#and will not engage with hatred

[whitesunlars]

there are two fundamental truths about what's happening right now that if you disagree with you don't care about the lives or suffering of the people impacted and you don't actually want peace:

Both Israelis/Jews and Palestinians have history in the same land. They have valid claims to the same land. They deserve safety and dignity in the same land. Neither is going to disappear from the land. Neither is going anywhere.

Neither Israelis/Jews nor Palestinians will have safety and dignity in the land as long as Hamas continues to exist.

you can disagree on how safety and dignity can be achieved. you can disagree on how to defeat Hamas. you can disagree on what a peaceful future would look like. but if you disagree with either of these two points there is hate in your heart.

[mzminola]

Every time I see news of crowds agitating against Israel outside a synagogue, or museum, or Jewish day school full of children, or restaurant, or educational event, and so on in the US, every time my thought is why the fuck aren't you holding this 'protest' at city hall? Or your state legislature? Or your federal reps' offices?

A random Jewish institution in the United States has absolutely zero power to affect the decisions made by Israel's parliament or military. You're not "raising awareness" or "drawing attention to the issue" because the general public of the US is already at least somewhat aware thanks to the news, and Jewish people are in fact one of the groups in the US to be the most fucking aware of what's going on.

If you are upset by US military aid going to Israel, you need to convince your federal representatives to change that. Those reps do not base US military foreign aid policy on random US citizens harassing other US citizens.

If you want the US to provide more civilian relief in the form of food, medicine, or helping refugees come here, you need to convince reps at every level. Can your city partner with a refugee organization to arrange housing? Can your governor arrange scholarships or exchange programs to state universities? Can the feds channel more funds to Doctors Without Borders?

Do a write and call-in campaign. Hold your protest at legislatures. File a petition. Do something to directly express your desires to the elected officials who have a direct say in policy.

We've held protests at city halls and state legislatures and federal buildings for centuries. Why aren't you doing so for this issue?

Why are you macing people attending synagogue? They have no more power over elected officials' choices than you do.

Why are you screaming at schoolchildren? They have less power over elected officials' choices than you do.

Why are you blocking entrance to a museum? Hold a fundraiser to build your own, if you want to educate people so badly!

I know the antisemites don't actually care about US military & foreign aid policy. I know the racists are simply reveling in an excuse to whip up a mob to attack Jews. It's obvious.

But if you really, truly want to help the people of Gaza, you need to stop being part of that hateful mob, and organize your own, real political actions that directly engages with your elected representatives.

[thisgingerhasnosoul]

Do you guys ever see a post that’s so abusive and hateful towards Jews (under the guise of anti-Zionism, of course), that you want to respond and call them out on their gaslighting bullshit, but you know you can’t because if you do they’ll end up harassing and brigading you for the crime of being a (((Zionist)))/Jew they don’t like?

[imaybe5tupid]

Why bother? (Why bother?) It's gonna hurt me. (It's gonna hurt me.) It's gonna kill when- (Why bother!) -You desert me! (Gonna hurt me!)

Set after Nightmare. Laios is reminiscing and contemplating.

[katyspersonal]

me: I do not really understand the hardcore insistence of some Mohg fans/simps that he could not or must not have done any sexual-incestous crime! Not only it is a reasonable version, but also extremely interesting and intriguing to explore how not all victims of oppressive system are good people! Soulsborne is super fitting for fucked up themes and characters, any Mohg is valid and fun including the darkest you can get, right? Extremely messed-up interpretations of Mohg don't THREATEN other fans in any way shape or form!

fandom clowns: *passively-aggressively shun Mohg fans from the circles, attack Fromsoft for """homophobia""" (wtf), confuse acknowledging the event with enjoying the event, will label Mohg fans as insensitive or danger to real SO/incest victims, fear Mohg as an awful scary taboo to bring up in memes compilations or fanart that could obliterate all fun despite him being part of the canon, demand blacklisting anything about him in their clown Discord servers thus making lore chats weird, shame or block people with flattering interpretations for MeDiA iLiTeRaCy uwu, treat hating Mohg as a moral act rather than personal stance and generally cause a lot of hostility in the fandom, ALL because whereas seeing Mohg's SO as canon they then got mad at this canon instead of either swallowing it or move onto another videogame free of this theme*

me:

me: Nevermind, this fandom is chronically incapable of handling the dark themes and think the fandom owes them sanitised experience.

[pumpkinpaix]

library school is an unethical scam and I am 100% serious about that

[mayasaura]

As a former horse girl, I am standing up for horse girl Harrow rights. Sometimes you’re small and from a rural area so you put all your childhood angst into horseback riding. She would have a small black Arabian and they would have a deep unspoken bond, Aragon-style. She deserves a horse bestie.

While I have trouble imagining Harrow going for a hobby that's both athletic and requires a bond of trust with another living being, what are AUs for if not exploring new angles on characters? I support your horse girl Harrow AU. It would good for her, to have a living companion that doesn't understand complex human ideas like war crimes.

[t4tails]

What's wrong with Rocky Horror? Not defending it just genuinely curious

dr frankenfurter is a transmisogynist caricature (look in the notes of that rhps vs bound poll i rbed for more details) and the creator, richard o'brien, has some fucked up things to say on trans women. ill punctuate this with that im not saying rocky horror has no worth, historical or otherwise, but the way people bring up said worth when trans fems dare to bring up their discomfort with the show, is disgusting and just one example of many when it comes to a lot of tme people not actually wanting to discourage transmisogyny in queer scenes.

[black-queen-rising]

The people taking this dialogue as a legitimate “character flaw” or literally just at face value at all and not as a continuation of the blatant disrespect the writers have not just towards Rhaenyra as the heir of twenty years, but towards anything that could even vaguely be construed as “women’s work”, is the most perfect encapsulation of just how entrenched misogyny is into the very heart of our pop culture and how the popularization of fantasy has managed to worsen our societal view of soft power by painting it as not only weak, but frivolously feminine, unimportant, and a waste of time.

Since the beginning of the show the writers have almost exclusively portrayed Rhaenyra as disinterested if not opposed to her role as heir, as a politician, and a woman in power broadly all against the original canon and all glaringly, not to make her look worse or better or likable or incompetent (they do all those things, almost every episode, with however they need her to affect the plot in that given moment because they’re incapable of having the characters drive it organically) because it’s not truly about her at all. It’s simply because they cannot fathom a story where a woman is politically adept and as a result either 1. evil or 2. boring, and that is fundamentally because once again they are so biased and against portraying anything that could even vaguely be construed as women’s work or at all “feminine-coded” in an even neutral-but-interesting way they do for (stereotypically) masculine-coded activities like sword fighting, horse back riding, dragon riding, hunting, archery, not to mention just the concept of the political conversations that drive these stories, let alone an actually positive way.

They have taken a story that at its core was always an indictment of structural misogyny and how it will literally cause societies to tear themselves apart over nothing. But because they decided at the outset they wouldn’t and couldn’t portray the structural part of said misogyny without scaring away their intended audience, and decided instead to base this all around ultimately meaningless ~team discourse~ (because literally everyone meeting their downfall as a result of the consequences of systemic misogyny is the point) their alternate path has been to over-exaggerate and ultimately turn to spectacle every single woman involved’s individual suffering at the expense of everything else about their characters. It doesn’t matter if that was the intent or not the principle result of this adaptation has been the continual disempowerment and degradation of women and their agency combined with an almost impressively voyeuristic portrayal of their suffering.

The women in this show are not allowed to have interests or hobbies unless it’s to serve to make them seem “bad” in someway, whether that be the discomfort around Helaena’s bugs, the total lack of any positive representation of Alicent’s religiosity, or how the women dragon riders are broadly painted as aggressive, violent, and unnatural. I don’t even have specific examples to list from the other “team” because in order to be portrayed as “likable” to the general audience the women of Team Black are barely allowed to have personalities, let alone distinguishing interests or characterizing hobbies. The agency and autonomy they have been stripped of, collectively, from both historical precedent and actual ASoIaF, is almost entirely in their refusal to allow women’s work to be portrayed positively. There are no balls, no sewing circles, no garden parties, no trappings of power and contests of will in the jewels and gowns Rhaenyra must now loathe to be (their deeply narrow and biased view of) “likable”, there are no female mentorships, and no female friendships, and at every chance they have had to portray these things at both a societal and personal level they have chosen to veer away and instead reinforce their suffering. They have removed women’s avenues and halls of power from this story, while making it very clear there are no others that exist in this world, and they cannot participate in the men’s; if they could this story wouldn’t exist. So we are left with a group of people who are supposedly driving this story, who this story is supposedly about, but they are internally and externally isolated, largely removed from the public eye, angry or distressed to be there on the rare occasions they’re present, disempowered, stripped of personal agency and will, and we’re still told they have power. But if we search for it the only logical conclusion is that any power which does not center on how much suffering they have been through, or how much more they may be dealt, is not only gone, it was never there in the first place.

I don’t enjoy Rhaenyra’s quasi domestic abuse any more than Alicent’s visceral sexual shame and I don’t enjoy the infantilization of Helaena’s character any more than the erasure of Rhaena’s and it is deeply concerning how many people look at these decisions, and nod their heads and say “yes, this is realistic, and not only is it realistic it’s, GOOD, because without horrific psychological and physical abuse and ultimately a complete reduction to every female character as peace loving victims of powerful men’s cruel machinations we could never even SEE how misogyny is so damaging.” And the mindset that drives people to claim that those of us who call out how this is, the definition of benevolent misogyny and say we’re crazy, that we can’t see the complexity, that actually we’re the ones somehow falling back into sexist tropes, or asking for a black and white story when instead the black and white has simply become an insultingly reductive view of evil men versus helpless women and when all else fails, accusing us of wanting a boring story because it’s either not focused on gratuitous individual female suffering, or is focused on the kind of political power every single featured female character on both sides of this conflict wielded in the original book instead of evil man conversations and eviler man dragon-battles, is at its heart why we have come to a place in pop culture where one of its most marquee properties displays and embodies these problems so glaringly in the fucking first place.

[popsicle-stick]

What do you imagine the Drac Attack Pack look like a year or two afterwards when they a permanently changed but no longer Going Through It (and may have just possibly changed out of funerary garb)?

circa 1900

i actually can't decide if jon's hair grows back brown or stays grey/white! i think a lot of ppl like the latter, but i do like the symbolism of both.

but yeah! quincey the younger is on the way and all being said they're very happy!!!! and they look it. i think they (especially mina) take pains to make sure they, uh, come across as Normal as possible.

[eosofspades]

okay i meant to make this post forever ago but my personal opinion on why so many people were so dissatisfied with lightfalll (disclaimer: i am not one of these people, i love lightfall SO much), is that lightfall was kind of subjected to a really aggressive marketing campaign.

like, stick with me here, i feel like almost all the lightfall release content (the trailers especially) were so focused on battling the witness, how this battle has been centuries in the making and this is the Second Collapse Finally Finding Us, only for there to be,,, no real resolution. the end was left on such a severe cliffhanger, but not only that, there was NO battle with the witness. the witness didn't even seem to be having a hard time at all with what we WERE throwing at it.

and for narrative reasons *i* am obsessed with this ending; in terms of storytelling i adore practically every creative decision that was made in lightfall, but i think the reason that so many people were so upset about it is because lightfall had such intense marketing and was rooted in the implication that this was the End of Days, only for us to get almost no closure, and instead so many more questions.

(there's also something to be said, i think, about the fact that the people who ARE most upset about this are like, the youtube gamer dudebros who's content is very very often rooted in the aggressive, violence-and-warfare, pvp-centric, no-interest-in-lore approach to destiny, and that the people i've seen primarily ENJOYING the narrative decisions (or at least being understanding about it) are the artists and writers and loremasters of the fandom, but i'm not quite sure,,, how to expand on that point.)

[virtue-boy]

Went on a transandrophobia truther blog and instantly saw this ..

1) love the slight of hand where he says "being trans" instead of actually identifying any positionality or god forbid mentioning WOMANHOOD as a type of positionality in his post which allows him to call trans women men and completely disregard the experience of the closested trans WOMAN. Telling that your argument hinges on "after transitioning to a man I am exactly the same as a woman undercover as a man"

2) just say you're not on T and you don't know anyone who is. Like as someone who's passed as male on an off for my whole life and now fully passes as male all the time thanks to T I low key snorted reading this... Liiike let's be for real here passing as a man (and doubly so if u are binary and have the pronouns to match) and passing gives you privilege out the fucking wazoo and I literally think about it every time I leave the house, meet new people, take blue collar jobs, interact w people on public transit, walk around at night, go to gay clubs, bond w male overseers, look for roommates, etc. This is obviously extremely racialized as much as it is gendered, but there is literally not a single "privilege" I had as a girl (that was assumed to be a guy 50-70% of the time) that I lost as a guy.

3) Also how do trans men "inherently defy patriarchal manhood" I literally know a trans guy who went to jail for domestic violence against a woman like trans men are incredibly capable of accessing and enacting patriarchy and thinking ourselves justified in accessing patriarchal homosociality. Like we are literally becoming men and we don't just magically exit the patriarchal society because we aren't the men at the top of the make food chain.... a la R.W. Connel. Being trans men means we lose some for being trans but we win some because we are men. Like gay men are frequently denied their masculinity but it would be dodo brained to act like gay men have no male homosociality they can access or that no gay man has ever accessed male homosociality. Like if u believe that you actually don't know any gay history Attttt Alllllll 😭 like genuinely. We also earn more money per dollar than women in our same gender modality, that doesn't sound like "inherently defying patriarchal manhood" to me that sounds actually like a pretty typical social positionality for oppressed and marginalized men. Like in my own friend groups, at school, and in my music and promotions scene being an (openly trans) man actually has granted me actually a lot of homosociality that I can draw on.

[amateuranatomymechanic]

i swear to god every time i see people saying “evil trans men minimizing trans women’s experiences with transmisogyny and specifically trans women of color/the inherent race of gender perception in the West” or “evil trans women are attempting to erase the struggles and experiences of misogyny trans men are experiencing” i want to like. shove the “pokemon porn isnt real problems” meme at them

[9x07]

how many times do we need to learn as people that irony and hyperbole can be harmful because 'jokes' aren't easily distinguished from genuine thoughts and feelings until we stop rewarding people for speaking or posting about violence

like even if you're joking/don't actually believe that/think whoever you are insulting is bad/immoral/fictional therefore deserves it - ad hominem attacks always do more harm to the people who share those characteristic then the individual you intend to cause harm to or discredit

[nemmet]

question: who is your favourite scooby doo character and why?

in a similar vein to my how did you get into scooby doo post from last month, i'm now interested in hearing who your favourite character from the franchise is! are they a member of the core gang or a side character? which iteration/version of theirs do you like best? do you have any specific memories associated with them? do they mean a lot to you personally, or do you just think they're neat? it's time to gush about them in the tags/replies!!

[trashymichi]

i love hearing ur aot opinions. if you could pick any popular aot fandom headcanon or fan theory to explode into dust for ever which one would u pick

tbh i don’t really spend that much time in the fandom so idk what popular headcanons/theories there are out there to answer this. all i know is that i will never ever give a single solitary fuck about aotnr or what it has to offer