proud Immortal Demon Way's characters finally come into his second life.

He didn't have the words to describe a lot of his transmigration experience, honestly! His words had described a lot of this world already, haha, hadn't they? Sometimes a person just had to put up with it and keep going.

And then excuse himself later to go scream into a pillow! Many times!

At first, life was just him in a body that didn't fit and strange memories that slipped between his fingers like sand. His memories of a past life had settled eventually, the System finally came fully online, and his relationship with his second family was fully fucked forever. That was fine, though! That was fine! With some unsolicited prodding from his System, he left to go seek his fortune soon enough and he never had to talk to his character's birth parents or siblings again.

But Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky had never said much of anything about Shang Qinghua’s family or home village, besides saying that the man had dreamed of more than his mediocre origins, so everything had been unfamiliar and original and real. Getting to Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, which he had described in great detail, was a real headfuck. There were no words for the experience of recognizing things that he’d written in another life.

He saw the glistening rainbow bridge and the intimidating sect entrance and the majestic meeting hall on Qiong Ding, and he nearly screamed. He definitely squawked. His vision got really fuzzy for a minute there and he had to sit down on the ground before he fell over. What the fuck?! What the fuck?! He’d made a world! The System had really made a world out of his web-novel! He was really stuck in Proud Immortal Demon Way!

There were upsides and downsides to joining Cang Qiong Mountain Sect. Downsides included: the hard training, the harder workload, the dangerous missions, the disrespect towards An Ding Peak, and being surrounded by arrogant and foolish teenagers looking to look down on someone. It was really something else to look some of them in the eye and think, "Bro, I don’t know your name, but you kind of owe your existence to me. Could you stop being such a fucking asshole about leaving your chores for me to do?! Respect your father!"

Upsides included: actually becoming a cultivator (pretty cool, even though the work of cultivation sucked more often than not), better living accommodations and food, and actually getting to see some of the cooler places, plants, monsters, and magic that were a part of his world. Sure, carting a monster corpse brought in by Bai Zhan Peak to Xi Jiao Peak for butchering was smelly and heavy and altogether miserable, but seeing an impossible animal was still kind of incredible. If this unwilling Shang Qinghua could stop being pushed around and stepped on long enough to appreciate the upsides, he’d really appreciate it!

It was interesting and infuriating to log the differences between what he’d imagined, what he’d written, and what the System had created. What sort of author described every single object in every single room? Who had time for that? Who wanted to read that? The System had filled in all the living details of An Ding Peak - the Leisure Houses, the training grounds, the storehouses, the warehouses, the kitchens, the lesson halls, the leisure gardens, the farming fields, the livestock fields, the stables, the cart lot, the water supply, the sewage systems, and so on - so that people could actually live here. Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky as an author had done many things worthy of complaint and criticism, but wasting his readers’ time with sewage systems was not one of them!

The System had also filled in all the little details and decorations - the paintings on the walls of sect history, the detailing on the rooftops supposedly offering protections from dream demons, the chipped and faded paint of old storehouses that disciples would be tasked with replacing, the statues in the fields to scare off scavengers, the carvings on the doors meant to reduce resentful energy, the childish etchings of bored students the surface of the lesson hall desks, the old bench where the An Ding Peak Lord liked to sit and eat flatcakes - so that it really seemed like people had built this place and maintained it and added to it for generations.

Shang Qinghua had his quibbles here and there. Sometimes the System had made choices that he objected to! He would have done it differently if it had asked him, the author, to contribute. He really felt as though the System should have asked him to clarify the plot holes and the gaps in detail, instead of choosing precedence randomly or building off random implications taken way too literally.

Sometimes he found out that the System had built things out of throwaway lines that Shang Qinghua himself had completely forgotten about. It turned out that Ku Xing Peak made a lot of purification tools and containment vessels because Airplane had offhandedly mentioned that this was their specialty, and now Shang Qinghua had to cart around delicate ceramics to be sold to city merchants or other cultivation sects. He never would have dared to write that if he’d known that it would one day in another life be his job to do things like take inventory and chase down signatures for successful deliveries.

Places, items, and creatures were one thing, but logging the differences between the people he met and the characters he’d created was something else. At first it was okay, because he was surrounded by nameless An Ding Peak nobodies - his fellow disciples, their teachers, the hardworking managers and merchants, even the peak lord - none of them had ever mattered in Proud Immortal Demon Way. If Airplane had been the one to name any of them, he didn’t recognize the names or remember them.

Then he met Yue Qingyuan.

Wow, it was a worse headfuck than first arriving at Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, when Shang Qinghua finally realized that this was the young version of one of his actual characters. It took him a minute. As a lowly outer disciple, Shang Qinghua hadn’t received “Qinghua” as a name yet (his name was Houhua, not that anyone ever used it) and the future Yue Qingyuan was still called Yue Qi.

Shang Qinghua was fourteen at the time. Yue Qingyuan must have been around the same age, so he didn’t strike the tall and handsome figure of the sect leader Airplane had described. The boy was broad, but actually a little short. He had freckles. He had acne.

But he also had a warm smile that seemed to go all the way to his eyes when he offered to give Shang Qinghua directions to the right office on Qiong Ding. He had a steady hand when he helped Shang Qinghua up, after the An Ding disciple had suddenly tripped over nothing upon being introduced. Yue Qingyuan - Yue Qi - walked him to the right office and did his best to make small talk, friendly and kind even though Shang Qinghua was having difficulty stringing more than a few words together in his shock.

Even then, it was obvious that the boy was developing the calm surety and the social charm that would make him a greatly admired sect leader someday! It was all Shang Qinghua could do not to blurt out: “Holy shit, you’re REAL?!” Which would be closely followed by: “Hey, is Shen Qingqiu really real too?!” And then maybe closely followed by: “FUCK!!!”

As the years went by, Shang Qinghua met more of Proud Immortal Demon Way’s characters, and it was weird every time. None of them were exactly like he was expecting. He kept expecting… well… he kept expecting them to look like the fanart, like flawless character models, more or less. Instead, he kept getting… people.

Wei Qingwei, head disciple of the sword-focused Wan Jian Peak, was also shorter than he was expecting, kind of stout, with a wide face and a wider smile. Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky had apparently had the man crack a few jokes upon his rare appearances in the web-novel, usually during tense situations, as he was reminded by the System upon thinking to himself: “Why is this guy LIKE THIS?!” So, because of just a few lines, the real Wei Qingwei had a relentless sense of humor and loved telling jokes.

Upon their first meeting, when Shang Qinghua was fifteen and had been sent over to help renovate some Wan Jian dormitories, fifteen-year-old Wei Qingwei had pretended to fumble a sword and, using a packet of dye and a sleight of hand, made it look like he’d accidentally cut off his own hand at the wrist. Of course Shang Qinghua had screamed and panicked! Anyone would panic! But Wei Qingwei had laughed at him and said, “Got you! Shang-Shidi, the sword wasn’t even unsheathed!” Asshole!

Qi Qingqi, the head disciple of Xian Shu Peak, was much taller than he was expecting. Apparently Airplane had once described a group of some of the peak lords by saying something like: “Each one of them was like a giant to young Luo Binghe.” That group had included Qi Qingqi. The System apparently had taken that to mean that Qi Qingqi was of a height with the likes of Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu. Shang Qinghua discovered this adaptational choice when he was almost sixteen, when this giraffe-like girl came to An Ding Peak to complain about an order someone along the pipeline had dropped completely, and he accidentally found himself (still waiting on a really good growth spurt) eye-level with Qi Qingqi’s chest.

Airplane had apparently once said in Proud Immortal Demon Way that Qian Cao Peak Lord Mu Qingfang appeared a little older than his colleagues, by which he’d probably meant that the man was just tired or something, but this head disciple Mu Qingfang appeared to have ten years on all the other head disciples. Which was good! Shang Qinghua approved of their future head healer not being a teenager and having more training!

On the bad side of things, Airplane had also once said in Proud Immortal Demon Way that the Zui Xian Peak Lord Zhang Qingyan liked his drink too much. This was the peak specializing in alcohol, so it had seemed to make sense! It was supposed to be funny, if anything! Well, at sixteen, Shang Qinghua found out that the System had focused too much on the “too much” part of that statement and now the head disciple of Zui Xian Peak was pretty clearly a budding alcoholic. (Sometimes a cultivator’s constitution and ability to “cure” themselves just… made a person drink more. A lot more.) Which was… not good.

At seventeen, Shang Qinghua met Mobei-Jun.

He didn’t know where to get started with Mobei-Jun.

Somehow he’d… forgotten that Mobei-Jun had been originally based on Airplane’s idea of “the perfect man” and not the super pretty, muscular but slim-waisted protagonist type? The real Mobei-Jun was… tall… and big… and thick. Mobei-Jun’s intimidating features were… more striking than pretty. The first time Shang Qinghua had come back to his Leisure House and found this spoiled brat of an ice demon napping shirtless on his bed, and gotten an eyeful of all that heavy muscle and chest hair, he’d nearly knocked himself out on the doorframe trying to turn away before he had a heart attack.

Mobei-Jun really was going to be the death of him, holy shit.

Especially because this ice demon really was a spoiled brat! Airplane had described this character as being arrogant and apathetic, so now Shang Qinghua had to deal with a Mobei-Jun who took long baths and then carelessly dripped water all over the floor and all over fresh sheets! Who ate all of Shang Qinghua’s cooking and ungratefully only demanded more food, sprawled over furniture not really fit for someone of his size, and then watched Shang Qinghua like a fat tiger! Ahhh, this demon really was lucky he was handsome!

Mobei-Jun was also kind of violent, and mean, which was… well, it sucked.

Back to the sect that Shang Qinghua was now actively betraying, however, as far as he could see, there was still one future peak lord missing.

It wasn’t Shen Qingqiu, who Shang Qinghua had thought would be the last one to show up. Shen Qingqiu had shown up and had been advancing through the ranks of Qing Jing Peak before Shang Qinghua had even met Mobei-Jun, which meant that Yue Qingyuan had finally stopped looking like someone had torn out his soul. (Shang Qinghua had been forced to grit his teeth every time that someone mentioned how privileged that Yue Qingyuan was to have been granted that year of secluded cultivation in the Lingxi Caves at such a young age.)

No, of all the peak lords, it was Liu Qingge who Shang Qinghua had yet to meet.

After meeting Mobei-Jun and becoming an inner disciple, the System had given Shang Qinghua three years to make it to head disciple, probably because the deadline for a new generation of peak lords to ascend was fast approaching. He was working hard to achieve that! Not only did he have to sabotage the current favorite, but he had to make sure all his own training, missions, work, and research were as close to flawless as he could get it! All while keeping an intruding ice demon happy! He wasn’t totally sure that he was going to make it at this rate, even though he’d been here for years.

So it was a little concerning that Liu Qingge hadn't shown up yet. There was so much left to do. A world-state that had yet to be established. Liu Qingge had work to do here!

Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu still had to develop a hatred for each other as disciples that would extend to everyone believing that Shen Qingqiu had murdered Liu Qingge as peak lords, after all. Granted, all Liu Qingge really had to do was beat everyone else on Bai Zhan Peak up to obtain the position, and it wasn’t exactly hard to get Shen Qingqiu to develop a lifelong grudge, but the guy was still cutting it pretty close.

It was possible that Liu Qingge was already on Bai Zhan Peak and making good progress, but that he was just so solitary and focused on searching out the next big battle that Shang Qinghua had just never had the opportunity to meet him. Shang Qinghua did his best to avoid Bai Zhan Peak most of the time, honestly! He was curious about where Liu Qingge was, about what the man looked like, but he didn’t let himself sweat at not seeing the future war god, when he already had so many things to sweat about. The System had taken care of bringing in everyone else, so Shang Qinghua was sure that Liu Qingge would follow sooner or later.

Shang Qinghua’s first sign that something was wrong was that, on the day that Liu Qingge finally announced his existence by beating up everyone on Bai Zhan Peak, everyone was saying things like, “I can’t believe some kid managed to topple all of Bai Zhan like that!”

He… may or may not have ignored this sign.

To be fair to this poor writer-turned-disciple, though, he’d been up all night finishing some paperwork catastrophe the An Ding Peak Lord had thrown at him to fix, as some kind of “test” of his logistics skills. Upon hearing the latest gossip, Shang Qinghua thought, “Oh, finally?” And then his overtired brain collapsed from the effort of thinking two words together in a sentence, and all he could manage from there was to feel the intense need to go to bed at a maximum, static-y volume. No words. No more thinky thoughts. Just the need for speedy sleep.

He stumbled through the rest of his day and then passed out for 18 hours straight. In hindsight, this would have been the time when the gossip was at its hottest. He missed all of it.

When he woke up, everyone was still dealing with the aftermath of what had happened on Bai Zhan Peak, but the conversation had shifted more towards replacing Qian Cao Peak’s depleted supplies and the repairs to Bai Zhan’s training grounds. Liu Qingge was the name on everyone’s lips, still, but everyone knew the basic information now. Now, everyone was just exclaiming over and over again how unbelievably young (and pretty) he was to have bested every other disciple on the sect battle-focused peak. This didn't seem too strange.

The System probably would have based the War God's appearance on his sister, Liu Mingyan, a strong contender for the most beautiful woman in all of Proud Immortal Demon Way. Liu Qingge apparently being a very pretty boy fell neatly into line with all the other character design surprises that Shang Qinghua had gotten smacked with so far.

If Airplane had known that he'd be transmigrating into his novel, maybe there would have been even more handsome men! And everyone would have lived happily ever after and nothing bad would have happened ever, probably, but also there might be more sexy guys too.

-

TBC

[liquidstar]

I feel as if many people, myself included, have been having problems with the way “critical thinking” is conducted in fandom circles more and more. Which I’d say is a good thing, because it means we’re thinking critically. But still the issues with the faux-critical mentality and with the way we consume media through that fandom group mentality are incredibly widespread at this point, despite being very flawed, and there are still plenty of people who follow it blindly, ironically.

I sort of felt like I had to examine my personal feelings on it and I ended up writing a whole novel, which I’ll put under the cut, and I do welcome other people’s voices in the matter, because while I’m being as nuanced as I can here I obviously am still writing from personal experience and may overlook some things from my limited perspective. But by and large I think I’ve dissected the phenomena as best I can from what I’ve been seeing going on in fandom circles from a safe but observable distance.

Right off the bat I want to say, I think it's incredibly good and necessary to be critical of media and understand when you should stop consuming it, but that line can be a bit circumstantial sometimes for different people. There are a lot of anime that I used to watch as a teenager that I can’t enjoy anymore, because I got more and more uncomfortable overtime with the sexualization of young characters, partly because as I was getting older I was really starting to realize how big of an issue it was, and I certainly think more critically now than I did when I was 14. Of course I don’t assume everyone who still watches certain series is a pedophile, and I do think there are plenty of fans that understand this. However I still stay away from those circles and that’s a personal choice.

I don’t think a person is morally superior based on where they draw the line and their own boundaries with this type of stuff, what’s more important is your understanding of the problem and response to it. There are series I watch that have a lot of the same issues around sexualization of the young characters in the cast, but they’re relatively toned down and I can still enjoy the aspects of the series I actually like without it feeling as uncomfortable and extreme. Others will not be able to, and their issues with it are legitimate and ones that I still ultimately agree with, but they’re still free to dislike the series for it, after all our stance on the issue itself is the same so why would I resent them for it?

Different people are bound to have different lines they draw for how far certain things can go in media before they’re uncomfortable watching it and it doesn’t make it a moral failing of the person who can put up with more if they’re still capable of understanding why it’s bad to begin with and able to not let it effect them. But I don’t think that sentiment necessarily contradicts the idea that some things really are too far gone for this to apply, the above examples aren’t the same thing as a series centered solely around lolicon ecchi and it doesn’t take a lot of deep analysis to understand why. It’s not about a personal line anymore when it comes to things that are outright propaganda or predatory with harmful ideals woven into the message of the story itself. Critical thinking means knowing the difference between these, and no one can hold your hand through it. And simply slapping “I’m critical of my interests” on your bio isn’t a get out of jail free card, it’s always evident when someone isn’t truly thinking about the impact of the media they consume through the way they consume it.

I think the issue is that when people apply “Critical thinking” they don’t actually analyze the story and its intent, messages, themes, morals, and all that. Instead they approach it completely diegetically, it’s basically the thermian argument, the issue stems from thinking about the story and characters as if they’re real people and judging their actions through that perspective, rather than something from a writer trying to deliver a narrative by using the story and characters as tools. Like how people get upset about characters behaving “problematically” without realizing that it’s an intentional aspect of the story, that the character needs to cause problems for there to be conflict. What they should be looking at instead is what their behavior represents in the real world.

You do not need to apply real-world morals to fictional characters, you need to apply them to the narrative. The story exists in the real world, the characters and events within it do not. Fictional murderers themselves do not hurt anyone, no one is actually dying at their hands, but their actions hold weight in the narrative which itself can harm real people. If the character only murders gay people then it reflects on whatever the themes and messages of the story are, and it’s a major issue if it's framed as if they’re morally justified, or as if this is a noble action. And it’s a huge red flag if people stan this character, even if the story itself actually presents their actions as reprehensible. Or cases where the murderers themselves are some kind of awful stereotype, like Buffalo Bill who presents a violent and dangerous stereotype of trans women, making the character a transmisogynistic caricature (Intentional or otherwise) that has caused a lot of harm to the perception of trans women. When people say “Fiction affects reality” this is what they mean. They do not mean “People will see a pretend bad guy and become bad” they mean “Ideals represented in fiction will be pulled from the real world and reflected back onto it.”

However, stories shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you the lesson as if you’re watching a children’s cartoon, stories often have nuances and you have to actively analyze the themes of it all to understand it’s core messages. Oftentimes it can be intentionally murky and hard to parse especially if the subject matter itself is complicated. But you can’t simply read things on the surface and think you understand everything about them, without understanding the symbolism or subtext you can leave a series like Revolutionary Girl Utena thinking the titular Utena is heterosexual and was only ever in love with her prince. Things won’t always be face-value or clear-cut and you will be forced to come to your own conclusions sometimes too.

That’s why the whole fandom-based groupthink mentality about “critical thinking” doesn’t work, because it’s not critical. It’s simply looking into the crowd, seeing people say a show is problematic, and then dropping it without truly understanding why. It’s performative, consuming the best media isn’t activism and it doesn’t make you a better person. Listening to the voices of people whom the issues directly concerns will help you form an opinion, and to understand the issues from a more knowledgeable perspective beyond your own. All that means nothing if you just sweep it under the rug because you want to look infallible in your morality. That’s not being critical, it���s just being scared to analyze yourself, as well as what you engage with. You just don’t want to think about those things and you’re afraid of being less than perfect so you pretend it never happened.

And though I’m making this post, it’s not mine or anyone else’s job to hold your hand through all this and tell you “Oh this show is okay, but this show isn't, and this book is bad etc etc etc”. Because you actually have to think for yourself, you know, critically. Examples I’ve listed aren’t rules of thumb, they’re just examples and things will vary depending on the story and circumstance. You have to look at shit on a case-by-case basis instead of relying on spotting tropes without thinking about how they’re implemented and what they mean. That’s why it’s analysis, you have to use it to understand what the narrative is communicating to its audience, explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or incidentally, and understand how this reflects the real world and what kind of impact it can have on it. 

A big problem with fandom is it has made interests synonymous with personality traits, as if every series we consume is a core part of our being, and everything we see in it reflects our viewpoints as well. So when people are told that a show they watched is problematic, they react very extremely, because they see it as basically the same thing as saying they themselves are problematic (It’s not). Everyone sees themselves as good people, they don’t want to be bad people, so this scares them and they either start hiding any evidence that they ever liked it, or they double down and start defending it despite all its flaws, often providing those aforementioned thermian arguments (“She dresses that way because of her powers!”).

That’s how you get people who call children’s cartoons “irredeemable media” and people who plaster “fiction=/= reality!” all over their blogs, both are basically trying to save face either by denying that they could ever consume anything problematic or denying that the problematic aspects exist all together. And absolutely no one is actually addressing the core issues anymore, save for those affected by them who pointed them out to begin with, only for their original point to become muffled in the discourse. No one is thinking critically because they’re more concerned with us-vs-them group mentality, both sides try to out-perform the other while the actual issue gets ignored or is used as nothing more than a gacha with no true understanding or sympathy behind it.

One of the other issues that comes from this is the fact that pretty much everyone thinks they’re the only person capable of being critical of their interests. That’s how you get those interactions where one person goes “OK [Media] fan” and another person replies “Bro you literally like [Other Media]”, because both parties think they’re the only ones capable of consuming a problematic piece of media and not becoming problematic themselves, anyone else who enjoys it is clearly incapable of being as big brained as them. It’s understandable because we know ourselves and trust ourselves more than strangers, and I’m not saying there can’t be certain fandoms who’s fans you don’t wanna interact with, but when we presume that we know better than everyone else we stop listening to other people all together. It’s good to trust your own judgement, it’s bad to assume no one else has the capacity to think for themselves either though.

The insistence that all media that you personally like is without moral failing and completely pure comes with the belief that all media that you personally dislike has to be morally bad in some way. As if you can’t just dislike a series because you find it annoying or it just doesn’t appeal to you, it has to be problematic, and you have to justify your dislike of it through that perspective. You have to believe that your view on whatever media it is is the objectively correct one, so you’ll likely pick apart all it’s flaws to prove you’re on the right side, but there’s no analysis of context or intent. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily mean those critiques are unfounded or invalid, but in cases like this they’re often skewed in one direction based on personal opinion. It’s just as flawed as ignoring all the faults in the stuff you like, it’s biased and subjective analysis that misses a lot of context in both cases, it’s not a good mindset to have about consuming media. It’s just another result of tying media consumption with identity and personal morals. The faux-critical mentality is an attempt to separate the two in a way that implies they’re a packaged deal to begin with, making it sort of impossible to truly do so in any meaningful way.

As far as I know this whole phenomena started with “Steven Universe Critical” in, like, 2016, and that’s where this mentality around “critical thinking” originated. It started out with just a few people correctly pointing out very legitimate issues with the series, but over time it grew into just a trend where people would make cutesy kin blogs with urls like critical-[character] or [character]crit to go with the fad as it divulged into Nostalgia Critic level critique. Of course there was backlash to this and criticism of the criticism, but no actual conversation to be had. Just people trying to out-do each other by acting as the most virtuous one in the room, and soon enough the fad became a huge echo-chamber that encouraged more and more outrageous takes for every little thing. The series itself was a children’s cartoon so it stands to reason that a lot of the fans were young teens, so this behavior isn’t too surprising and I do believe a lot of them did think they were doing the right thing, especially since it was encouraged. But that doesn’t erase the fact that there were actual real issues and concerns brought up about the series that got treated with very little sympathy and were instead drowning out people’s voices. Though those from a few years back may have grown up since and know better (Hopefully), the mentality stuck around and influenced the norm for how fandoms and fandom people conduct any sort of critique on media. 

That’s a shame to me, because the pedestal people place fandom onto has completely disrupted our perception on how to engage with media in a normal way. Not everything should be consumed with fandom in mind, not everything is a coffee-shop au with no conflict, not everything is a children’s cartoon with the morals spoon-fed to you. Fandom has grown past the years of uncritical praise of a series, it’s much more mainstream now with a lot more voices in it beyond your small community on some forum, and people are allowed to use those voices. Just because it may not be as pleasant for you now because you don’t get to just turn your brain off and ignore all the flaws doesn’t mean you can put on your rose-tinted nostalgia goggles and pretend that fandom is actually all that is good in the world, to the point where you place it above the comfort and safety of others (Oftentimes children). Being uncritical of fandom itself is just as bad as being uncritical of what you consume to begin with. 

At the end of the day it all just boils down to the ability to truly think for yourself but with sympathy and compassion for other people in mind, while also understanding that not everyone will come to the same conclusion as you and people are allowed to resent your interests. That doesn’t necessarily mean they hate you personally, you should be acknowledging the same issues after all. You can’t ignore aspects of it that aren’t convenient to your conclusion, you have to actually be critical and understand the issues to be able to form it. 

I think that all we need is to not rely on fandom to tell us what to do, but still listen to the voices of others, take them into account to form our opinion too, boost their voices instead of drowning them out in the minutiae of internet discourse about which character is too much of an asshole to like. Think about what the characters and story represent non-diegetically instead of treating them like real people and events, rather a story with an intent and message to share through its story and characters, and whatever those reflect from the real world. That’s how fiction affects reality, because it exists in reality and reflects reality through its own lens. The story itself is real, with a real impact on you and many others, so think about the impact and why it all matters. Just… Think. Listen to others but think for yourself, that’s all.

[blind-rats]

The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself. 

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement. 

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.