I’m kind of baffled about the state of dawntrail discussions having two parties in regards to Living Memory, one being “shutting it down is amoral” and the other being “it’s moral and not at all like what Emet-Selch wanted to do with us”. It’s like a lot of people refuse to engage with the narrative from any other perspective other than their own when the game essentially hits you over the head with the message.
Yes, the existence of Living Memory is unsutainable and amoral and, frankly, pointless – you can make the very valid argument that the people there were just AI chatbots trained on the memories of a given individual, leeching off of the souls of others, their existence demanding the genocide of the entire universe in the end. I agree, in our eyes, Living Memory is an affront to life, sure!
Nobody seems to talk about that this is the exact same perspective Emet-Selch had about us, or when mentioned, people say that it isn’t the same. It is? He very explicitly tells us that the people living on the shards today are pale imitations to what he considered to be life, and thus shutting it down and trying to undo his mistake IS the solution (he is very much like Solas from DA in this regard), because in his eyes there’s nothing to lose but everything to gain. Emet-Selch saw us in the same light we see the people of Living Memory, and the game is painfully unsubtle in drawing this parallel. Even with the differences (we are not recreated memories but actual souls being reborn from the aetherial sea, etc-etc), the game WANTS you to make this connection between Emet and what we do. It is quite literally the point!
Yes, Living Memory has to be shut down because its biggest drawback is that it’s unsustainable and would continue to destroy what we deem to be lives. It is also arguably an affront to what we consider life and its natural end (directly opposing the message of Endwalker). The Endless aren’t even too hung up about this shutdown, bar Sphene. Shutting down Living Memory is necessary.
But you can’t say it was morally good and unquestionable if you can’t give Emet’s views the same grace. In the end, both his plans (and the Ascians at large, frankly) and Living Memory had to be stopped because that means survival for us, but to divorce the two narratives to maintain the WoL and co.’s moral superiority is disingenuous and does the story a disservice.
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Harassment is horrible, it's terrible mods in this Discord aren't doing anything.
But on the other hand, what about you? You harassed a person over *fanfiction* ( to the point it's the 4th tag who shows up on your blog ). Yet, all your harassment is still there out of the open. You haven't really seriously apologized, especially to them. You're still quite active on fe3h discourse while he had to remove himself from many public online space.
How is this fair?
You're rightfully upset about harassment towards members of your community, there should be *serious* amends made... But how can you hold double standards like that?
I haven't followed the discourse closely because it's so awful, why are you all so hateful? Because you just seems like one of the "bad guy" in this story along with Raxis and the other. I'm not saying you're the same, but you're not really better than those you criticize either, and the same apply for the other blog who participed in your harassment... It's just horrible all around. You're all drowning in a cesspool of toxicity and it's making you all worst people than you actually are.
I hope you, and people around you, will at least receive amend over the harm caused to them. I hope you stop receiving troll, death threat and any other type of hate message you probably still receive. But I hope you'll sincerely recognize your faults and fully amend to them too.
Look, I know you probably mean some kind of well and that you likely spent a long time thinking over this message, so I'm going to lay it out as simply as I can:
I have never once interacted with Cap'n himself, and I have repeatedly told anyone reading my posts to do the same. This is unlike the people who have harassed me and others, who went out of their way to make sure we saw what they were saying about us. This includes publicly admitting to using alts to go around our blocks of them so that they can keep interacting with us directly
Very quickly into critiquing Cap'n's work, a primary focus became pointing out the problematic rhetoric he was spreading with his incredibly influential, incredibly popular fanfic. This includes the justification of holding racist rhetoric, the anti-miscegenation rhetoric, the infantilization of women, the demonization of men, the justification of imperialism, and more, all which appear very quickly into the story and stay prominent throughout the story. The people who have harassed me and others, meanwhile, either deny this rhetoric exists in their circles or outright hold this rhetoric themselves. This includes the use and defense of genocide apologetics.
This post is the first time I have talked about Cap'n in over a year, and the last time I posted any notes on his fic was over a year and a half ago. This is unlike the people who have harassed me and others, who have engaged in harassing behaviors as recently as this week (as of Aug 18 2024).
It has been explicitly said by those close to Cap'n that my notes, while upsetting him, had no part in him leaning away from social media more, unlike what you say here. This is unlike the people who have harassed me and others, who have driven off multiple people from social media and have openly patted themselves on the back for doing so, justifying their harassment by saying the people they've harassed off social media deserved it.
I have kept my critiques strictly on this Tumblr, as have most of the people who have talked about Cap'n's fic. This is unlike the people who have harassed me and others, who have spread their harassment on places such as Twitter, Reddit, and TVTropes.
I have refrained from ever accusing Cap'n of ever holding any bigoted views himself, and have made it a repeated point to say that his problematic writing is far more likely due to ignorance of the subjects involved rather than outright malice. This is unlike the people who have harassed me and others, who have accused many of us as people of being sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. based off of nothing. This includes accusing at least one of us of actual crimes against actual people with no proof and on multiple sites such as the popular and public Edelgard Discord and on Reddit.
People who said they were in contact with Cap'n (as in, mods of the Discord server that Cap'n was once in, the same server that has the mod that uses genocide apologetics) have been told that I was willing to remove parts of my notes that he found too attacking or harsh, and they've been told that I would outright remove all of my posts regarding Cap'n period if he would talk to me directly and we could discuss the implications and rhetoric he had accidentally written into his story. While I do understand him not wanting to do the latter (as it involves directly talking to me), he hadn't even done the former (which does not involve directly talking to me and only involves relaying messages through his friends). And with all of the above on top of that, it gives me the impression that he feels less like "this person is harassing me and that is giving my anxiety" and more "this person is critiquing me and I don't like that." While he has every right to feel the latter, we aren't going to sit here and say that's the same as the former.
So, nonnie, to answer why I am "hateful," as you put it: I don't like stories that unironically say being two races mean you don't belong to either race being influential in a fandom, as a mixed-race woman. I don't like stories that have characters of color only be used as props for the author's favorite little white girl to be influential in fandom, as a person of color. I don't like stories saying that women just want to go back to being innocent pure little girls and not be the wilted tainted flowers they are now to be influential in a fandom, as a woman. I don't like stories that lay the blame of all the world's suffering on the shoulders of a race of people who've barely survived a genocide to be influential in a fandom, as a person with a modicum of knowledge on where that rhetoric inevitably leads to. I don't like stories saying that men who don't bow down to women will almost certainly become rapist pigs or otherwise terrorizing monsters to be influential in a fandom, as someone who rejects sexism of all forms. I don't like stories that liken the violent conquests of imperialism to the blooming of flowers, or that say that imperialism is the only way for the "good" culture to help everyone - actual, genuine rhetoric used to justify actual, genuine imperialism - to be influential in a fandom, as someone who has read any history book ever.
And I don't like how all of this and more have clearly been normalized in big 3H fandom circles and how this has led to multiple people getting harassed, in no small part due to Cap'n's influence on the fandom at large.
I'm sorry if Cap'n doesn't like me pointing out the bigotry he had engraved throughout his story, and I'm sorry if I'm not going to be convinced that me doing that is the same as people's deliberate and long-standing attempts to chase people out of the fandom for saying they don't like Edelgard in the one way they allow anyone to like her, and I'm sorry that me calling out the racism people are engaging in and are hiding behind the shield of "discourse" seems to bother you so much, but I think I've explained why I'm not exactly that sorry well enough. Hope this answers your question <3
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ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".
like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!
on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.
returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body
literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence
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hey!!!! i am so excited for the new chapter drop, and i just wanted to offer some insight into why people might have gotten frustrated last time with the delays even tho you owe us nothing lol. i think it was about information rather than the fic itself… so maybe instead of pushing the drop day back by one day (repeatedly if need be), a whole week, or two week, pushback at a time could frustrate people less... then if it's ready sooner than that, it'll be a lovely surprise for everyone who wasn't expecting it for another week or two!! plus you guys would be giving yourself like an extra week to chill and finish it instead of the pressure of just 24hrs, (which is nothing what with real life etc) and you could even have a few days off before dropping it if you DID finish it early, cos no one would be any the wiser!
just an idea, that's what i'd do i think and that's how deadline pushbacks often work at my college so i thought i'd share :) hope that's not presumptuous :) you might already be doing this who knows :)
hello hello we are super excited for it as well!! re: your insight — we totally get why people are annoyed by delays, because it definitely is frustrating to look forward to something and constantly have it delayed, especially a little bit at a time and multiple times in a row, so trust me when i say that we fully understand that and wouldn’t be pushing it back by these increments if we didn’t think it would fully be done by a certain time. the 1 or 2 day delays for ch9.2 in particular were 1. made when there were only about one day’s worth of edits left to be made on 9.2, so it was a very reasonable guess to us, and 2. extremely circumstantial and unexpected. thea was very very close to being done but stuff kept coming up, like her being too physically tired after working her shift (her schedule is all over the place usually) to keep editing which she didn’t think she would be, or getting delayed at work for hours, or the one time we got that one anon about ch9.2, thea had been actually and literally swarmed by thousands of people at her job and simply was not in the mood to hear someone complaining about a chapter being delayed by another day or two. there also is something to be said about how we’ve seen people complain or get annoyed when it’s pushed back by a longer period of time in advance, which we have also done, so it leaves us kind of trapped between a rock and a hard place — do we overestimate and have people complain, or do we try to give them shorter term update goals and still have them complain?
we fully get why it’s frustrating and aren’t pushing it back little by little in order to be difficult, but either way, we just don’t think people should be in our inbox vocalizing those frustrations to us. they can even complain in dms to their friends about it, we don’t care! we appreciate the sentiment and the insight and we do try to give reasonable estimates for delays as much as we can, but honestly we just don’t really want to hear if people are annoyed 🤷🏽♀️ it’s not helpful or productive to us in any way and we would just prefer it stay out of our inbox and out of our sight overall
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