#and then having to explain how her shit does in fact actively harm trans people. how it isnt just like. her being mean and unaccepting

[victory-cookies]

I love having a half hour long debate with my mother about how bad jk r*wl*ng is bc she decided to listen to that witch trials podcast! (lying lying lying I hated it it sucked I hate debating her)

[gringolet]

that italian?

okay okay okay i think it happened long enough ago that i can dish about the drama. she changed her url and im not including it anyway so its fine.

prepare for a fuckin. essay in responss to a TWO WORD ask but anyay

so once upon time there was an italian who hated children and loved reylo. she also hung out in the arthuriana tag and got a bunch of asks about it. so one day some poor anon comes in and asks if she has any trans headcanons for arthurian characters, and she, instead of being a normal person and saying like, no, she goes off about how trans characters in fanfic is forced representation and she cant talk about trans people bc surgery is triggering for her.

found this in the archives lol. so i rbd politely explaining that while it was fine to not have trans hcs, her justifications for it were a little offensive.

hey i dont want to start discourse or anything but i see ur asks in the tag a lot and i wanted to politely address this. firstly obviously no one is under any obligation to hc things, and headcanons and fandom is not activism. if you’d just said “no, not really” it would b fine. i mean, cringe of u, but fine. but u make a couple of points here i want to look at a bit critically. then there is “I don’t like when headcanons are pushed up as ~representation, especially when… Ehm, it’s just fandom stuff?” i dont want to misinterpret you or put words in your mouth, but the implication that theres no need for trans rep in fandom and dismissal of that is a very cis take. My initial read of your intention there was a complaint of ‘why should something like fandom spaces, which are for fun and not serious, be filled with non fun serious (bad) trans stuff that i have to see when im trying to enjoy myself.’ now that could be incorrect, you were a bit vague here. if that is what you meant, i think you maybe should examine why you feel that way. if it isnt, im unclear on what exactly youre trying to say here. the idea that trans hcs are performative wokeness and “representation” in fandom is completely ignoring the actual trans people making and wanting them. there is so vanishingly little representation of trans people in actual media and even less thats good, and i think implying trans hcs are being pushed on people and fandom for, ~representation (a world of meaning in the ~ i shant speculate on) is very dismissive and ignorant of that fact. honestly the main thing im troubled by is the idea that trans bodies are inherently disgusting and triggering, which is an incredibly harmful and hurtful idea, and since you yourself acknowledge that trans people and hcs dont predicate surgery i question why you bring it up, except as a justification for disconfort rooted in unexamined prejudice. im not accusing you of being a terf or anything, i dont believe you meant harm by this or have bad intentions, and im definitely not saying anyone has to hc anything. it was the uncomfronted insidiousness of your justification that concerned me. this is not a personal attack at all, you just have a lot of influence in this fandom space and i wanted to make you aware of some of the surely accidentally harmful things ur saying.

so she flips out and rbs that yelling at me and cursing me out in italian (she moved blogs so i dont have her whole response just bits)

basically she completely derailed the original topic and accused me of calling her a horrible person for her triggers? which i never did and would never do, and then tried to make it a wierd anti v proshipper thing

third: I never said there’s no need of trans hcs in fandoms, BUT I’ve noticed that there’s a tendency of condemning people on the basis of what they ship / the dynamics they write. ( like the infinite discourse about how ‘I ship only mlm enemies to lovers because f/m enemies to lovers are Inherently Bad and Abusive - something I personally heard on Twitter sigh ), so I feel the need to say it. blame the current fandom climate.

and were like wow, this lady is unhinged, so we look around her blog and find a. a lot of stuff like saying its racist to not like incest?? and that italians arent white?? also shes a swerf?? and kind of deniel italian colonialsm? and reblogs from a bunch of out and out terfs} there was more but this isnt a callout post lol.

valentine lanzelet made a post about this crazy italian we found and she flipped out on him (this is one of several cursey italian tag rants)

roughly means: GO SHIT YOURSELF (italian alternative to go fuck you), RACIST TERF IS YOUR GRANDMOTHER IN A WHEELBARROW (italian saying which does not translate well) AND WHAT HAS ITALIAN COLONIALISM TO DO WITH THIS YOU UGLY SHIT, and anyways lancelot sucks

(translated by claudio beheaded)

anyway so then. and this is when it gets unhinged. she goes on this server me and a lot of my mutuals n friends r in, camelot, and starts complaining about me.

(in red is the server admin, who was lovely) i asked her to move this convo to dms if she must bc it was rude to bring drama into the server, and she refused, and started insisting that she was being bullied and just wanted to be left alone, so i was like okay lets all block each other and move on, and she refused, continuing to defend everything she was being criticized for

they also said claudio was making them look bad by translating their rants which like... queen if that made them look bad they were already a bad look.

so she keeps pinging people and replying to shit despite everyone else at this point begging her to just drop it and call it a stalemate

imagine this but around n around for like an hour. also she repeatedly got me and valentine confused it was super funny. also she claimed it was an invasion of her privacy for valentine to go on her public blog and look at the things she openly said and rbd there

so the server got put in slow mode and she KEPT GOING even though everyone was just begging her to stop and not even responding

as u can see, around this point we just started spamming her with emoji reactions. she announced she was leaving then went back to arguing a full three times before finally dipping from the server

then she continued complaining about us and calling us puriteens in her tags (trying to make it a proshipper v anti thing i guess lol?)

for literally months before finally remaking. also in that time she got in an argument about how the crusades were fine actually. italianphobia works hard but she works harder i guess

anyway i prolly left out a lot but thats the italian saga

[terventenko]

i thought you'd be a decent radfem by reading your bio but you're just another one of those terfs that mainly loves chatting shit about any and all trans people instead of like... actually educating people or trying to help them or sharing information. really sad. there are more and more of y'all and honestly no wonder people are "abandoning" the lgbt community cause why the hell would any decent quiet gay or bi person want to be in the same space as you? i'm so tired of y'all goddamn

please do me a huge favor and read all of this before you claim that i'm not trying to educate, help, or share information.

if you took a look at my most used tags, you'd see that this blog is primarily for criticizing queer theory and archiving ways it has harmed women- often, in the case of transwomen in female spaces, PHYSICALLY harmed them. transactivists say "that never happens!" and this blog has countless examples of the fact that yes, it does happen.

if you scrolled down to interactions i've had with libfems and transactivists, you'd see that i do try to educate and have open discussions with you. i understand where you're coming from because i believed what you believe in for years. i try to show you my point of view, share my experiences, and come to some sort of mutual understanding- or at the very least, civility. but you're never receptive. all transactivists ever have to offer to the conversation are insults, circular reasoning, the denial of sex-based oppression, and threats. just the other day someone threatened to put me in the hospital for trying to explain radfem theory and how modern trans activism harms women.

i've tried educating. you don't want to hear it.

radfems are immediately noplatformed. that's why none of you actually understand what radical feminism is or what we're fighting for. you don't allow yourselves to engage with us and listen. you scream "terf!" at any woman who criticizes liberal feminism or queer theory. it's exhausting.

why are women the only oppressed class who aren't allowed to make jokes about their oppressors? gay people are free to say they hate straight people. poc are free to say they hate white people. as a disabled woman, i make jokes about able-bodied and neurotypical people all the time! but when a female says she hates males, she's immediately deemed an evil, irredeemable bitch who has blood on her hands. modern transactivism is just the same old patriarchy, misogyny, and male entitlement with a coat of nail polish.

and while you're here- i do not have to be "one of the decent ones" for you. do you not hear yourself? you sound like every other entitled asshole who thinks marginalized people are only worthy of respect if they're "one of the good ones". i don't advocate for the rights of women on the basis of their sex for some rando on the internet to feel better. this is bigger than you. get over yourself.

[itsclydebitches]

Is buying the new Harry Potter game supporting transphobes because I've been seeing a lot of that on twitter? Not playing it. Pirating is fine, but actually paying for it.

Hi, anon!

I’ve seen a lot of the same and had initially thought to post my thoughts on the issue… before I got a very angry ask condemning me for a post where I admitted that I thought the game looked great and was excited to play it. I can no longer link to that post because I deleted it: a late night, impulsive decision made in an effort to try and protect myself from further flaming. Thus, I considered ignoring this ask under the same justification… before realizing that it might not matter in the long run. The Harry Potter: Legacy trailer has been out for just a few days and already I have gotten that furious ask, been told off by a friend for mentioning the trailer, and was questioned (antagonistically) about why I had added a Harry Potter related book to my Goodreads list. They’re small and potentially coincidental anecdotes, but it feels as if any engagement with Harry Potter is slowly coming under scrutiny, not just the (supposed—more on that below) crime of purchasing the new game. Given that I will always engage with Harry Potter related media, if there’s any chance such subtle criticism will continue regardless of whether I make the “right” choice to boycott the game or not, I might as well explain my position. Especially for someone who asked politely! Thanks for that 💜. 

Which leads to the disclaimer: Any anon hate will be unceremoniously deleted. This is a complicated issue and I intend to write about it as such. I ask that any readers go into this post with good faith and a willingness to acknowledge that this situation isn’t as black and white as they may prefer it to be. If that’s not something you can emotionally handle—which is 100% fine. Some subjects we’re simply not inclined to debate—or if you’re just looking to get in a cheap shot, please hit the back button.

Right. Introduction done. Now here’s the tl;dr: saying things like “Buying this game is inherently selfish/transphobic” isn’t the hot take people want it to be. Is boycotting Legacy one (very small—we’ll get to that too) way of showing support for the trans community? Yes. Is buying the game proof that you’re a selfish transphobe?  No. This isn’t a bad SAT question. Legacy boycotters are to trans supporters as Legacy buyers are to  ___? The argument that someone is selfish for buying the game is basically that you are choosing a non-essential video game over the respect and lives of trans individuals, but the logic breaks down when we acknowledge that purchasing a game has no real life impact on a trans individual’s safety, support, etc.   

“But Clyde, you’re giving Rowling money. She is then using that money to support anti-trans organizations. Thus, you have actively put more harm into the world.” Have I? I’m not going to get into whether/how much/what kind of money Rowling is receiving from this project because the fact is we don’t know and we’ll likely never know. Suffice to say, she probably will get some portion of any $60/$70 purchase. The real question is whether those sales have any meaningful impact. Reputable information on Rowling’s net worth is hard to come by, but it seems to be somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion pounds. Or, to put it another way: a fuck ton. And money keeps rolling in from a franchise that is so, so much bigger than a single video game. It literally doesn’t matter how much money you might put in her pocket via Legacy because she’s already so goddamn rich she can do whatever she wants. If Rowling wants to give a million dollars to the heinous “charity” of her choice, she can. She will. You are not directly contributing to this horror because that money may as well already exist. Every person in the world could refuse to buy this game and she’d shrug, going about her disgusting life because it literally does not affect her in any meaningful way. You’re refusing to give the murderer a knife when they’re got direct access to a knife-making factory. Horrible as it is to hear, you can’t stop them from doing something horrific with that tool. 

For me, this is the straw argument of the Harry Potter world. Not straw as in strawman, but literally straws. Remember how everyone was talking about plastic straws, swore off them, and subsequently deemed anyone who still used one to be selfish people who didn’t care about the environment? It didn’t matter if you had a certified “good” reason for using one (disability) or a “selfish” reason (carrying straws everywhere on the off chance you wanted a drink is a pain in the ass)—you’re a horrible person who wants the planet to die. Same deal here. If you can swear off straws, great! Do what tiny bit of good you can. But if you can’t or even don’t want to give them up, the reality is that your “selfishness” doesn’t make a significant difference in the world. The amount of plastic corporations are pouring into the ocean makes your actions inconsequential. It’s not like voting where every small, individual act adds up to a significant total. This is your lack up against others’ staggering abundance. It’s not adding a few drops of water until you have a full bucket, it’s trying to un-flood the boat with a teaspoon while someone else is spraying it with the hose. Have you, on the most technical level, made a difference by moving that teaspoon of water out of the boat? Yes. Is it a difference that holds any meaning in regards to the desired outcome? Not really. Now apply all that to Rowling. She is so phenomenally wealthy—with additional wealth coming in every day—that your purchase of Legacy is a teaspoon of water in her ocean of funds. It’s inconsequential.

“But Clyde, buying this game would support her and supporting her sends the message that what she believes is okay.” Exact same argument as above. JKR’s fame is so astronomical that no video-game boycott could ever make a dent in it. For every 100 people who swear off her work there are another 1,000 who continue to engage with both her writing and the writing related to her world because she is that prominent. Harry Potter is one of the largest franchises of all time, second only to things like Pokémon and Star Wars. This isn’t some indie creator who you can ignore into silence. The reality is that Rowling is here to stay and we have to take far more substantial acts to counteract that influence. 

Even more importantly, buying the game is not evidence that you support her views and the black and white belief that it does is an easy distraction from those harder “How do we improve the lives of trans people?” questions. I started compiling a list of stories with problematic authors only to realize the number of incredibly popular texts with awful histories attached to them unnecessarily increased the length of an already long post. Everything from Game of Thrones to Dr. Seuss—if you love it, chances are one of the authors involved has a history of misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. Which I don’t say as a way of excusing these authors, nor as a way to silence the justified and necessary call outs on their work. Rather, I bring this up to acknowledge that engaging with these stories cannot be concrete evidence for how you view the minority group in question. The reasons for consuming these stories are incalculable and at the end of the day no one needs a “correct” reason for that consumption (my teacher forced me to read the racist book, I only watched the homophobic TV show so I could call out how horrible it was, etc.) If fiction were an indicator of our real life beliefs we’d all be the most horrifying creatures imaginable. I may be severely uncomfortable with the queer baiting in Supernatural, but if a friend says they bought the DVD collection my response is not, “How dare you support those creators. You’re homophobic.” In the same way, someone purchasing Legacy should not generate the response, “How dare you support her. You’re transphobic.” There’s a miles’ worth of pitfalls in connecting the statements “You purchased a game based on the world created by a transphobic author” and “You yourself are transphobic.” 

So if buying Legacy does not add additional harm to the trans community from a financial perspective, and it doesn’t make a dent in Rowling’s platform, and playing a game is not evidence of your feelings towards the group the author hates… what are we left with? “But Clyde, it’s the principal of the thing. I don’t want to support a TERF” and that is an excellent argument. Your morals. Your ethics. What you can stomach having done or not done. But the “your” is incredibly important there. People need to understand that this is their own line in the sand and that if someone else’s line is different, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically a worse person than you. For example, I have made the choice not to eat at Chick-Fil-A. Not because I believe that me not giving them $3.75 for a sandwich will make a difference in their influence on the world, but because it makes a difference to me. It helps me sleep at night. So if not purchasing Legacy helps you sleep at night? That’s a fantastic reason not to buy it. But the flipside is that if someone else does purchase it that is not a reliable reflection of their morals, no more than I think my friends are homophobic for grabbing lunch at Chick-Fil-A now and then. Sometimes you just want a sandwich. 

“But Clyde, why would you want to buy it? Rowling is such a shit-stain I don’t understand how anyone can stomach supporting her—whether that support has an impact or not. Maybe someone eats at Chick-Fil-A because it’s close to them and they’re too busy to go elsewhere, or it’s all they can afford, or they don’t know how homophobic they are. There are lots of reasons to explain something like that. But you’re not ignorant to Rowling’s problem and there’s no scenario where you have to play this game, let alone spend money on it. So why?”

The reality is that I will likely be buying Legacy, second-hand if I can, but new if it comes to that, so I’ll give some of my personal answers here, in descending order of presumed selfishness:

5. Part of my work involves studying video games/Harry Potter and as a researcher of popular culture, my career depends on keeping up with major releases: good and bad. I often engage with stories I wholeheartedly disagree with for academic purposes, like Fifty Shades of Gray.

4. I find the “Just pirate it!” solution to be flawed. I’ve spent the last four months struggling to get my laptop fixed and I currently have no income to buy another if it were to suddenly develop a larger problem. I am not going to risk my $2,000 lifeline on an illegal download, no matter how safe and easy the Internet insists it is. 

3. We’ve been told that Rowling has not been involved in Legacy in any significant manner and I do want to support Portkey. No, not just financially because I know many others have insisted that everyone good has already been paid. Game companies still need to sell games. That’s why they exist. There’s a possibility that a company with just two mobile games under its belt will be in trouble if this completely flops. Is my purchase going to make or break things? No. Same reality as whether it will put new, influential money in Rowling’s pocket to do horrific things with. But I’d like to help a company that looks as if they put a lot of heart and energy into a game only to get hit with some real shit circumstances outside of their control. Even if they’re not impacted financially or career-wise… art is meant to be consumed. I know if I wrote a Harry Potter fic and everyone boycotted it because they want nothing to do with Rowling anymore, I’d be devastated. Sometimes, you can’t separate supporting the good people from supporting the bad. Not in a media landscape where thousands of people are involved in singular projects.

2. I’m invested in reclaiming excellent works created by horrible authors. That’s fandom! We don’t know much about Legacy yet—this is pure, unsubstantiated speculation—but this new story could be a step forward from Rowling’s books, giving us some of the respect for minority groups that she failed at. That’s the sort of work I want to promote because Harry Potter as a concept is great and I think it’s worth transforming it for our own needs and desires. The reality is that as long as Rowling is alive she’ll benefit from licensed material, but if that material can start taking her world in better directions? I want to support that too.

1. I literally just want to play it. That’s it. That’s my big justification. I think it looks phenomenal and I was itching to get my hands on it the second the trailer dropped. And you know what? I’m not in a good place right now to deny myself things I enjoy. I don’t need to tell anyone that 2020 has been an absolute horror show, but for me certain things have made it a horror show with a cherry on top. Not a lot gets me excited right now because we’re living in the worst fucking timeline, so when I find something that makes me feel positive emotions for a hot second I want to hang onto it. I have no desire to set aside that spark of happiness in a traumatic world because people on the Internet think it makes me selfish. Maybe it does, but I’m willing to let myself be a bit selfish right now. 

Which circles back to this issue of equating buying a game with active harm towards the trans community. It honestly worries me because this is a very, very easy way to avoid the harder, messier activism that will actually help the queer community. When someone says things like, “You’re choosing a stupid video game over trans lives” that activism is performative. Not only—as demonstrated above—is purchasing a game not a threat to trans lives or ignoring the game a way of protecting trans lives, it also gives people an incredibly easy out while still seeming ‘woke.’ Not all people. Maybe not even a significant portion of people, but enough people to be worrisome. “I’m not purchasing that game,” some people post and then that’s it. That’s all they do, yet they feel like they’ve done their duty when in fact they’ve made no active difference in the world. Are you donating to trans charities? Are you speaking up for your trans friends when someone accosts them? Are you circulating media by trans authors? Are you educating your family about trans issues? Are you listening to trans individuals and continually trying to educate yourself? These are the things that make a difference, not shaming others for buying a game.

All of this is not meant to be an argument that people shouldn’t be absolutely revolted by Rowling’s beliefs (they should) and that this revulsion can’t take the form of rejecting this game wholeheartedly. This isn’t even meant to be an argument that you shouldn’t encourage others to boycott because though the financial impact may be negligible, the emotional impact for you is very real. I 100% support anyone who wants to chuck this game into the trash and never talk about it again—for any reason. All this is meant to argue is that people shouldn’t judge others based on whether they purchase this game (with a side argument that we can’t limit our activism to that shaming). That’s their decision and this decision, significantly, does not add any real harm to the world. Your fellow Harry Potter fan is not the enemy here. We as a community should not be turning our visceral on one another. Turn it on Rowling. She’s the TERF, not the individual who, for whatever reason, decided they wanted to play the game only tangentially related to her.  

If Twitter and Tumblr are any indication, I can imagine the sort of responses this post may generate: “That’s a whole lot of talk to try and convince us you’re not a transphobe :/ ” For those of you who are determined to simply things to that extent, there’s nothing I can say that will change your mind. Please re-read the disclaimer and consider whether yelling at me over anon will benefit the trans community. For those of you who are still here, I do legitimately want us to think critically about the kinds of activism we’re engaging in, how performative it might be, whether it harms the community in any way, and (most significantly) whether it’s actually moving us towards a safe, respective world for trans people to live in. Personally, I don’t think telling Harry Potter fans that they’re transphobic for buying Legacy will generate any good in this world, for them or for the trans community. 

At the end of the day only you can decide whether you can stomach buying this game or not. Decide that for yourself, but make that decision knowing that there’s no wrong answer here.  

[citrineghost]

100 Humans on Netflix

So there’s this neat Netflix Original show called 100 Humans. I immediately got interested in it because they take this group of various humans from different backgrounds, age groups, and so on, and they use them to conduct experiments to get answers to interesting questions.

So, right away I had concerns about this show because

If you know anything about data and statistical research, you know 100 people is a very small sample size and does not breed accurate results

However, I’m very curious and wanted to see what they came up with anyway. I watched all 8 episodes and, honestly, I enjoyed watching it for the most part. However, I have a LOT of issues with the show and how it was conducted and I want to list them out here.

If you’re interested in watching 100 Humans or have already watched it, please consider the following before taking any of the show’s data as fact.

100 people is a very small sample size. This is because, the more people you have, the more weight each increment in your percentages has. With 100 people, each person represents 1 entire percent. That’s a lot. That means even a few people giving incorrect answers, having off-days, or giving ridiculous results (such as you can see in the spiders georg meme), can sway the entire result of an experiment into unreasonable territory. This is why most scientific studies attempt to get data from many hundreds or even thousands of people. The bigger the sample size, the more accurate it is to the entirety of the world.

I’ll put the rest under the cut because it gets long

The 3 hosts, who I’ll refer to as the scientists (regardless of if they actually are, because I’m not sure and don’t feel like googling it) repeatedly make false statements. For example, in one episode, they told their humans to “raise your hand if you believe you’re less bigoted than the average person here,” to which 94 people raised their hands. One of the scientists then made the statement, “If that were true, it would mean only 6% of Americans are bigoted.” This statement is entirely false. The only way to actually determine a true meaning to that would be to determine at what percentage of bigotry you are considered a real bigot. You also must consider that believing you’re more bigoted than other people in a small group, who you already have an impression of, is not necessarily indicative of how you feel you measure up to America as a whole. Anyway, I could go on and on. The only way to accurately summarize the results of that question would be to say that 44% of the humans had an inflated sense of righteousness or something of the sort.

The 3 scientists, both in person and in narration, for the sake of entertainment (if that’s what you call it) continually made “jokes” that poked fun at different groups, implied men are shit, etc. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but the kind of jokes they were making to amp up the hilarity of their host personas was genuinely just uncomfortable and made me feel even more like they couldn’t be trusted to go about unbiased research.

The scientists continually drew conclusions where the results should have been labeled inconclusive

The scientists made blanket statements about certain groups based on 1 element of research that would not stand up to further evaluation. For example, when explaining that ~93% (i think it was about that number) of Americans have access to clean, drinkable, tap water and yet some large number of single use bottled waters are sold every year, one scientist said it was because people believe bottled water is safer and cleaner than tap water. I am going to do my next survey on this to see if my own perception is flawed, but I simply don’t believe that all of the people who buy bottled water do so because they think its cleaner than “tap” (as if all tap is the same.) I know there have been studies about people drinking unlabeled bottled water and tap water and not being able to tell the difference, but this neglects to account for the fact that different houses pipes can affect the taste of the tap water running through them, people can use disposable bottles of water for certain activities or events too far away from tap for people to refill their reusable bottles easily, and so so so much more. Anyway, it just really bothers me to see “scientists” making these kinds of generalizations when they’re the ones whose results we’re supposed to trust.

The show was incredibly cisnormative. There was an entire episode based on comparing men and women that made me extremely uncomfortable with its division of people by men and women. There was the implication that all men have penises and all women have vaginas. There were implications that reproduction is a necessity in picking a partner. It was just a shitshow. There was one comment by one subject who asked, when being told to separate by men and women, “What if I’m transgender?” Obviously I can’t say for sure, but this person didn’t appear to be transgender and the sort of tone it was asked in makes me think it was literally something they asked him to say in order to get inclusivity points with the viewers and to “prove” that they’re not transphobic by having them divide up, because they said to go to the side you identify with. This whole thing is a) harmful to nb folks who would not have had a side to go to and b) completely negating the fact that the way we were socialized can have an effect on our social responses. That means that for a social experiment, a trans person could sway the results of one side due to their upbringing and the pressures society put on them before/if they don’t pass. This is all assuming they had any trans people there, which is potentially debatable.  I also take issue with this entire fucking episode because just, the amount of toxicity in proving one sex is better than the others is really gross and actually counterproductive to everything feminist and progressive. Not to mention, them implying that they’re trying to support trans people only to reinforce the notion that a trans man is inherently lesser for being a man when even prior to hatching, he would have also been force fed propaganda and societal pressure implying he’s less than for supposedly being a woman is really gross and makes me angry. The point of what I’m saying is that it’s actually not woke to hate men as a way of bringing women up because there are men who are minorities who are being hurt by the rise of aggression being directed at them for their gender. Anyway enough about that.

The tests drew false conclusions because they did not account for how minorities adapt to a world that’s not made for them. This is specifically directed at the episode where subjects were asked to match up 6 people into couples. There were 3 women and 3 men and the humans were asked to put them together into pairs. they could ask the people 1 question each but then had to match them up with only that information. The truth is, the people brought in were 3 real life couples already, which the humans didn’t know until after they matched them. The couples were m/f, m/m, and f/f. I think that’s great, but the problem is, literally none of the humans asked any of them their sexuality as their question and most people didn’t even consider they could match up same-sex people. One girl even thought that they had told her to make m/f pairings, even though they didn’t.  The scientists concluded from the experiment that the humans have a societal bias toward people, and assume they’re all straight, even if they, themselves, are not straight. I personally believe that was the wrong conclusion to draw. You could see some of the queer humans were shocked that they hadn’t considered some of the pairings might be gay. But, I don’t think it’s because they believe everyone they meet is straight, I believe this says more about what they expected from the scientists themselves. If someone is in a minority and they go to do something organized, like a set of experiments, they are going to be judging the quality and setup of the experiments by those designing them. I feel that the lack of consideration that the couples might be gay has a lot more to do with queer people having adapted to a world where queers are rarely involved or included in equal volume to the cishets. The queer humans taking part in the experiment and failing to guess gay couples shows that they have adapted to a world where they are excluded rather than a belief that every random person that they meet is straight. My point is further supported by an expert they had on the show who explained that, statistically, it was entirely likely that they were all straight and that even queers will account for being minorities by going with what’s most likely. The truth is, we are surrounded by a whole lot of straight people. It makes sense to assume only 6 people are all straight and that, if any aren’t, they may be bi.

The scientists frequently broke an already small sample size into even smaller groups. The group was very frequently broken in half, in thirds, or into sets of 10 people. These sample sizes tell us almost nothing actually conclusive. 

The experiments/tests frequently were affected by peoples abilities, unrelated to what was being tested. For example, one test that was broken down into 6 people and 6 control people competing at jenga was meant to show whether needing to pee helps or hurts your focus. first of all, sample sizes of 6 are a fucking joke. Second, this completely ignores these 6 people’s actual ability to play Jenga. If someone sucks at jenga with or without needing to pee, them losing Jenga when they need to pee says exactly fuck all about whether needing to pee affected their focus. They should have tested people’s Jenga skills beforehand, counted the amount of moves they made before the tower fell, and then did it again after hours of not peeing to compare their results. This test made no logical sense at all.

The scientists ignored the social effect of subjects knowing each other as well as duration of events during their last experiment. They were testing to see if people with last names near the end of the alphabet get a shittier deal because they go last in everything where things are done by name order. They tested this by doing a fake awards ceremony where they gave out some 30 awards to people, gauging the applause to see whether the people at the end got less hype and therefore felt worse about themselves than those in the beginning who got the fresh enthusiasm of the audience. the results showed that the applause remained fairly consistent throughout the awards. The issues with this test are numerous, but here are the three I take most issue with. 1) the people here all got to know each other very well over the week it took to make the show. People who know each other and have become friends are much more likely to cheer for each other with enthusiasm, regardless of how long it’s been. On the other hand, polite applause from a crowd at, say, a graduation, where you are applauding people you don’t know, WILL start off more raucous and grow very quiet except for individual families near the end. 2) the duration of the test was a half hour, which is not very long at all and doesn’t say much to test the limits of enthusiasm. Try testing the audience at a graduation with a couple hundred graduates that also involves the time it takes to walk all the way up to a stage a hundred feet away, accept a diploma, and then wait for the next person. These kinds of events take hours and nobody keeps up their enthusiasm that long unless they’re rooting for someone in particular. 3) this study tested only one of many many ways name order affects a person. Cheering and applause is only one factor. It does not take into account people having their resumes looked at in alphabetical order and therefore people at the beginning of the alphabet being picked before anyone ever looks at a W name’s resume. It doesn’t take into account a small child’s show and tell day being at the very end of the school year, after 6 other people have brought in the same thing they planned to. No one cares about their really cool trinket because they’ve seen a bunch like it already. This test doesn’t take into account how many end-of-the-alphabet people just get straight up told, “we ran out of time. maybe next time,” when next time doesn’t really exist. I feel genuinely bad for the girl who suggested this experiment because the scientists straight up said something akin to, “lmao her theory was bs ig /shrug” even though it was their own shitty research abilities that led to their results.

They did one experiment intending to see how many people have what it takes to be a “hero.” The request for this test was made by someone curious about the effect of adrenaline and if it really works how some people say. The scientists thought it an adequate method to determine an answer by testing their reflexes with a weird crying baby sound and then dropping a doll from above while they were distracted with answering questions. The scientists looked up before the doll dropped to indicate a direction of attention. While this does give some answers about peoples intuition, reflexes, and ability to use context clues, its entirely an unusual situation, makes no sense in reality, fails to take adrenaline into consideration literally at all, and has a lot more to do with chance. The person dropping the doll literally couldn’t even drop it in the same place from person to person. Some got it dropped into their lap and others almost out of arm’s reach. This, like a few of the other mentioned experiments, was during the last episode, which felt lazy and thrown together last minute, with very little scientific basis to any of the results. The last episode was weak and disappointing overall. 

One of the big issues I have with this show is actually their repeated use of the same group. They said at the end that they had done over 40 tests. Part of doing studies is getting varied samples of people in order to get more widespread results. Using the same 100 or less people (already a tiny sample) repeatedly is a terrible research method. You’re no longer studying humans at large. You’re studying these specific humans. You can’t take the same group with the same set of inadequacies, the same set of skills, and the same set of biases and then study them extensively and in many different ways like this. Your results are inherently skewed toward these specific people and their abilities. I expected them to at least get a new group each episode - every 5 or so studies - but no. They keep the same group all week, which makes the entire season. This is inexcusable in research imo.

The next issue is contestant familiarity. The humans all getting to know each other is great, socially, but it also destroys the legitimacy of many of the studies that involve working together or comparing yourselves and your beliefs

Many tests had issues with subject dependency. One study, meant to compare age groups and their ability to work together to complete the task of putting together a piece of ready to assemble furniture had each group with members they relied on entirely. A few people built the furniture while one person sat across the room, looking at instructions with their back to the others. They had to relay the instructions through a walkie talkie to another contestant and that other contestant had to relay it to the people they’re watching build the chair. You cannot study a group’s ability to build something with instructions by the ability of one single person to communicate. You’re testing that individual and the rest of them on two completely different capabilities. One person fails at being able to communicate and everyone else becomes unable to build the furniture. Even if everyone else in the group is more effective than all the other groups at building ready to assemble furniture, they might end up falling in last because of their shitty communicator who is literally not able to convey simple instructions. (yes, this actually happened in the test)

One test judged the subjects at their speed of getting ready, to see if men or women are faster at getting ready. While most elements of this test were just fine, the part I took issue with was that they did this test without regard to social convention. They told the subjects they were going on a field trip and to get ready by a certain time. Then, they gave them many things to get distracted by, like refreshments to pack with them, a menu to preorder lunch from, and so on.  The part that upsets me about this test is that they ignored social convention entirely, to the point that subjects were judged based on their conventional actions and expectations more than their actual speed at getting ready. The buses promptly shut their doors and left at the time they were supposed to but there was no final call to get on the buses. In general, when a group is to be taken somewhere by bus, there will be an announcement to load up and leave. You could clearly see many of the subjects were ready to go and were just standing around talking while they waited for fellow subjects to finish getting ready. I have no doubt that, if given a final call, most of them would have loaded up within a couple minutes. However, they were relying on the social convention of announcing departure and were therefore, left behind entirely (for a nonexistent field trip). These people who were left behind were counted as being late and not making the time cutoff. If one were to look at the social element of this situation, if everyone there believed there would be a warning before departure, the fact that 24 to 14 women to men were loaded onto the buses at departure doesn’t necessarily indicate the women were faster to get ready. It seems to me that it’s more likely to indicate anxiety at being late and a belief that they need not impede on anything lest they be reprimanded or have social consequences for taking too long - something women are frequently bullied for. There’s also the chance that many who boarded without final call are more introverted or antisocial. Plus, we can’t forget to include the people who have anxiety about seating. If someone is overweight, has joint pain, or has social anxiety, they will be more likely to board early to get a seat they feel comfortable in. If they had counted up all of the people socializing and waiting on the sidewalks nearby, they may have found that there were more men who were ready to board up at a moment’s notice. I’m not saying I think men are faster to get ready, I’m just saying that we can’t know based on who boarded without a final call. If people believe they will have a last minute chance to board, a large number of them will take the last few minutes to socialize with their new friends until they’re told they have to board. Therefore, this test cannot be considered conclusive without counting and including the people who were ready and not boarded as a third subset.

Honestly, I could go on and on about how sensationalist and unscientific this show is, but I just don’t have 6 more hours to contribute to digging up every single flaw with it. There’s A Lot.

My point is, if you feel like watching this show, which I don’t necessarily discourage inherently, I just beg you to go into it with a critical eye. Enjoy the fun of it and the social aspects, but please don’t rely on the information provided and please don’t spread it as fact, because it’s not.

It’s entertainment, not science.

[la5t-res0rt]

fun fact fucko no one cares that he’s trans, gnc, or autistic. all they care about is that he said someone wasn’t bisexual all because they hate them. thats fucked up no matter who you are. being austistic isn’t an excuse to be an utter dick hole.

alrighty folks strap in because we are in for a long one today

to start off i will begin by saying that i care about the identities of people i like and call friends i care enough to listen and learn from them because they have different perspectives on issues that i as a person who is none of the things that this person is will ever understand

it is important to listen to people and learn from them not just shine a light out of your ass for someone out of a weird place of blind worship thats honestly so cringey but that isnt what this is about this about you and likely others harassing ad sending death threats my friend and comrade betel bitches

i will now be going under a readmore to spare the dashboard

so lets recap what exactly is he being harassed for

as you all are no doubt aware there is a blog called nether receipts where a certain user we shall not name catalogs instances where members of the beetlejuice fandom are harassed correction its a blog where this person catalogs instances where flaws in their character as well as the characters of the people around her are highlighted and critiqued with the occaisional off color remark and threat which i obviously do not approve of who would

anyway following reading some ill-informed and not-so-well-phrased comments from a certain narcissistic user about their sexuality my friend had this to say

this was the post that got them put on this receipts blog which really exists as a source of people for a certain cluster of the beetlebabe fandom to harass and try to drag or cancel 

this is the post that has made people call him biphobic and here is why thats wrong and stupid

you said in your ask that he only is saying that this icky person is not bisexual because there is malice between them and while yes its true that there is malice orion never once said that this person wasnt bisexual

i took the liberty of sifting through the harassment asks he received yesterday because you all love receipts so much i took the liberty of grabbing a few and adding some highlights so you dont miss the important bits

orion never once said this person isnt bisexual he stated that equating doing femme on femme  pornography to bisexuality is a biphobic statement and is in fact a problematic thing to say

there may be crossover between bisexual people and people who do femme on femme but they are far from the same thing doing pornography is a choice you actively make and you do it for compensation however being bisexual is simply part of who you are it is something you dont choose 

although this person would perhaps disagree

and before you come for me this person posted these for the world to see and obviously i have as many receipts as my drive can carry furthermore how does this argument make sense why would you care so much about heterophobia if youre not heterosexual why are you so pressed oh wait is it perhaps

because this person is using the split attraction model for woke points like this screams that this person sees women as sex objects or perhaps this person is comphet and is denying themselves because heteronormativity is so deeply ingrained in their being that they wish to cling to heterosexuality to keep up their squeaky clean white feminist woman persona or maybe theyre just not well informed on lgbt+ issues

editors note the editor is an ace person who considers using the split attraction model is situations like this isnt exactly helpful like i cant stop you from doing it but you shouldnt have to say im a bisexual heteromantic person you can just be a  bisexual woman and keep dating men you dating men doesnt erase your bisexuality saying that you would have sex with a woman but not romantically be involved with them makes the editor think woman = sex object and as a feminist the editor has to say thats fucked up

i will reiterate implying that doing pronography of any kind is equitable to a human sexualty is harmful to bisexual people and if youre like uhhh im bi and i think its okay guess what you do not speak for every single bi person so you should try harder to be compassionate for other peoples level of comfort

in any case statements like these are hurtful to bi people equating voluntary sex work to a sexuality isnt okay and its something that person should maybe address and consider apologizing for but since this person only listens to people in their inner circle and they dont even really listen to them its unlikely that this person will ever make amends for past biphobic tendencies because as everyone has been so quick to point out being bi doesnt excuse biphobia or homophobia or anything of the sort editors note heterophobia is not a legitimate issue im sorry if you feel oppressed for your straightness but really thats a you issue 

here is one more screenshot where my friend basically covers what i have just said as well as reminding the world that the owner of nether receipts is a narcissist 

being a bisexual person does not excuse you from saying biphobic things and there is literally no identifier you can use for yourself that exempts you from criticism for your actions and it doesnt mean that people cant demand that you address the wrongs youve done or said

you dont have to listen you dont have to do anything but dont be surprised if you say something shitty to a group of people and they get mad at you

also all that being said what orion said was not biphobic if anything he is raephobic but lets be honest who isnt ok there thats my one funny haha for you

we have every right to criticize someone who creates simulated cp and shares it with minors in 18+ servers or someone who equated bisexuality to voluntary sex work or someone who accuses people who disagree with them of being fascists or nazis or someone who goes out of their way to repost and edit art in a mocking manner or someone who actively claims to own a fandom like these are all critique worthy behaviors that all come from the same person who never explains their actions never holds themselves accountable for the shit they cause like we as people who share the same space as this person have every write to call bull roar when we see it

it is no secret that i dislike his person and it is also no secret that i will not hesitate to the the opportunity to drag them for being a shitty person whenever the opportunity arises and since their most recent beef with me was about how i was a bad friend i guess i figured this would be a good time to come forward for one of my friends who received dozens of harassment messages and several death threats over his commentary on the actions of this one vile individual

and i am addressing them now if they ever end up reading this or when it is inevitably sent to this person 

if youve got a problem with the way he and i or other antis critique you maybe come out from behind your wall of dipshit cronies and talk to us your damn self i am very sick of having to deal with nasti or morgan or that one minor or suz or that person that runs the rp blog or any of the others in your little hoard im tired of them trying to be slick like we see you we see all of you

all of your simulated cp aside youve said some really shitty things that you could easily amend since youve likely learned more about what it means to be lgbt+ since it is now a community you see yourself being a part of 

part of being human is learning from your past and making a better version of yourself for tomorrow and although i think you are a really awful person i dont think youre above self betterment and self reflection and self awareness 

also you dont seem to care at all when threats are being tossed around by your buddies but no matter how much me or orion or any of the others dislike what you do no person in their right mind would be okay with sending death threats and you shouldnt either you should at the very least extend that courtesy 

anyway

fuck you asker youre full of trash garbage and i hope you have a not so good day like i hope it rains or something invalidate my friends identity and ill yell at clouds

[raguna-blade]

So carrying on the shared symbol thing with persona games, here’s a fun one that probably needs more time in the oven but hey, can come back later with later revelations

So, here’s one that technically shows up in the first game but doesn’t really become a thing until (I am assuming, i still need to actually play the first few and finish most of them but whatever) Persona 3

Evokers! Also known as guns. Specifically hand guns, but I think that’s the least important detail when one of the big symbols of your game is shooting yourself in the head to summon mythic figures.

So Evokers. In game, and as per the wiki, they are supposed to function by more or less...making you face mortality and the fact that you’re going to die for real.

By simulating shooting yourself in the face. It’s a good thing that the Kirijo group already got their mad science comeuppance because man, that’s kinda...

But hey, the logic and rules at play here do seem to be consistent across the games. To Summon a persona requires, apparently, a huge amount of stress and or trauma to activate properly, and the Evokers are a fast way to do that that isn’t, comparatively anyway, super duper traumatic. It’s free artificial trauma for everyone that is comparatively less permanent.

Which...Well I don’t believe that for a second considering SEES is one big trauma center. I don’t think there is a single person in that group who is trauma free really. Nobody is free of it, even the dog.

I mean maybe the protag, but they come off as super depressed to me.

But for the moment let’s accept that as true. If i’m wrong i’m wrong, but I think i’m right and i want to get to the juicy stuff.

So given evokers function by applying trauma directly to the soul to summon yon persona, I think it’s obvious then what guns are SUPPOSED to represent right?

Trauma. But not just any kind of trauma no. Remember, Evokers are supposed to basically be going Hey Trauma But For A REASON. To Summon a Persona. A persona which is used to protect yourself from something (Shadows technically, but A persona is a mask used to face life’s struggles as the games are so fond of reminding us.)

So, Guns are Trauma Turned Towards Protecting Yourself from...something. My understanding of psych stuff is you know, layman, but basically it’s an active self defense mechanism. Or at least turning that pain on outside hurty things.

So if this holds true as a consistent and shared symbol going forward, we should expect that everyone who uses a gun is both

A: Traumatized in some manner.

2: Actively Defending themselves possibly by literally using that trauma against things.

Which i’m sure is totally a healthy thing to be doing. Has to be. Can’t not be right?

I can see no possible way in which using your trauma like a club against the world can possibly backfire on you.

SO!

Who uses guns in the series going forward.

In Persona 4, We have two for sure, maybe a third. That is Naoto, Adachi, and Maybe Dojima (I assume he HAS a gun, but I don’t think he’s ever shown using it. I’m going to assume for the moment this is true as fits the analysis, cause it fits well enough, but if he actually pulls it out ehh)

Persona 5 has uh...literally all of the phantom thieves. Technically not morganna, but if you think a slingshot isn’t basically a fire arm, well sure technically but also you can absolutely kill someone with a slingshot don’t get it twisted. But yeah, all of the phantom thieves and ESPECIALLY Akechi, since he uses a real one. Well, sans Futaba, but we’ll get there.

And do these individuals demonstrate being both traumatized AND using that as some kind of defense mechanism...?

yeh.

So start with P4. Now compare the other persona users in 3-5, the group in 4 is actually really well adjusted. Like yeah, you have some elements of stress and being an outcast and elements of weird harrowing stuff happening to them sure. I mean if nothing else they’re in the middle of a murder mystery with a serial killer in town, that’s stressful for anyone, let alone the weird supernatural shit on top of it, and then there’s the more mundane stressors.

But...Uh...Largely, they’re handling it pretty well actually. Protag was pretty alright moving to town and seems to get along with people well. Yosuke had the dislike of being in town but he had friends, he wasn’t really hated or anything. Chie is pretty alright, Yukiko is stressed but not exactly freaking out, Kanji has some shame going on however you want to frame that i’m told it reads different for japanese audiences though it’s not mutually exclusive, Teddie DID in fact have an existential crisis but that’s not really the same thing i think, Rise is hella stressed, and then there’s naoto who uh.

Kid’s got some problems. They’re also the only one who uses a gun So Hey First stop.

So depending on how you want to read it, Naoto is either dealing with some trans issues or just aggressive and unending misogyny given their profession. Personally while i can see the naoto is trans reading, the game doesn’t explicitly come out with that as the issue, while it DOES with the misogyny so I’m going with that. If you do think it’s more that than what i’m going with, you can easily sub it in I think since from what i’ve heard on the subject suggests it very much CAN be traumatizing dealing with that in society....And also because it’d still feed back into the misogyny thing so it comes back to that anyway.

Regardless. This is a thorny enough issue really, so i’ll strive to not fuck up but please forgive me if I do cause it’s not intentional.

What do we see with Naoto? They’re a genuinely skilled, talented and experienced detective, and at a really young age. Their skills are undeniable really, and they’ve got acclaim and real accomplishments under their belt.

They are also, apparently, belittled constantly because they’re read as female and that is apparently far far more important than their skill. Because of that they’re belittled, talked down to and dismissed purely because of that.

And Naoto is fucking tired of it. So much so that they do everything in their power to present as male and believe they should straight up just...cut out whatever lady aspects are there and just go full dude.

Which here you get two really radically(?) different readings depending on if you fall on the Naoto is Trans and so fucking tired of the misogyny vs Naoto Is fucking Tired of the misogyny and so damn desperate.

In case A, Naoto genuinely believes they’re a dude, and genuinely believes duding it up will solve their problem....But they’re rejecting that part of themselves actively, and refusing to acknowledge it at all. That’s a problem for him, if only because actively rejecting a part of yourself is by no means a healthy thing, especially when it keeps getting brought up constantly in your line of work (I can only imagine how much this would suck to be dismissed because people think you’re a girl when you’re a guy but also you’re denying that you’re a guy and recognize that even if you were outwardly a guy they would STILL dismiss you as a girl even though you’re not. Just typing that out is...yech.)

In Case B, you have a still tired of the dismissal, but also they think they radically need to change their body and gender just to get anywhere in the world which is egregiously fucked up because you know. She’s good at her job! Why should she HAVE to be a dude to get anything done? It’s fucked up.

But they’re a gunman! So...i mean i guess it’s obvious what the trauma at play here is, it’s gender related regardless of how you slice it and how is it used...? Naoto disguises (or “disguises”) themselves as a guy, actively using the thing that they’re being traumatized by to fight back against the world in some way.

I mean as thorny as the issue is in the reading it, the outcome is at least simple enough under the shared symbols thing.

Ok, but what about Adachi...? Welllllllllllllllllll

Adachi is definitely traumatized I think but it's not in the kind of way that's sharp and specific. I'm cribbing a bit off of [https://youtu.be/8qG8Mqe_1v8] with their description of how Adachi reacts to the Scoobies calling him out.

To summarize and or paraphrase, it's not that there's a specific thing that broke Adachi down. It's that he's trapped in a job he hates, or at least without the possibility of improvement. He's shoved in a backwater town when he's a city boy. He feels ignored, he doesn't like the people around him very much, he's got basically no money, he has no significant other, he has to just keep going and existing day in and day out and it's...

God it's so fucking soul killing.

It's not like his childhood was better apparently, in that it basically was a prelude to adult hood but also unlike then, he didn't have the supposed promise of do well in school and get cool shit that was summarily broken.

So what's a guy who's made to feel worthless, made to feel like a nobody, made to feel utterly disenfranchised, and has actual evidence to support some of this (keep in mind the reason he got reassigned did involve him screwing up somehow, though I don't think it's explained what or how) going to react when given the ability to act out with no consequences, or seemingly?

Well, I imagine that you would see them do some fucked up shit really. We've seen people in real life do things just as bad if not worse, and the exact way he wields his trauma is well...sadly understandable to anyone.

Though another interesting shared thing, which I neglected earlier and MAY share into the Gun Imagery is a sense of isolation. Which...Actually. Actually may track. Evokers are used by well...ritualistically killing yourself, which is for all the harm it throws out to everyone connected to you, is also a very solitary act. And in both cases here, the characters are in a very real way killing their true selves in order to deal with the world (In adachis case by presenting a fake version of himself and in Naoto's case by actively rejecting a part of themselves however you want to spin that one)

This does raise a question of the SEES gang having elements of isolation which off hand I want to say yes that's the case across the board, and only by coming together do they win but I also legitimately cannot recall how it plays out beyond the minimal We're The Only Ones Capable of Dealing With This thing which isn't quite the same thing. The ritualized killing yourself still stands so that's still in play really, and i'll keep an eye on it going forward.

I should probably ALSO keep an eye on the uh...Suicide aspects. Even looking back at Naoto and Adachi they have elements of it, although more figurative than literal. Both very much have a life is over thing related to their careers and where they end up when first introduced, so it's not an unreasonable call though the strict actual read of suicide suicide is...Hmmm...

Well I suppose Adachi's chunk of the world is accessed through the noose room if I recall, so that might not be quite as empty a connection, while Naoto's secret lab thing may not be quite as on the nose it does focus on a destruction of self in some way given the way a lot of those secret labs go about doing things in those shows.

That is, there's generally one of two outcomes. Either the Evil Org creates a mindless/corrupted pawn to use whatever their powers/abilities are for the organization (see every monster of the week) OR they create a hero/renegade warrior that uses those very same powers they were imbued with against them....Which suddenly makes me wonder if the the ambiguity of if Naoto's transness vs woman in male spaces thing is intentional in regards to how to read that section. If so that's actually clever as hell because then either way you want to read it the literal what's going on with their shadow (body modification either to become their true self and the rejection of that or to be able to actually be respected for their work and the implied destruction of self that's going on there) it reads as this is bad so...Kudos.

Anyway, off topic, maybe another day.

All this said, this leads to Dojima who SHOULD have a gun and probably does, but...never uses it that I can recall, not once. Doesn't even show up with a gun if memory serves.

It's not that he's not traumatized. He most definitely does have some shit kicking around what with the dead wife, disconnect from his daughter and all that, but he never really...weaponizes it does he? He never turns it on others, never uses it to isolate, none of that. Which is interesting because as a Cop I think we can safely say he SHOULD have a gun of some flavor right? That does seem to be the vibe, and yet he doesn't freak out. The reason why is heartfully straightforward though.

Nanako. He can't exactly revel in his hurt and lash out at folks with it. Like yes, he's not winning parent of the year at the start of the game by a long shot, but frankly emotionally distant and neglectful after your wife died but still trying (failing but trying, critically, the trying) is not the worst spot to be in, no way. And he takes to reorienting things quite well once he get's the additional stability in his life Yu and (at least in part) Adachi.

Which, really, is what also ended up saving the SEES members. Not Yu, but the fact that they managed to form genuine connections with each other that let them get past the hurt and not be taken up and swallowed by it. It's why Adachi ended up going the way he did because he really DIDN'T forge those connections, and because of the whole everything he couldn't really get out of that loop and fix himself up.

I mean Izanami's game basically threw two whole ass people into the deep end of their problems but this ain't about her right now.

So ok, that's the group from 4 and right now this is feeling pretty consistent.

So let's get to the group that has literally every party member carrying with The Phantom Thieves.

So...again, to bring it back, Guns symbolically here are weaponized trauma right? They're using that to strike back against what's threatening you, often by using it against them.

Now, there are variances with the phantom thieves for sure, and the most relevant and DIRECT one is that all of them, every last one, is an outcast of some flavor from the social norms, and this has screwed with them something fierce. Now it's not as apparent or visible in all cases, but I'll get into specifics as we go down the list, but I want to say this at the top because it fundamentally comes down to Because Of this outcast status, this particular form of trauma, they became the Phantom Thieves, and in doing so struck back against the society that hurt them, with the intent to inspire those like them.

Well not Akechi, but his specific issues at least nominally align I guess.

Anyway. I won't go into as much detail here, but I feel it's worth pointing out that their Phantom Thieves Personas are probably the cleanest way to point out how they go about weaponizing their various more personalized traumas to protect themselves and fight back.

Joker: Accused of a crime he didn't commit, sent to a city away from his family and friends, said to be a violent felon...Like it's not exactly brought up in the game in part because he's a silent protag but Joker absolutely had his life ruined. Like full stop, his world fell apart over night, not because he did something wrong but because he tried to do the right thing. And then Kamoshida happened which basically took boyo from being merely fucked over to losing what little he had left (where what he had left was a friend of a friend of his folks taking him in and shoving him in a drafty attic)

And then from said trauma he created the well...Joker Persona. Someone who emphatically is a criminal, the kind of guy who is actually pretty ominous when you consider the knife,gun and dark outfit combo making him look like some kind of assassin. That he helps people is probably a small miracle really.

But by the same token, it's blatantly clear the persona that he pretends at school is not his true self either. He has to hide himself, make himself look small and innocent and as unthreatening as humanly possible. He's not, by any means but...

Morgana: Imagine you wake up one day and you remember maybe your name, a few random bits of information, and nothing else except that you were (probably) a human and now decidedly are not. That's...Rough man. It's just rough to deal with and it's awful, and then you just keep getting hit with that fact over and over and over again. Mona's pretty straightforward, but it tracks that they would make themselves out to be the cool collected sort that they do (even though they botch it nigh constantly). If you can't remember anything about yourself, make yourself out to be the coolest smartest most talented type right?

Ryuji: He literally had an authority figure not only mock his family situation, he straight up broke his leg, killed his dream of running track, ostracized him from his friends and peers, put more pressure on his mom. He was reduced to a thug and his response to that was, apparently, let me be a (diet) delinquent then. It's not like he did anything bad really but he certainly stopped giving any kind of a shit to the world. His attitude got turned up for sure. This got more emphasized with the Actual Skull persona as a phantom thief, where he's far more intimidating, outright hostile and violent (A bat and a shotgun? yee)

Ann: I mean there's the obvious sexual assault, her friend attempting suicide, etc, but i've seen it pointed out that a good chunk of Ann's problems are also based in the fact that she's white in japan, so basically she straight up has to deal with racism too. It's why she's considered the sexy one for example (girls like her are easy you understand) so it's...well. How the game handles (or doesn't) that aside, the persona she ends up developing first off a very blithe sort of vibe to how the world views her (seen in her confidant arc) before ultimately gravitating to having more active control over her image and consciously choosing how the world will view her instead of them making the choice themselves.

Yusuke: Abusive parents (which is damn near a theme with the phantom thieves. Families being broken or Abusive which is hm) who actively stole his work, and he knew about it. It very clearly messes with his art and his relationship to this thing that he loves, and even after knowing how his adoptive dad was abusing him and other students and making a mockery of art...To which he actively throws himself into Art EVEN HARDER than before, as a dedicated fuck you on the subject. Actually straightforward, which is perhaps weird for Yusuke, but hey they can't all require deeper reading.

Makoto: Makoto's deal is a bit more complicated but boils down to She's tired of having all these expectations pushed onto her and dictating the exact kind of person she should be. Always the good girl, always kind and elegant, soft spoken, I mean she knows aikido and is supposed to be good with it. Which is why she turns that around is basically Lord Humongous, albeit less jacked dude in bondage gear and more Badass Violence Biker. Just let it all out and take no shit from anyone ever. Again straightforward enough.

Futaba: Now...Here's a weird one to say because it's...She doesn't have a gun. I mean we could probably make a fair enough statement, if an absolutely buckwild one, that she does not at this point have a trauma. Or at least, not one that is weaponized. Because well...Her issues were very self focused. She thought her mom killed herself because of her, and that almost made her (futaba) kill herself. That's not a great place to be, but it's not like she ever takes her dead mom issues out on the world. She doesn't even really take her extreme social issues out on the world. If anything she pretty much...Has them and kind of deals with them quietly.

I suppose you could say that her weapon of choice is the computer. It's no gun, obviously, but unlike everyone else up til this point she also doesn't really...hide herself. There's no fake persona (in the not summoned beings of myth and story) that she presents to the world. She's decisively genuine about everything, and pretty much the only difference between her and her Oracle persona is neat goggles yeah? Which makes her an interesting pair with Maruki who we'll get to later as another gun not haver.

Haru: Kind of a complicated one, though also kinda straightforward. She's ostracized from her father and finds the abuse that he's laying down on the people who work for them abhorent, which is bad enough, that kind of realization that your life is built on the suffering of others. There's also the uh...It's not strictly this because arranged marriages are very much business affairs more than romance, but the way it's portrayed definitely reads as her dad selling her which is you know. Not...ideal, though her specific reservations there seemed less the arranged marriage (it's business she get's it) but more the dude was an creep and also again the abuse. The family motto being betray anyone to get ahead (paraphrased to hell and back) also suggests some not so great things really, though her bond with her dad did seem to be genuinely strong, which is why her reaction is tada heroine of justice.

Which, I just realized this and I gotta point it out, actually lines up MARVELOUSLY with Morgana and Zorro. Wealthy Individual who see's the crimes and evil deeds of the world and decides to mask up and fight the crime they cannot contest with their unmasked face, warring against the system that enriched them at presumable cost to themselves because it's the right thing to do? Beautiful. Probably should look into that more. But yeah.

Sumire: I mean...I mean she basically straight up says I think I was second best to my sister in everyway and then I got her killed and her reaction to that was Let Me Be My Sister and well...yeah that's exactly how she dealt with her trauma, albeit with a little bit of magic help. And Perhaps most notably, this is almost the most explicit demonstration of Evoker Gun Antics because She Creates a Persona (“Kasumi”) To Protect Herself (alldattrauma.exe) by using that trauma (dead sister) against the world (Literally everyone else) it's...Actually a really clean example I think?

Akechi: Last but not least of the gun havers, Akechi who uh...Outcast because of family reasons (single mom, Dad's a creep) in a way that just...We don't actually ever get the details I don't think, but the way he reacts to it I think makes it clear that his whole life was basically a string of kick this kid while he's down, keep him outside the system, and of course the persona he ends up creating, both of them, end up being one the charming charismatic prince who seeks justice and a bloodthirsty lunatic, neither of which accurately reflect his true self I don't think. Aspects of it sure, but not completely. If pressed, I would say that the Akechi we see in the Third Semester is probably the closest even though he's probably a dream Akechi, being someone who does have a distinct judgement for what is right and wrong but also, critically, can and will shoot you in the face cackling as his plans come together. Rather like Joker actually, which is appropriate given their mirrored trickster roles, and the general shape of their outcomes (both get their smuggery on when things go to plan)

Anyway, the way he reacts to being forced to live an outcast is as mentioned, let me get back into that system, let me be part of it and all that.

And last but not least

Maruki: Now...He doesn't have a gun. It doesn't quite match up with the symbol thing which I think at this point is established enough that it's probably some kind of thing, but what I find interesting is that...he fits MOST of the criteria right? Definitely has a trauma that shaped how he reacted to the world and yet, it's not weaponized right? It doesn't well...evoke a different persona from him. It's not weaponized to protect him and that seems odd right? He ends up with a Palace right?

Sure. But I want to go back to what i'm proposing the Evokers Represent.

Trauma, A Destruction of the Self (Suicide literal or figurative), Isolation, and weaponizing your trauma to protect against the world...And he only actually tracks to the Trauma part of that. He IS hurt for sure, no question. He is fighting back against the world in his own way for sure, what with Azathoth and his mind whammy, and I would say that the nature of it is directing how he's doing things (no more pain for anyone yeah sure)

But where it falls apart, and actually DOES line up with the guns as metaphor for those things mentioned, is that he doesn't really Isolate. He doesn't present a fake self to protect himself. He doesn't destroy an aspect of himself to protect himself. No, he's extremely upfront that “No this is bullshit, it should change, fuck this noise, I'll do what I can with what I can and oh hey godlike power now I can help everyone”

Which cool, except that apparently in the Stay in Maruki's world ending he kinda fades into the background, which suggests the self destruction but no, not even then really. Like I know I made a bit of meta about him obscuring himself and kinda fading away as a person, but I don't think it's strictly meant to be get rid of yourself so much focus on the message and not the messenger. You can throw your mask away. No more pretending. You don't have to hurt anymore. As the song goes.

And it's worth pointing out that, in comparison to literally everyone else on this list, Maruki is unambiguously a healthier person mentally by a long shot. Shady antics with Sumire aside, He genuinely wants to help people, he want's them to be better the right way ideally but if he had the means to do it of course he'd just hot delete those deeply traumatic and life shattering pains that they couldn't overcome. Then he does get that ability. And Then he does do that.

Anyway, the ramblings on long enough, and I kinda feel i'm drifting, but yeah. Think this is another symbol that tracks (I probably wanna check out Persona Q and Q2, but what I know on those does have it break down a bit but they're also not mainline games so I'm not sure how to square that so....)

[thatfeministkilljoy]

Women are actually having their rights taken away. Can you explain why you think that transmisogyny hurts literally everyone, and why it ’s relevant at all to change the language of these discussions when females are actively having their rights eroded? All the language change does is make the conversation inaccessible to women in poverty who don’t understand this unscientific rhetoric like “men can get pregnant too”.

Transmisogy comes down to policing women’s bodies. I thought we had decided a long time ago that that was wrong. Transmisogynistic policies have hurt dozens of cis women who didn’t look “feminine” enough. Yes, our rights are being taken away. Just because a woman is transgender doesn’t mean hers aren’t. In fact, look at the state of LGBT rights and the enforcement of gender roels and tell me how exactly they aren’t losing arguably even more rights. THe inclusion of transgender peopel hurts no one and the exclusion is messy and harmful. Why should we exclude entire groups of people from decisions that fully effect them just because it’s a little easier to word? 

No one “changed the language” I made that fucking post. No one tried to change anyone’s language but y’all policing mine. And transmisogyny wasn’t relevant to my choice of language, because as I have had to say a million times; it was not about trans women. It was about trans men and non binary people who could get pregnant. TERFs just see the word “trans” and get excited to shit on trans women. I was not the one who brought up trans women, they were. I was speaking only on the original topic and the people effected by it.

It in no was makes it inaccessable. If someone doesn’t understand what is meant by statements like that, all they need to do is ask. Seeing gender neutral language in a post were you don’t understand the need for inclusion does not mean the post is inaccessible to you. You are still able to read all of the information and apply to yourself despite it not saying WOMEN ONLY, and again, if you don’t know why it’s gender neutral, you can just ask. And what about trans men and non binary people in poverty? They don’t deserve to have resources made accessible to them because, it might confuse someone else and it’s better to exclude them then maybe explain something to people?

The idea that we should just toss concepts because some people may not understand them is the wildest take I’ve heard in a long time. We’re gonna have to toss most of feminism then, a lot of people haven’t heard of and don’t/won’t understand a lot of the concepts we use.

And I don’t know why you assume all poor women have never heard of trans people???? 

[themattress]

More bullshit from Mod A in regards to Xion.  Mod M is more reasonable (although I question if toxic male fandom does hate anything that reads like fanfiction at first glance...I think that if it reads like the kind of fanfiction they like, then they’ll eagerly accept it. I like to consider myself equal opportunity in this regard: if it reads like any kind of bad fanfic, then I dislike it.)

I’m with @riniuchihaa here. For me, Xion, far from being the best KH character, was the first glaring neon warning sign that the series was going off-course, that an original character was being created for the sake of it despite not being able to impact much of anything given her placement, and then was not ever let go of even though the excuse given as to why she was forgotten by KH2 should have rendered it impossible for her to appear in the series again.

“not a damsel in distress, action girl or sex object”

Is she not those things, though?  She has to be rescued or protected several times throughout the game. She wields a Keyblade and can even be better at it than Roxas if she’s absorbed enough of his strength. And there are a lot of creepy guys online that will argue that she is sexy, particularly with KH3′s model of her suggesting that she’s not wearing anything underneath that coat, which is open all the way to just above her chest. By KH3, she’s even taken Namine’s “plot device to make convoluted shit happen” status. If anything, people take issue with her being all of those things, and not even being them as well as other KH girls. She’s very derivative with little to add for herself.

“she’s a regular human being with a regular human emotional arc”

I would actually say that of Xion in the manga.

In the game, I think this is a case of projecting. Xion’s personality and arc are written as such a blank slate, with more people talking about Xion and what she’s going through than her and it being onscreen, that it’s easy to project on to. But when looked at objectively, there isn’t much humanity to it at all.

Ask yourself this: what is Xion like when she’s not around Roxas and Axel, doing missions and eating ice cream? What are her likes and dislikes, her own personal hobbies or aspirations? What are her feelings on matters completely unrelated to her friends?  For the life of me, I can’t come up with an answer. The closest I can get is with the text of her Secret Reports, where she honestly shows more character than she actually shows in the game itself (but then, that’s the same with Roxas and his Diary entries.) 

Before her identity crisis kicks in, all of Xion’s scenes are shared with Roxas and/or Axel, in the context of missions, ice cream, and being good friends with them, simply going along with whatever they’re doing and saying. Any feelings of inadequacy she feels during periods of time where she’s “malfunctioning” are skimmed over, and again is talked about more by other people than by her. Once her identity crisis happens, any scene she has apart from Axel and Roxas either still works them in somehow (they are consistently her biggest motivations in her own personal conflict, the only reason she’s conflicted about her existence is because of them since they give her a reason to exist) or just focuses on her freaking out about the fact that she’s a replica whose personality was formed based on the fragmented memories of another person that leaked into Xion through that person’s Nobody, which makes her less fit to exist than those who aren’t meant to exist. Yeah, totally a regular human emotional arc right there!  Can’t count the number of times in the history of the human species that people have had to go through that!

Kairi in KH and Namine in COM actually felt like human beings with emotional arcs in spite of their extraordinary circumstances. Xion feels more like KH2′s Kairi and Namine, where I get the basic trope behind their personalities and development, but can’t really pin them down as three-dimensional and realistic. That’s Xion - the writing for her is very trope-y, not human. The main points of how she was written were three-fold: as a plot device (a means of getting Roxas from point A to point B), as a wish-fulfillment character (she’s basically Tomoko Kanemaki’s self-insert), and as an exploration of a theme (the “What Measure is a Non-Human?” theme that Kanemaki is obsessed with). The humanity being inferred in regards to her being a trans girl case study was not at all intended to be there, and it can only happen because she was sketched thinly enough for it to be applied to her. 

“complains that she’s taking too much space or stealing the spotlight”

I’m sorry, but this is a valid complaint. When it was announced there was going to be a game about Organization XIII set between COM and KH2, everyone was wanting and expecting more development and focus on the members who had already been firmly established, most of whom were in desperate need of such development and focus. So to suddenly have Xion introduced and be the major focus of the game, whether she’s actually on-screen or not, would be very jarring and disappointing. 

What’s worse is all the games she pops in after Days, as not only does it destroy the established rules of canon in regards to her fate, but she ultimately steals the spotlight in an even more harmful way in KH3: Kairi, the original KH girl, who had been receiving build-up for YEARS as a Keyblade-wielding Guardian of Light, is literally screwed out of this role in favor of Xion, her Mary Sue copycat whom no-one asked for to begin with and whom many people weren’t keen on having return, as not only did it destroy the main thing she had going for her (her nature as a tragic character) but it robbed Kairi of development and focus that, again, she was in desperate need of. But Xion got over 30 more votes than Kairi in a Japanese popularity poll, so...priorities?

“Xion’s story is about the right to define her own existence, to live as her own true self, etc.”

No, that’s not what Xion’s story was about. It was about her learning that she had no right to her existence because it was actively hurting the existences of others, including her best friends’, and that the right thing to do is to disappear. I take some issue with how it played out (mainly that Xion accepts this way too easily and becomes a “Too Good For This Sinful Earth” type who does the right thing for the sake of her friends even when a more angry, selfish and conflicted Xion would’ve been more engaging and human, and that Riku is OOC in his treatment of her considering his treatment of Roxas), it was still incredibly tragic and it owned that. So for that tragic story to be undone in favor of a “lol, just kidding, Xion can exist and get a happy ending with her friends after all, no tragedy here!” way of appeasing the fans who called foul and raised a stink about it (especially in Japan) will never sit right with me, especially when the writing doesn’t even TRY to justify it. It just happens for the sake of it.

“It has a lot to do with the fact that Xion is a young girl whose story expects us to genuinely empathize with her”

OK, here’s a tip: it is rarely EVER a good idea to expect your audience to all feel a certain way toward something and try to force that reaction. “Death of the Author” is a thing, which is why you’re best not taking sides or playing favorites when making a story, you’re better off putting your personal feelings aside and just letting things play out, allowing people in the audience to make up their own mind. When the story pushes for the audience to genuinely empathize with Xion, with lines by others such as “poor Xion!”, then it’s not surprising that the opposite effect happens: some fans don’t like or empathize with her because they resent the hamfisted attempts at being told that they should. 

“That’s like saying Kairi didn’t matter in KH1 because Sora forgot her in COM”

That’s a false equivalence if I ever saw one. KH came out before COM, and Sora didn’t forget her so much as she was replaced by someone else, Namine, in his memory, which drove that story’s conflict. Its resolution was Sora learning the truth and remembering Kairi again. Kairi is still a factor in COM, a very important factor at that. Days came out after KH2, where there isn’t even a hint of Xion, she is not a factor in that game because she wasn’t invented yet. Sure, Xion matters to Days, but that mattering doesn’t feel like it amounts to much when she isn’t seen, heard from or mentioned for the entirety of the game it was leading up to.

“But so what?”

So, it feels incredibly unnatural to have a character jammed into a pre-existing timeframe and pre-existing dynamic prior to KH2, with mass amnesia being used as a plot device to explain away why she wasn’t present in any way in KH2, only for every game taking place after KH2 (and thus after Days was made) to suddenly start featuring Xion again, with the mass amnesia plot device being casually discarded. What’s worse is how canon rules were obliterated so that Xion could return in KH3 and reverse the tragedy element that made her story effective to begin with, at the expense of characters like Kairi who have been around longer than Xion and who desperately needed exposure more than Xion. Seriously, in addition to the point I already raised about Xion taking Kairi’s place, just think about this: characters that were created as a trio, Sora, Riku and Kairi, are no longer a trio, just the duo of Sora and Riku, while characters that were created as a duo, Roxas and Axel, are now a trio thanks to Xion. It feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who liked Kairi and the Destiny Trio, and it’s a big reason as to why Xion’s inclusion in the series feels like a mistake to those fans and thus why she’s such an off-putting character to them.

The only statements made here that I agree with is that Xion sadly wouldn’t have gotten as much hate if she was a badass, older male character, that her being forgotten due to memory magic isn’t really a mark against her since that’s a cheap plot device that happens to a lot of characters in the series, and that you can’t really do the story of 358/2 Days without her since she’s so integral to it...but on that note, the story of 358/2 Days didn’t need to happen. The KH series during its early days was meant to be Sora, Donald and Goofy’s story, so leaving the period of time where they were asleep a blank made perfect sense. We never needed to know about Roxas’ time in the Organization beyond what was said and shown in KH2, and to this day I honestly wish we hadn’t.  In game form, anyway. The manga is great, it can stay!

[lovingmyselfishard]

TERFS and SWERFS are not Feminists

I just got into it with someone on my FB a day or so ago over this statement.  She accused me of “No True Scotsman”-ing.  

I tried to explain to her why I wasn’t and what I meant by that statement. 

If the tenets of your feminism are to actively cause harm to other women, you are not, in fact, a feminist.  (Yes, white feminism is full of fuck ups, but this is not the post where I go off on us not having learned any better in two fucking centuries, fellow white person feminists pull your fucking heads out.  I’ll get there later.)

Anyone can call themselves a feminist, and I can’t stop you.  I am not, in spite of what a bunch of gamer dudes and male comics fans seem to think, the word police.  I cannot take away your birthday or Christmas for grossly abusing words.  

What I can do is lay out that if your feminism actively seeks to harm other women, it is not feminism.  

If your feminism relies on gender essentialism and makes you ally with people who seek to abrogate women’s rights in the name of fucking over other women, it is not feminism.  

Trans Women are women.  

(Female-identified) Sex workers are women. 

But, LovingMyselfIsHard, you don’t like fundamentalists or Quiverfull ladies, isn’t this the same thing?

No, because while I do not agree with the choices of women who decide to belong to the Quiverfull movement or fundamentalist churches, they made those choices, probably under varying degrees of duress, but that is also not my decision to make for them. When they ask for help, I will help them, if they want to live like that, I will let them be.  

Because feminism is about supporting other women in their choices and giving women the power to survive and thrive, and be treated as the equals to men.  

The difference between me and TERFS and SWERFS is that I would never push to pass laws telling women who they are, how they must identify, what they must do, and if they even qualify as women. 

That last part is so much bullshit.  

Trans Women are women, and if you do not agree, f you support people who purposely out Trans girls and women, leading to harm and abuse, if you advocate jailing sex workers for their own good or cutting off their means of supporting themselves because you find it icky, GTFO.  

You heard.  You and I, we got nothing to talk about. 

Once a year I post on my FB, “If you hold beliefs that prevent you from treating other human beings as human beings, see yourself out. We have nothing to talk about.”

I don’t care what “phobia” or -ism you’ve got that you think forces you to be an asshole to people who are just trying to live their lives, I don’t want it.  I don’t want to have to defend my friends from your bigotry.  

That goes double for “religious” beliefs or what the fuck ever.  

I’m gonna leave the argument on TERFS with Trans Women are women, and if you’re too bigoted or blinded by the patriarchy to see that, you aren’t a fucking feminist.  

Now, onto SWERFS.  

“But sex work is a choice.” 

Yes, it is.  It is a valid choice.  I don’t care what the laws say, or your screwed up morality thinks, sex work is work.  It is work to put out for someone you may not like or be attracted to.  It is work to promote yourself, and figure out how to do it in ways that won’t get your ass arrested.  And it is only more dangerous than most other types of work by virtue of the fact that they can’t call the cops or report a creeper to HR.  

Even the legal types of sex work come with these risks because of assholes like you who think you can’t rape a whore, or that strippers and cam girls are asking for it.  

IF you feel this way, GTFO.  We have nothing more to say to each other. 

If your argument boils down to “It’s demeaning,” you have obviously never worked service industry or in an office in a support position.  Which, by the way, is no guarantee that you can get help when you’re being abused or sexually harassed.  Let me tell you about the 8 years I spent working for a psychopath who yelled at me and made cry just about every day. The sexual harassment from him and his cronies.  And it was art the height of the recession, so I’d make it to second and third rounds of interviews to be told I either had to accept a level of pay that would not support me and my husband or stick with my shitty, but relatively well-paying job with great benefits.  

I mean, I had good benefits, so at least the anti-anxiety meds I took almost daily to deal with that asshole were covered, right?

Yeah, well, until Obamacare, Sex Workers didn’t get health insurance.  

Any job can be demeaning.  In retail or service industry you are dealing with increasing numbers of entitled assholes who never worked those jobs and do not get how awful they can be when people treat you like furniture.  In office jobs, particularly as women, we’re often slighted, asked to do emotional labor for the dudes in the office, other people take credit for our ideas and work, ignore us in meetings, and relegate the “housework” like taking care of the coffee and shit to us, because female-identified.  

I have a friend who is a sex worker, and she’s told me that she felt a million times more humiliated on a daily basis when she worked in offices, than she does as a sex worker.  

And I completely understand that.  

So let me reiterate for those of you at the back of the room. 

If your feminism is predicated on attacking, harming, or infantilizing other women, you are not a feminist. 

Trans Women are Women. 

Sex Work is Work. 

And you’re an asshole. 

We good?

Edited to add:  I also support non-binary folks, and genderqueer folks, and if you don’t like that, there are so many offs you can fuck.  

[knightofbalance-13]

Speaking Over LGBT People: Totally Okay! (Sarcasm)

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/163784145881/is-anyone-else-really-afraid-vol-5-lgbt-rep

What a bunch of fuck ups.

First, let’s do Fairy Wizard AKA the pseudo intellectual who said RT should have super buff characters because realistic then said RT should have super fate characters because unrealistic.

Honestly, I have very little hope of rwby ever getting ANY lgbtq+ rep, much less anything meaningful. Time and time again the writers had countless opportunities to do so, all of which were passed up. I would be surprised if this volume got anything more than volume 3 did  (though it’s more likely we’ll get nothing like always). As far as which characters end up being queer is concerned, RT have written themselves in a corner of their own design. If they confirm BB then people will be mad at them for “sacrificing artistic integrity to satisfy fans” (as if rwby has any of that left) and if they *don’t* confirm BB or actively make it a canon notp then people will riot at the queerbaiting (and there’s been A LOT of that in rwby, especially considering the bmblb controversy/clusterfuck).

No actually, you people will be absolutely obnoxious about it if there is any LGBT character (not Bumbleby which, surprise, isn’t the only route for making an LGBT character), demand more and more while bitching about every straight couple in the show, screech homophobia whenever things don’t go exactly your way while l also claiming to speak for every LGBT person as if they are a hivemind, which is ACTUALLY homophobic as fuck.

The only people who pushed themselves into a corner is YOU people: Either it doesn’t happen because you were so fucking toxic about the subject and then blame RT, leading them to stop interacting with fans or outright be spiteful towards them. Or it does happen, you bitch about how you didn’t get it immediately or some equally stupid with the same reaction. Everyone blames the LGBT community for it further discourages diversity while you ruined the show because you are THAT insecure about yourselves that everything in life must mirror you or bow to your will. Either way, you look worse and your situation gets worse. Although I doubt you acre since this lets you play victim.

So if the character never shows up: you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Either way, if their takeaway is “gee we should have never included this character so let’s kill them off” then that would be THEIR fault for misreading and mishandling the situation, NOT the fans’. Personally I think that’s highly unlikely to happen, but the fact that this is considered a concern is quite telling of RT’s history of lgbtq+ rep and the treatment of its queer characters.

“If their takeaway is that I should have never gotten into a relationship with this person, it’s THEIR fault for misreading and mishandling the situation, not the abuser.”

That’s what you sound like, you victim blaming fuckwad. They never said WHEN the character was coming, MONTY made the promise on a whim so they have no obligation to keep it and with all the shit you’ve given them: They have EVERY right to never write the character. You sound like a fucking abuser blaming your partner for your actions. That is how irredeemable your actions are.

Ultimately I wouldn’t feel sorry for RT and you probably shouldn’t either. They kinda brought this whole thing on themselves and it’s time they realised that baiting people for years while making homophobic jokes in your other shows has consequences.

“You spoke out against me while I was hitting you for years so you deserve this.”

Yeah, keep victim blaming. That doesn’t make you look bad at all.

Next we got this Santaclausindian person:

Well, they said there would be queer rep, than proceded to not plant the seeds for one at all. Of course it will be bad. They had four seasons to do it. Without even subtle hints, any gayness will feel shoehorned in.Â

Didn’t you people say :you don’y need to plant the seeds: Just do it?” I guess it doesn’t apply as a defense, only an attack.

If they go with the wlw roote, which is the most likely, seeing how the show is supposed to be about the girls, they can either make one of the big ones queer, or a side character or even a one-shot. Now the latter won’t be enough at this point, maybe if they never promised it, but after 5 years of nothing, I don’t think they can get away with throwing a bone.Â

YOU all are the ones insulting them and calling them bigots for not having an LGBT character in a show that BARELY has an romance. YOU all are the ones who attacked Arryn and drove her away. YOU all are the ones trying to label the CRWBY as every form of bigot you can think of. YOU all are the ones being homophobic by thinking LGBT people are so weak and fragile they can’t take a joke. YOU all are the ones attacking LGBT people for not agreeing with you. YOU all are the ones harassing people. YOU all are the ones who cant criticism. You don’t deserve a bone, in any sense of the word. You all deserve jackshit, AT BEST.

And finally we have Dudeblade AKA the straight guy who thinks he knows the LGBT community better than ACTUAL LGBT people.

They had their chance.

They had so many chances to introduce or reveal a character to be LGBT+.

And you had your chance to not be a terrible human being, you all did. But not only did you waste it completely, you insist that everyone else around you is wrong, that no one but people who act and think like you deserve respect. AKA Psychopathy.

But what do they do instead? - They decide to let a song (somehow) slip by that all but says that “this couple will get together.” and say that “it’s not canon.”

Boo. Fucking. Hoo. Your ship didn’t get confirmed, never mind the fact that this EXACT same thing happened with Black Sun Shippers and yet you never said a word so it’s only wrong when it negatively affects you AKA the exact opposite of equality. Not to mention you act like the only way for there to be an LGBT couple is Bumbleby, ignoring bisexuals, gay men, pansexuals, asexuals and trans people who aren’t attracted to the same gender. And mind you, you act like you know the community better than an ACTUAL LGBT person who called you out on your bullshit, you suicide baited them and then acted like it was their fault.

“It’s not the right time yet.” - Falls apart when you have let so many opportunities slip by.

So many that you can’t name any.

“We want it to feel natural.” - So, you’re saying that you don’t consider it to be natural to begin with. Good to know.

Ah eyes, not like they took their sweet ass time with Renora, the only hetero ship that is even close to confirmed. Not toemntion the fact that you think that heterosexuality isn’t natural, mr. “heterosexuality is a cliché.”

“We aren’t good at writing romance.” - Explain Renora, Arkos, Black Sun, Iceberg, and Qrow in general. Or are those exceptions?

Dubious, Sunk, hasn’t happened, didn’t happen and I counter you with the background guy holding up a picture of Sun’s abs. 

If there’s backlash, well…

No, shut up. Stop talking. You obviously don’t understand what logic is so I suggest you stop.

You Dudeblade have crossed so many lines, calling CRWBY every offensive term in the book, using Monty, Shane, Sheena, and Arryn to attack them then when Arryn showed a tweet that contradicted you, you tried dismissing it then using it for yourself. You delete criticism and call everyone who disagrees with you whiteknights. You attack LGBT people and claim to know more about their sexuality than them because you’re a fucking yuri fan. You lie, cheat and misinform just to create insults, you try apply criticism against you suing defenses against RT then don’t follow them a bit as if you are somehow better than everyone else, you actively set back equality for not just LGBT people but for races and genders by being homophobic AND heterophobic, racist and sexist as fuck and so much more.

By the end of this: YOU will be the ones with the backlash. YOU will continue your bullshit and people will see your shit, they will see that you were using them, they will see that you don’t actually acre and how monstrous you truly are. They will see that you used people, kept them hostage, refsed to see yourself in the mirror, cared only about yourself and harmed people’s lives. And here’s a preview of YOUR backlash.

[thedeadflag]

So, I'm reading this fic, a HP AU of The 100, and I'm not that far into it, but so far it's been very good, and then there's a fight between Raven, a muggle born, and Fox, a pure blood, because Raven keeps ranting about the purebloods awfulness, which I totally agree with her, in a general way, as if every pureblood is like that and it hurts Fox, because she is a pureblood and she's not like that, and Raven knows that she isn't, but she still talks in general terms about purebloods and (1/?)

like, I understand and agree with what she means, but, being myself a white man who sees a lot of generalization on tumblr about things white men do, I understand how it can hurt your feelings to be lumped together with people you disagree with, and so I don’t think Fox is wrong on this matter, but then Raven gets angry, because it’s not like Fox suffers any restrictions or reproaches from society, while Raven, because she is muggleborn has to deal with a lot of shit from purebloods and (2/?)

and Raven says a lot of hurtful, mean things, saying that purebloods are a bunch o inbreds and that, basically, Fox should just suck it up, because there are people, the muggleborns, that are persecuted just because they weren’t bred, and like, I understand Raven, I do, some purebloods can be downright disgusting, but like, saying this thing to your friend just because she is a pureblood just, to me, feels a little too much like being discriminated for being muggleborn, and I guess (¾)

what I’m asking is, what do you think on this matter, seeing that it can be translated to current issues, issues of color, religion, sexuality, gender. (4/4)

Okay, so this is going to be long, because there’s some important lessons here on interacting with marginalized people.

Muggle-born folks are, within the context of the magical world in the Harry Potter Universe, an oppressed group. That’s just facts. There’s purebloods, halfbloods, and then muggle-born. Only thing deemed worse in some ways is a Squib, due to being from magical parents but lacking magical prowess, who are considered traitors to their blood, the purity of their people. Squibs put the ‘natural superiority’ of their people (or, at least, the argument of superiority) at risk by not being magical, and thus not carrying their people’s power that’s used to prop up their standing in society as superior to halfbloods and especially muggle-born folks

This sets up a pretty easy race/ethnicity allegory (that is also inherently infused with classism) from what I’ve seen, heard, and read in the books (I made it partway through the books, watched all the films, have a large number of HP fanatic friends).

Which means Raven can talk shit about purebloods all she wants if she’s muggle-born in that story. Maybe it might be a little mean of her sometimes depending on her word choice if she’s directing it at Fox, but honestly, marginalized people need to be able to vent their hurt and anger and frustration in order to be healthy. It’s a legitimate need that’s backed up by decades of science. Our friends and allies need to understand this and not take it personally.

Like, even remarks like “They’re all inbred!”, which might seem to be an insult against purebloods, would really just be a commentary on how purebloods aggressively discriminate and wield their power to the point where even in their relationships, only other purebloods are good enough, pure enough, valuable enough, worthy enough to be their partners (or sometimes even just their friends). It’s letting out anger that you and your people are so thoroughly deemed worthless and lesser-than. it’s turning the discrimination she faces into an attack to try and reclaim the violence done to her people. 

Marginalized groups tend to discuss their oppression at a social level, not an individual level, since discussing things like racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. at an individual level basically never accomplishes anything except maybe, at best, a good venting session about a single person who upset them. These are social processes. They attack whole groups of people, not individuals, and by default, conversations and material about them will be on a social level unless explicitly noted otherwise.

When someone says, for instance (and to make this simple and easy for me to explain from my pov), that all cis people are transphobic, we’re saying intent does not matter, because society weaponizes cis people against trans people whether you’re aware of it or not, and usually promotes you being unaware of it (on top of all the largely invisible privileges that status offers). It doesn’t matter if someone wanted to hurt us, it just matters that we were hurt. Everyone’s raised in a thoroughly transphobic society, one cis people benefit from by being cis, and one where any inactivity or indifference or neutral stance on transphobia is, in effect, helping the reproduction of that oppression, because we do not live in a neutral society…we live in a society that actively oppresses large amounts of people in varying ways, and so any decision not to fight that oppression, not to attack the benefits cis folks gain from that oppression, is essentially a decision to permit that oppression. The marginalized, after all, are not responsible for overcoming their oppression…that’s the oppressing class’ responsibility, to work with the marginalized to dismantle those structures.

Society conditions us with thoughts and beliefs about marginalized peoples and buries them in our ‘common sense’ to be used via gut reactions, and unchallenged ‘truths’. Everyone, everyone needs to put in the work to unlearn these. It’s more visible for marginalized folks, since our oppressions tend to stand out when they’re directed at us, but it’s more important for those in power to put in the work to unlearn. That can be hard if they might not actually see themselves reproducing harm, or clearly recognize what is or isn’t harmful.

This is much larger than individual people. None of this is solely a single individual’s responsibility, but it is the responsibility of categories of people. Like, if you’re white, it’s your responsibility to be active in unlearning racism, and seeking out poc voices to manage that. Same deal for for privileged folks in relation to marginalized folks across just about any axis. If you’re not putting in the work, you’re effectively helping retain the status quo, and it’s important to be mindful of that. It’s important that folks do what they can, not just what they’re comfortable with, not just some notion of ‘if I treat everyone equally, I’m fine’ because that’s a non-solution, and it’s rarely that folks will end up treating everyone equally anyways, since they won’t have assessed the biases and stigmas guiding their common sense and instincts and gut reactions.

Cis folks can be visibly nice and still contribute to our oppression and harm us in ways they may or may not be unaware of. Malicious intent is not required for something to be transphobic, but even if it WAS, it’s very easy to attribute malicious intent to society as a whole, given it’s been operating a genocide against trans people for ages.

Far too often, when we vent about transphobia to our friends and family, we eventually experience hostility and aggression from them, and they experience burnout. Because I know my friends wouldn’t like me complaining a dozen plus times a day about varying instances of transphobia I face. Maybe a small handful every few days, but eventually I get the “Jeez, stop being so negative/sensitive/etc.” or the “well, I’m not like that!” remarks. Or, if I’m venting to coworkers, i could get complaints to my manager. Or my family members would stop picking up the phone when I call them, and/or stop answering when i text them. I, as well as well over a hundred trans folks I’ve known personally, have experienced being cut off from our social supports (whether temporarily or permanently) for trying to get support over the transphobia we face. Generally, people don’t want to hear about it, not on blast, not all the time, not every day for months and months, even though that’s our reality, and we need help managing that reality. Folks don’t want to hear it. And while it’s nice to feel validated by our local, in-person trans friends, sometimes that negativity can be draining on our relations with them. This is why having multiple outlets is good, and why we need good allies who know not to take it personally.

This is because stress is far more dangerous when it’s routine and relentless…major individual stress events like a death in the family can be difficult but there’s usually some form of supports in place to help manage that. But dealing with a dozen instances of minor to moderate stressors daily, ones that generally will not cease? That tends to have a more significantly negative impact on a person’s mental and physical health, especially since there’s rarely any support resources in place to help people deal with those. And those stressors, combined with social stigmas, and high rates of poverty, and high rates of unemployment and homelessness, and high rates of medical discrimination, tends to lead to us attempting suicide. These are the main reasons why 43+% of trans people have attempted suicide at least once (and that’s honestly a very conservative number). Not being permitted to manage our stress and pain without consequence is a huge reason for that. We’re attacked for expressing our pain, constantly, and that hurts.

Because when trans people vent “I fucking hate cis people!” they’re not thinking of each and every individual cis person alive, so it would be wrong to take such a statement personally. They’re likely speaking of the cis people that have harmed them recently, and how they wield transphobia against them. Because let me tell you, as a trans woman who has worked retail in numerous public positions, eventually, you just start to forget their faces. Too exhausting to be angry at each of them, and it’s much easier to just get upset at society for weaponizing cis folks against us, and use ‘cis people’ as shorthand, a form of metonymy, which is commonly used all across society in similar ways. And since the category of cis people is used to wield transphobia against us (remember transphobia exists at the social level first and foremost), it is logical for us to use metonymy. Easier than listing out the gritty details of each instance, each person involved, each form of transphobia, etc. When I’d come home from work and close the door, and loudly vent “UGH! FUCKING CIS PEOPLE I SWEAR TO GOD” my roommate would (if he was home) toss me a gummy worm and nod sagely, asking if the cis were at it again. 

He, a cis dude, knew I wasn’t raging about him. He was well aware I was raging at all the cis people who wielded transphobia against me while I was away. Much in the way that when a friend of mine would slump down beside me after a failed date and complain about how “men are jerks”, I’d understand that she was not, in fact, attacking my best friend, who is a man, and a very good person. She was using hyperbole as a form of emotional expression. Just like someone who says “I hate litterers” does not in fact hate all people in the world who have littered, they are likely upset that littering is such a common, destructive thing that folks don’t really care much about. Hyperbole. Used all the time.

It’s healthy for us to do this. It’s important we have the ability to do this unrestricted, and without being attacked for it. it’s important that our allies jump through trans 101 hoops and recognize that when we vent like this, it’s not a personal attack.

It’s not necessarily actual hatred against cis people. Usually just anger, and we’re allowed to be angry when cis people harm us on the daily and rarely care to change what they’re doing or how they think of us. We’re allowed to express that anger, and we shouldn’t be attacked for it. Allies wouldn’t attack us for it, they’d understand it.

Recognize that this is bigger than your feelings, it’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than any single one of us. Recognize that we can be generally good people but still participate in widespread oppression. Recognize that you have a long way to go, and that’s okay, because so does everyone else.

The Fox in this story should work at understanding this dynamic better and getting past her initial defensive reactions, because no one’s attacking her, and it’s not personal

[ourinnergalaxy-blog]

Child Abuse Chit Chat 6/1/2018

Me and my two younger sisters are together in the house tonight. Our parents semi-recently got back together nearly divorcing after our father cheated on our mom and moved out for a few months. While a lot of the things he did were very deeply hurtful towards our mom, there were some things said that were specifically against my sisters. I was out in Chicago at the time, so I wasn’t there for the whole exchange (but you best believe I would have been if I could have). So, since I’ve been back, we’ve all been talking kind of on and off about some of the crappy things our father has done to us all.

Tonight, since we were all together, we just sat and talked for a while about it. Sometimes we’d jump to other topics, but it seemed like collectively... all three of us really wanted to just... make sure this was all real. Make sure we were all on the same page with things.

It’s been... enlightening.

Specifically, today, my middle sister brought up an even I remember vividly: the time my father pretended to self harm in front of me. I remember being at the computer desk which is in a corner of our living room, and he sat in a chair in front of me so there was no escape. I was actually literally cornered. I personally do not remember what we spoke about. I remember being upset, and him being upset. Then I remember him pulling out a knife. And I remember being scared. VERY scared. I remember leaning back in my chair, but subtly so that he wouldn’t know I was trying to escape. And I remember he cut himself on his wrist just below his watch. I cried hysterically. There was so much blood. Mom came downstairs and told him to leave me alone, and I ran upstairs. That is all I remember. I don’t remember what came before or what happened after. But my sister was able to fill in the blanks. She told me that what we were talking about was the fact that I’d been suicidal at the time. And that after it happened, I rushed upstairs and told her about it because she was worried about why I was sobbing. She said I even wrote about it in a diary. She was even able to place that this had happened while I was in 11th grade or 12th grade. But, sometime after I’d been diagnosed with depression. 

Honestly, this shit is surreal. I can’t believe I didn’t remember that, but I also can’t believe she did. She and I both remember that mom told us it was fake blood. She and I both remember that she would always make excuses for him. 

She helped me remember something else too: it was scary to ask him if we could do things. Even if it was things we didn’t NEED him for, like going to play outside. I remember it now. It was a gamble. A risk. All we wanted to do was go outside and play with our friends, and we had to walk on eggshells to do it. He would yell for no reason. I remember it now. I remember lurking in the doorway of his darkened bedroom. Like the entrance to an evil lair or a final boss. Foreboding and sinister. Illuminated sometimes only by the TV or laptop screens with a harsh white light. I remember I never stepped all the way inside, unless he was watching cartoons. It was easier to talk to him if he was watching superhero cartoons or something like that. But a lot of the time, we wouldn’t go inside. We’d call in and ask. We’d bribe, saying we’d finished washing the dishes or doing our homework. We’d promise to be safe and not go too far (we never did go anywhere away from the street anyway and he knew that). But some days were not the right days. It required nothing on his part. He didn’t need to watch us or be outside with us. All we wanted was permission. And some days all we got was shouted at. Just for asking.

I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. I can’t believe I forgot about that... I know I have to write this down now so I don’t forget again. 

We also talked about how he’d humiliate us. How he still does some days. I remember making a joke too loudly and being humiliated in front of my friends or boyfriends for being loud. I remember falling silent and bitter, refusing to contribute further to the conversation. And I remember him never seeming to care. He wouldn’t call me out for being quiet. Just for being loud.

I also remember saying “I don’t know” a lot. Why didn’t I do my homework? I don’t know. Why didn’t I turn in the project? I don’t know. Why did I do this thing or that thing? I don’t know. I remember mom and father hated it. They hated that I didn’t know. And I remember them asking WHY I didn’t know and I remember not being able to EXPLAIN why.

Holy shit. 

My friends said it’d be good to talk to my sisters about this stuff, and I agreed. Like, of course it’d be good to kind of just... commiserate together or something. I didn’t realize that I’d actually learn something. Unearth these memories like this. I forgot how bad it was.

Holy shit, this is why I spent so long... being mad at myself for having depression. I had a good childhood, I’d say to myself. Nothing was wrong. Everything was fine. Why am I so sad? 

NO. Things WEREN’T fine. They were NEVER fine!!! My father hurt me mentally and emotionally for years and I forgot. I had to forget, I imagine. He would humiliate me, shame me, destroy my property, manipulate me, call me names. He tried to STOP me from going to therapy when we all found out I was suicidal! He tried to STOP me from taking anti-depressants after I started therapy. He tried to halt any sort of recovery I was striving for. Luckily, my mom vouched for me and insisted this was the best way to go. But... but mom... you needed to stop him from hurting me... you needed to stop him from abusing me and you didn’t... you didn’t stop him. You LET him do this to me AND to my sisters. You let ME pick up the pieces when my middle sister got screamed at for no good reason. You let me STAND THERE while my father SHOUTED AT ME WHILE HE WAS FUCKING NAKED LIKE THAT WAS AT ALL OKAY. YOU let me SUFFER and you’d only swoop in when YOU thought it had gone too far. Your definition of “too far” was off, mom. You let our abuser back into our home. You let him promise he’d change, but he hasn’t, mom. AND YOU KNOW IT! I KNOW YOU KNOW IT! That’s why you’ve been SO EAGER to do this little anniversary getaway. That’s why you’ve been so desperate to just get out of the house and be alone with him. You know nothing has changed. You know he’s abusive and vile. You know he’s manipulative and cruel. You know he needs to be in fucking therapy. And you let him back in. You just let him back in and I just... I wish I’d never had to come back here. The ONLY reason I’m happy to be back is that now my youngest sister doesn’t have to suffer alone anymore. I can be there for her like I used to be for my middle sister.

God I’m scared. I’m so fucking scared. No wonder Iyakuum’s been here this whole time. No wonder people are active. No wonder everything’s been feeling so weird and different. They feel they need to protect me. We’re back with our abusers. We have to protect ourselves and we have to protect our mom and we have to protect our youngest sister. Fuck... It just... it makes so much more sense now... I knew things weren’t great. I definitely knew that after digging through a lot of the stuff I could remember on my own. But with this... Now I know. 

Now I know for sure this has been happening my whole life. A big reason I was resisting the DID or OSDD self exploration was that I didn’t think I had enough trauma. Or, more accurately, I didn’t think I’d had enough trauma EARLY enough. But now I know. I know this has been here always. He hasn’t changed. He’s always been like this. I remember now. 

Another thing my middle sister said was that she remembers me never being very feminine. Which is... really validating, actually. Because when I tried to explain being non-binary to mom, she insisted that I’d always loved wearing dresses and doing girly things when I told her that I didn’t. Maybe she didn’t realize how much I hated those terrible Easter dresses. Maybe she was gaslighting me to make me think I’d been more girly than I remember. I don’t... think it was intentional. At least, I want to think she actually believed I was more of a traditional girl than I thought I was. I don’t want to think she purposefully tried to stop me from being myself. Regardless, I’m having a hard time looking at her the same. She’s a wonderful woman. A sweet angel of a person. And she allowed my abuser to hurt me and her other two children. She’s kind and forgiving, and she doesn’t know when to say enough is enough. I want to forgive her so badly. I want to say that she was just as scared as I was. But I’m too smart for that. I know she could have and should have done something for me. She could have and should have protected me. She could have and should have realized what was happening to me.

I remember my father making every problem I had about HIM. I had depression? Ohhh nooo, I’m sooo sorry! I should have known! I should have seen the signs!! YEAH. YOU SHOULD HAVE. BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO COMFORT YOU NOW AND TELL YOU ITS OKAY THAT YOU DIDN’T. I HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO BE ANGRY. 

MY FURY IS RIGHTEOUS AND ITS MINE AND YOU CAN’T TAKE IT FROM ME!!!

I remember now. I remember how much you hurt us. Who took the brunt of it? Me? Iyakuum? Brenig? Tequo? Someone else? Who stood there when we were told not to cry or he’d “give [us] a reason to cry”? Who squared our jaw as he shouted at us for something utterly pointless? Who read Harry Potter books instead of studying for tests? Who begged for mom to come into our room when we were a teenager already so she could sing us to sleep when we couldn’t stop crying? Does [DEADNAME] even exist anymore? Hahahahahah DOES SHE? Ooo, I’m ITCHING to know the answer to that one! Is Nym a chosen name for a trans enby kid, or is Nym the name of an alter who’d been pretending for too long? Heck, maybe Nym is just the body itself. Just the vessel we travel in. That might make it easier to just use a single name when out in public so we don’t seem weird. 

AhahahahahahHAHHAAHAHAHA I’m SHAKING. I’m VIBRATING. I feel so ALIVE. I feel like I want to RIP HIM TO SHREDS. Fuck, man. FUCK. This is so fucking real. This is so fucking RAW. Like an open wound. Like a reopening a scab. I can taste metal in my mouth. AHAHAHAHAHA IT... it feels like I want to cry. No. It feels like I want to RUN. It feels like I want to HIT SOMETHING. I want to BREAK something. I want to fucking DIE. Shit. Now I have to trigger warning that too. Hang on... 

GODS do I feel so raw. My body aches. THis body ACHES. It needs to be set free. 

Iyakuum. Please. You write. You can do it on your own, right?

you can do it

Are you scared? 

Our sisters are home, so I guess that complicates things. 

But I trust you. You won’t hurt them, I know you won’t. You know you won’t. Everyone’s asleep. No one will notice. It’ll be okay. 

We’ll try again later, it’s okay. Let’s listen to your music.

[trashmykrp]

Because your dumbasses don't want to get this:

I know who all of you are and before you're going to talk shit about me, how about you look back on tmkrparchive and look at the shit you've been called out for to begin with because you're all here acting a saint, calling me toxic and problematic and whatnot but I'm not the one who refused to role play with Nanami because she was too different from Chaelin. Sounds familiar?

That's one bullshit reason down, claiming my muses are all the same. Explain that one.

Your bitch ass mun got prissy about the fact that Nanami ( Naya, at the time ) wasn't all over his dick and decided to act like normal friends would and should. When I went to the ventblog to ask whether it was just me or you were metagaming or blurring lines, everyone pointed out it was the latter. Not to mention that your BTS muse only dates one specific member while mine is willing to date anyone regardless of gender ( that's something that she still needs to figure out, though ). So get lost.

The other one, who sent in about me saying that I don't believe in nonbinary - that's my mistake and I do sincerely apologise for it because it's wrong. Some time ago, I asked an old friend of mine, what the term nonbinary meant and they said it very simple that nonbinary means agender. I've been always been very supportive of the LGBT community since I'm part of it but one thing I don't believe in is having no gender. So, to correct myself here: I don't believe in being agender. You're either male, female or both. You can fluctuate between either, you can be trans, you can be cis, but you have a gender. And the one who sent this in is the only person I've ever talked to about this, so hello to you, too.

Back to the fucking point.

I'm not denying that I talk to BTS face claims. I talk to many, but as I mentioned before ( and me being one of those people ), friends with male muses have face claimed to either ( and mostly ) Jungkooks and Jimins. I've known three Wonhos throughout four different muses, both male and female muses, two of which are now BTS face claims. I've known EXO face claims, and a grand majority are now Taehyungs and Jimins, those whom I still talk to. But there's also been BTS face claims who've turned to other faces or just flat out became female muses.

BTS is an appealing group to pick from because they're popular as hell. I have three BTS muses myself so there's no need for me to chase after anyone.

So with that said, Nanami ( nor me, I'm a 2NE1 stan before anything else ) isn't actively going out to look for them. She talks to them lessthan she talks to her female friends, the only exception being a Yoongi and a Jooyoung but as you can see, the latter isn't even a BTS muse to start with.

I'm not hiding anything. I don't have anything to hide. I've been called a face chaser back in the day when I was a demigod OC for face chasing after Yukwon when my muse talked to ONE, which was an OOC friend of mine anyway and everything was plotted. This is the same shit all over again, except now you're all using the fact that BTS face claims are everywhere to stamp "face chaser" on me.

A list of people Nami talks to every day ( some not often in the day because of time zone issues ):

Yoongi FC

Jooyoung FC

Sulli FC

Hyejeong FC

Lalisa FC

Hyosung FC

Yoona FC

Hyeri FC

I think that that proves enough, doesn't it?

Moving on.

"Besides all that, you're just a pathetic bitch who thinks it is ok to manipulate everyone in the worst kind of ways."

You must be a part of OMG, how were the Liar Liar promotions?

Chae was never over BTS FCs, she was that mother figure to everyone she talked to save for the Seokjin she dated and the muse that I addressed in the first paragraphs but she started feeling for him after seven fucking months, not 2 days like all of you. But issues arrived when this BTS, particularly Seokjin, hoarder decided it was a good idea to act a shady bitch behind her back. 

How did I manipulate anyone into anything ever? Something most of you don't seem to know is that I'm a "neutral" person. We can be best friends, nice and all, I'll defend you when you're right but I'll call you out on your bullshit when you're wrong. I'll coddle you when you've been harmed unrightfully so but I'm going to slap some sense into you if you're the one hurting a person without reason.

I've done wrong shit that I feel bad for, and the worst I did was towards Sam which I do want to apologise for but someone's too busy being petty to even let me. I have pride but when I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

But like that, if our muses don't talk, regardless of your face claim, I'll delete you. I've done it before, to FRIENDS, so of course I'll do it to plain strangers even if you're whoever I'm biasing in BTS at that moment. I don't need numbers.

All in all, I don't know what part of me is toxic in this day ( if I've ever been something, it's problematic, back when I was in Chrome Hearts/Dirty Sins/Bansin and a little while after in 2014 when I switched to CL being semi-au and I had no clue who the fuck BTS was ) because I value people a lot and when I know a muse is worth it, I'll give them one and another chance. I'll try to talk things out with a typist if there's an issue and I'm very upfront when someone does something that seems shady to me or something that makes me uncomfortable, and I want all of them to be the same way.

You all know this yet your crusty asses are here trying to be a hero by "exposing" me of shit you're holding a grudge on. Hit me up, let me know and see if we can just live in peace because honestly, I don't have a problem with anyone that much and the last time I did, that person took it upon themselves to be like, hey, I see you don't like me that much, do you think we can talk about this and find the middle? And bitch, guess what? Now we're friends.

SIDE NOTE: FOR THOSE WHO'RE GONNA ASK FOR "RECEIPTS", I'M WILLING TO GO FIND THEM - but unlike your creepy asses, I didn't know you could save chat logs onto your computer until yesterday and my accounts have been dead for a while. But if I do find them and y'all want them so bad, I'll submit them gladly so you can all shut the fuck up once and for all.

Have a nice fucking day.