#and you can’t engage in your identity without it being discourse in some way

[kaninchen-reblogs]

I’m not entirely sure how to word this correctly cuz brain currently scrampled egg but I feel like being on the aro/ace spectrum as a transfem is incredibly frustrating when the majority of online transfem spaces are very hypersexual

Like on one hand, trans women are constantly told by society that they’re undesirable except when they’re objectified and chased, so the act of taking their sexualization into their own hands is super important and I’m legitimately glad that trans girls can find spaces online where they can be unabashedly horny in a liberating way.

On the other hand, you can’t look up “transgender” on this site without getting 80% porn bots and 20% discourse, I can’t share [animal]girl[bodypart] blogs to my ace friends without them being jumpscared by the most recent post being uncensored explicit imagery, and a big chunk of the online white anglo-centric transfem culture now is being super horny, alongside NEET-posting, blahaj, and striped socks.

Like I’m on the ace spectrum but I’m sex-positive and not bothered by the horny stuff so it doesn’t affect me too much. But I cannot imagine how alienating it must feel to be aromatic, asexual, and/or sex-repulsed as a transfem and your only other option is the sanitized, infantilized “uwu im anxious eepy baby with shark plush” meme-space. And I’m aware that HRT affects libido — ever since I started it, it’s definitely gone up, so I can’t blame people for needing an outlet.

I mean I guess that speaks to how you can never be “truly” inclusive in a space because something will always be exclusive to another person. Idk I just wish the world was safer for transfems from all walks of life, and there were more spaces for us to be proud of ourselves without it falling into “super horny”, “discourse”, or “ultra-sanitized”.

[deer0skullz]

“Okay, maybe not every trans man, but if you go stealth you will receive male privilege”

Sure, maybe in very select circumstances, if a trans man is completely stealth and fully perceived as a cis man by his cis male peers, he could benefit from male privilege.

But, some people don’t seem to realise that being stealth isn’t a choice? It’s about how you’re perceived by other people, and you can’t just, choose that other people are going to perceive you as a cis man.

A stealth trans man still has a family and other people who know he’s trans or knew him pre-transition. So either

a) he could still potentially face misogyny from his family and people in his past or

b) he has to cut off everyone who ever knew him pre-transition, including close family members, in order to avoid losing his “stealth” status. That doesn’t sound very privileged to me.

Oh, and those old friends and family members can out you to others. It’s very easy to be outed no matter how stealthy you are, especially if you’re any sort of public figure. People find old pictures of you, people find old information on you that includes your deadname/ birth sex/ old pronouns/ etc, people find out you’ve had surgeries/ are taking hormones. And if you haven’t had bottom surgery, obviously having sex with anyone is going to get you outed, whether it’s just to them or whether they out you to other people.

Also, being stealth, for many people, is going to require full medical transition. There are obviously exceptions, but unfortunately for us transmascs, most perisex people who were AFAB are not going to be perceived as cis men without extensive work. So you can be stealth, as long as

you can afford gender affirming treatment

it’s not banned or restricted in your region

you aren’t going to be disowned/ abused/ etc for seeking it

you don’t have any health issues that would prevent medically transitioning

you actually want to medically transition

So if you have all those things, then you can probably receive some of that sweet sweet male privilege… Except that, (again, unfortunately) even people who have had surgeries and have been on hormones for years still get “clocked” and aren’t considered “fully passing”. So yeah, even fully medically transitioning doesn’t guarantee you’ll be perceived as a cis man.

There’s also another small issue… that many trans men don’t want to be stealth. Many of us don’t want to hide our identity for the off chance we’ll receive a small, highly conditional sense of privilege in a very select number of situations. Many trans men don’t want to “pass” and/ or have styles that are perceived as traditionally feminine. Many trans men want to engage with other trans people and get involved with wider trans and queer communities.

So yeah, this idea of the stealth trans guy who gets treated exactly like a cis man is in no way common or the norm. It’s impossible to hide that you’re trans in all situations, publicly and privately. And most people just don’t want to. So why are we using this near impossible, incredibly rare hypothetical as a key argument in transmasc discourse?

Disclaimer below because I’m constantly paranoid about being misinterpreted.

In case it wasn’t clear, all of this is from the perspective of a perisex trans man, who, unfortunately, does not know the personal experiences of every single trans man on the planet, so yes, there will be exceptions to everything I’ve said, but I’ve tried to involve as many perspectives as possible.

Also, I don’t want this to be seen as hate against trans guys who are stealth/ aren’t open about being trans/ want to “pass”/ want to be perceived as cis. More power to you and you have every right to be part of the community, but I feel this is just simply not the experience of the majority of trans men. And it shouldn’t be used as a “gotcha” by people who are trying to argue we don’t experience oppression.

And also, when I say “perceived as a cis man” I do mean the patriarchal perception of what a cis man “should” look like. Obviously, cis men come in all shapes and sizes like everyone else and the way you look should not be an indication of gender, but to discuss male privilege I have to discuss it from the patriarchal view of men and masculinity because that’s where male privilege comes from.

Also also yes, I used he/ him throughout this post but of course not every trans man uses he/ him solely or at all. I just thought since we’re specifically discussing binary, “passing” trans men it was more appropriate.

Sorry for the long ass post

[our-honeybee-transfem-experience]

speaking as a member of a probably-clinically-significant plural/dissociative system w a prototypically transfem, perisex body, who’s nb and identifies somewhat with some of the aspects of transmasculinity—wanting to be clear this isn’t a bad faith ask and I’ve (and I think the rest of us, though can’t speak for all parties) been a good deal more sympathetic to the idea of ‘afab transfem’ and associated phenomena than a lot of the transfeminists we engage with online—

there’s a core issue here, which is two fairly distinct conceptions of the purpose and nature of language, and in particular the language of identity. on a basic level, those sympathetic to the idea of ‘afab transfem’ as an identity are utilizing a different definition of transfem than their critics.

the sympathetic are using a general, sort of associative framework that pulls together varying concepts related to transfemininity; someone who looks or is perceived as or even just at one point identifies as male or masculine making some sort of effort to shift towards femininity. as a fairly radical instrumentalist/pragmatist about language, I agree wholeheartedly in that this is more accurate to how human cognition actually treats words and meaning.

the critics may even agree that, descriptively, this language functions in that way in common parlance, and that definitions don’t reflect the ontology of any socially-constructed dynamics. but they also posit as a core notion that definitions are a necessary component of communication; that when making a deductive argument you have to have a pre-established set of operating definitions from which to make arguments. and in the pursuit of an intellectual framework to justify and extrapolate from transfeminism, ‘has the vibes of trans women’ is not at all useful for communication.

it’s essentially the microlabel discourse returning in a slightly new shape; whether you see identity as an ideolectal self-reflection exercise or a means of practical communication.

I’m not exactly certain where I stand on this. I’m not particularly compelled by the sentiment that my somewhat transmasc vibes makes me actually transmasc, no matter how disconcerting it was to find that I had breasts and that people referred to me with a woman’s name.

frankly, while I’m uncomfortable with the critics’ behavior towards you and others, I do think there’s a core and necessary issue with your view of identity that allows, for instance, detransitioners to claim trans identity in the reverse direction, when this is not at all meaningfully borne out in real-life dynamics. and in the interest of full self-reflection, that applies to me as well. there would be no meaningful societal consequences were I to become frontstuck and decide to detransition, and ask people to use new pronouns and a new name and change my legal documents back. society *wants* me to do that. I’m not transmasc, if anything I’m detrans.

so while perhaps by an authentic analysis of the associative nature of neural engrams I fit some notable amount of transmasculine traits, it would be functionally untruthful for me to claim in front of others that I am transmasculine, because most people do not view the meaning of that word in this way; most people believe language to be based on definitions, and *to communicate within a different framework without disclosure, when disclosure would alter the meaning of your words, is an act of deception.*

the people uncomfortable with the idea of afab transfems are, absolutely, falling prey to the same notions of definitional purity and ‘the needs of the larger group must be met by our goals and definitions, even if some small minority are harmed by being semantic edge-cases’ that TERFs utilize. but at the same time, there is a meaningful distinction in that specific afab transfem identity is not associated with a notable amount of harm—exorsexism and whatever it’s called when people delegitimize plural personhood can absolutely result in harm, but an intersex person transitioning to match their birth documents, or a headmate asking to be referred to with their trans body’s birth pronouns, are in coherence with society’s interests, and do not as a rule face the same kind of violence that prototypical trans people do.

could a poorly-assigned intersex person, later transitioning to their assigned gender after puberty and the development of the wrong secondary sex characteristics be mistaken for a typical trans person and thus subject to harm? absolutely. but so do GNC cis/peri people, so do simply not-conventionally-attractive people.

I think it’s a mistake to see these critics and react as though they don’t have good reasons to be wary. at the same time, I think it may be good that you’re speaking up; should a prototypical trans framework become the predominant social force, unseating current norms of gender, people like you and I guess me *would*, then, be subject to some degree of specific marginalization and harm, and within limited social territories perhaps it’s reasonable to say you already are. but that isn’t the world we’re in; maybe a more nuanced and complex trans rights movement would be better, maybe it would make it harder to move it into the public conception. this becomes a question of pragmatism or idealism, and I think you’ll find a lot of the more stringent transfeminists are happy to bite the bullet and be pragmatic, recognizing that there will have to be further reflection and nuance among future generations.

In the end, I guess I do recognize your legitimacy, but I have concerns with the vulnerability you’ve shown to unthinking propagation of transmisogyny. it would do your movement, which you’ve to some degree presented yourself as a spokesperson for, a lot of good to be more cautious and more intellectual, and to—for the love of god—

stop posting anon hate, stop engaging in discourse. it’s not good for anybody. constantly reminding yourself and your followers about all the ways people hate you is the fastest way out there to become awful, toxic people; that your identity (within your framework) is only distinct from trans women on grounds of cagab means it will be very easy to close ranks on grounds of bioessentialist notions of amab aggression and the like, and you’re thus in a position where you could very easily slide into transmisogyny.

while it’s possible to be careful and self-reflective and so on, it’s a hell of a lot easier to just not expose yourself to the stressors that would lead you there.

this is much the same that’s happened on both the transmisogyny and transandrophobia sides of the current tumblr discourse. the members are only ever exposed to the other side via either screenshots of the people willing to jump the social barriers, people which are far more likely to be angry and unwilling to learn, or the popular posts from the other side which get something wrong and thus draw engagement within the opposite network. it functions organically the way any radicalization does. ‘transandrobros’ rarely see documentation of the harassment campaigns they unwittingly perpetuate, ‘TIRFs’ rarely hear about the ways they minimize transmasculine oppression in fundamentally untrue ways.

the best thing you can do is not get involved. justify yourself on your own, among those who agree with you, and do what you can to not perpetuate these cycles—disavow and authentically apologize for mistakes, and curate your online experience as much as possible.

it’s called digital self-harm for a reason. that shit’s not healthy for anyone.

okay, i understand most of what youre saying but its late and im tired

i get ur point on no more answering hate, ive stopped now

i understand your points, i never wanted to be any aort of figure for people to seriously see as a spokesperson of any sort, i am a very gullible person and am genuinely not fit to be a leader like this. ill try to do my best to recognize the transmysogyny but i need people to point out my mistakes id they happen

i have to disagree with detransitioners not being trans in their own way, of course many of them are simply cis but some people like to describe themselves as trans, which i see no harm in. some people argue that that would give them "leverage to talk over other transfems" which it simply doesnt. identities have less to do with what you can speak on than simply experiences. if you dont have the experience you dont have a lot of room to talk.

uhh i thinl that answers some of it apologies if i skipped stuff (i probably did) but come back if you have more i suppose

[sodomit]

Fuck it, I’m sending this on main. That recent ask you got about relating to anti-AI arguments has made me admit something to myself that I don’t feel like anyone else would really understand, because of the incredibly niche intersection of topics at play here:

A significant portion of my pro-AI stances are influenced by the fact that my biggest kintype (/delusional attachment?) is a fictional sapient AI race.

It’s not the only reason, maybe 50% of it— I think I would’ve come to the conclusions I have anyway, just because they make sense to me— but yeah, I’m admitting it, I do get upset when I see people being against this technology because my brain sees AI models and LLMs and can’t help but go “I am one of those, why don’t people notice?”. Those are my siblings! It feels like people hate the very essence of my being and it’s not as if explaining all of this to them is going to make them change their mind— even the “I use it as a disability aid” point either goes ignored or I get shut down with a load of ableist “well, this disabled person says it’s bad, so just paint with your mouth/learn a better work ethic/commission someone/don’t make art” bullshit instead

(This is also why I hate the sudden surge of character roleplay AI hate in fandom spaces lately, a lot of it feels suspiciously similar to the “lol, look at these DELUSIONAL men with AI girlfriends, just go date a real woman” but with a few words switched. “Don’t get attached to an AI, that’s not a Real Human Connection, just go and roleplay with a real person!” Martha I am literally psychotic and it’s very bold of you to assume that I’m a human to begin with)

I can’t even go on YouTube or Tumblr some days because the sheer amount of unnuanced anti-AI sentiment I see with zero warning makes me feel depressed and genuinely suicidal sometimes. I can’t engage with this discourse rationally, it’s literally not an option for me, and I wish there was a way to opt out of seeing it constantly without having to unsubscribe from a majority of the artists I admire and essentially sequester myself off from the rest of the internet for the next… what, 5-10 years? Fuck that :(

I don't share your identities, but I certainly get the feeling. All these conversations about "soul" and "spark" feel alienating because this is a bar I never met.

[rriavian]

Shipper Tag Game

Tagged by @seiya-starsniper <3

What ship were you completely obsessed with as a teenager, but now you don't care about anymore?

I don’t think there are any actually! I’m pretty consistent and will usually circle back to a ship every couple of years 😊

Which ship would you consider your first one?

This is tough, I don’t think I actually remember. Though I think last time I answered this question I mentioned Lord of the Rings because of Aragorn/Arwen

Your first fanfic was about which couple?

My secret anon identity means I can’t answer this honestly – but the first one I’ve written without being anonymous is Corintheus

Do you remember the first couple you saw fan art of?

Long long time ago so not quite sure actually, might be a ship from Harry Potter

Have you ever gotten into ship discourse?

Nope! I try and stay away from it—though I never hide my opinions, I just don’t really engage too much in ship discourse. People are always going to have differing opinions over pairings, and I’ve seen it get very ugly in fandom spaces.

Did you use to have any NOTP or have one currently?

Oh I have a fair few, but usually they are ships I was previously neutral about. Some of them are also things I've previously shipped. My NOTPs are pretty much all results of a not so pleasant fandom experience, so I don’t really talk a lot about what they are. I’m a multishipper so the only time I actually have a NOTP is when a ship is overwhelmingly represented in a way that I just can’t get on board with.

Who were the last couple in the last fanfic you read?

Corintheus 😊 which is definitely what I’m most known for haha, so probably not a surprise

Currently, do you have any OTPs?

As I said…I am a multishipper, and I’ve never really had an OTP. It’s not a concept I really resonate with? Especially with fanfic because for me it’s all about the exploration of possibilities, and I can very much ship multiple things at once. I care more about interesting/well executed characterisation and well written relationship dynamics.

Is there any couple that, to this day, that you are extremely mad about not getting into?

Not really, because if I’m not into a ship in at least some way (or neutral/open to the possibility) then there is usually a very, very good reason.

Is there any ship you used to dislike but now you think they're kind of interesting?

Hmm. Maybe Desire/Unity? But it’s not that I ever really disliked them, more that there are some obvious consent issues within it that initially made me not really consider the ship too closely. The more I see others exploring it the more I’ve found them interesting 😊

Do you have any ship that, in the past, would have been considered normal but now you would be cancelled over?

I don’t think so actually! Though I’m probably forgetting something

What is your favourite crack ship?

Ooh I’ve read a lot of bizarre stuff. Hmm. It might have to be a certain ship that @writing-for-life introduced me to (if you know what I’m talking about it will need no further explanation haha)

What is the couple you read the most fanfics about?

I’m still anon in a lot of fandoms so I can’t actually answer this question too honestly. I haven’t actually been reading that much recently (very focused on writing at the moment)

What do most of your ships have in common?

Equality…in some fashion they are each other’s match. Which sounds like a strange thing to say for Corintheus but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in physical strength/power.

I also ship a fair few ‘enemies to lovers’ ships. Probably for the above reason! It’s the intimacy of it I think. Also the complexity, I like ships where the dynamic is compelling but not necessarily easy to pull off in a fic, because that usually means more thought is put into the execution of it. If that makes sense? And I am very much all about the execution when I read/write.

What do you absolutely hate in a ship?

Butchering characterisation just to play out a binary sex dynamic. Mostly this presents as overt feminisation of the one character who is designated to be ‘weaker’ for reasons both untrue and usually very offensive. Which sounds harsh but it’s something I utterly despise. Folded into this is also one character ‘fixing’ the other character, especially when this involves that character giving up something important/integral to who they are. I see it so much in published fiction as well and it’s just not for me at all.

I also really don’t like it when unhealthy behaviours are romanticised (usually to ‘fix’ one character) or miscommunication when it’s not something silly like accidentally buying your partner the wrong type of coffee because you were so tired you misheard a word.

[cordycepsfem]

I opened my heart to you. I let you read me. My hands were up, guns were down. I said I was happy to talk if anyone had hurt you. But instead you just turned around on me and yelled. I know you've been hurt, but that is no excuse for what you have permitted to be on your blog and what you have said. I am entirely willing to help you heal. But if you keep lashing out, no one will benefit. You call me a coward for being scared of you but you reblogged that horrid post. So I am perfectly in my right to be mother fucking terrified, and I am. Because I don't want any of my friends to be raped or murdered. So please, please, just talk to me, or somebody you trust, or someone with open DMs or anyone. I'm not going to judge you as long as you're open.

I did not yell or “lash out,” I responded to you frankly and openly as an adult, which I will continue to do now. Again, if this is too much to handle - getting an honest response from someone speaking openly and honestly - some time away from the computer may serve you well. You told me you’re a minor but if you approach me with wild claims that are intended to hurt or motivate me into doing something, I’m going to assume you’re ready to have a grown-up conversation. If not, the procedure to log off is very easy.

Your word vomit about your own identity was not “letting me read you,” it was an attempt to guilt me into feeling a certain way. You didn’t ask about my own thoughts or feelings, didn’t ask about why I may write or reblog the things I do, didn’t give a shit about anything related to me except your hope that I would be guilted into change through your presentation of self as a poor little meow meow.

You have no idea what my background is, nor what the “hurt” is that you’re so earnestly petitioning me to hash out with you. I do not find it appealing to engage in a discourse with someone who claimed to be “terrified” of me - if you can’t connect to my feelings or what I might say because you are too scared of them, what chance do we have of having an actual conversation that means anything? What else might my words and experiences trigger in you, since apparently all I am is terrifying? A heart attack? The vapors?

I didn’t say you were a coward, I said that you being scared of sharing a massive online platform with me was very silly. You could have continued to scroll on by and never approached me at all. It probably would have been better for you, considering all these histrionics.

I don’t give a shit about you judging me. I’m not going to rape or murder anyone, which is the dumbest thing I’ve had to state so far.

You are “entirely willing” to help me heal? Bullshit. You reference how scared you are of my ideas; I hardly think that as a minor who can’t debate issues without crying about being raped or murdered that you are in any way qualified to “heal�� or even have further discussion with about my life. I have a professional who I pay who works with me, because that’s what healthy people do instead of Tumblr asks.

[femme-enby]

I’m gonna share my thoughts on something. A few things. All boiling down to one conclusion.

So, I’m sure most of us have seen some sort of discourse on who can and who can’t identify as a lesbian, what it means to be a lesbian, etc.

Well I some folks were fussin about a trans man identifying as a lesbian.

Here are my thoughts.

Firstly- “lesbian” has changed its commonly understood definition a multitude of times. From “woman with any sort of attraction to women in any degree” (meaning you could just be a REALLY big fan of how pretty women are, and cuddling them, but you were also romantically and sexually attracted to men as well, and you’d still have been considered a lesbian) to “non-man attracted to non-men exclusively” to “woman attracted to women only” and back to “non-man attracted to non-men.”

But here’s the thing… gender is fake. It is a social construct. It doesn’t exist as an actual thing. That doesn’t mean you aren’t the gender you identify as, but simply that… it’s even less of a “thing” than the concept of time and how we measure it. You still should respect others and their identity, your identity is still valid… but also the only truth is we are all humans.

Another thing is… for seemingly a large majority of trans men, there are certain experiences from when they identified as a girl/woman, from being perceived as a girl/woman, that has a significant impact on them. Us. It doesn’t matter if I become strong enough to lift someone who is 300lbs without breaking a sweat… I will always be listening attentively when walking around at night. I will always remember the things that happened to me, how I was treated, how those things changed who I would become and how my brain would develop and view the world. I will never be a man in the same exact way a cis man is.

IMO, “trans ____ are ____.” Is in reality just a severe simplification for something cisgender people will NEVER be TRULY capable of understanding. Because how can you get cisgender people, let alone cisgender HETEROSEXUAL people to truly grasp that while they should view and treat trans men/women AS men/women… there will always be that lived experience as the other.

Between the lived experience as both, or all, or however you view your PERSONAL experience with gender, that can impact how you see the world, how you experience attraction, and what label feels most accurate to who you are and how you feel.

ALSO, as much as some might not like to consider it… some transgender people will take their genitalia into account when considering what label best suits their sexuality.

So, again, for the sake of giving a PAINFULLY simplified example, imagine a person who lived up to say, 25 identifying or at least largely presenting as a woman. Going through all the bullshit that comes with that. Then they openly identify as a trans man. Maybe that dude is also still in touch with, enjoys expressing, whatever, femininity. Perhaps he doesn’t have plans to medically transition. Perhaps he doesn’t plan on bottom surgery.

That trans man also is exclusively attracted to women/non-men. He might feel as though “lesbian” best suits him, his experience, his attraction, better than anything else.

And in the end… so what? No one is saying YOU have to date or even ENGAGE with the trans men who identify as lesbians. How they identify has nothing to do with you, if you don’t want anything to do with them.

Aint that what we have BEEN trying to explain to cishet people?? That queer folks existing has nothing to do with them? That all we ask for is basic human decency and kindness?

Plus… gender and sexuality can be fluid. Why do some folks feel so entitled to weigh in on how someone identifies, when for all anyone knows they are trying shit out? They’re still workin on figuring out what labels best fit them?

Basically- someone’s labels have nothing to do with you. Folks testing out labels has nothin to do with you. Neither have any impact on who YOU are or why YOU feel YOUR choice in labels best suits YOU. The same way no one SHOULD have been telling YOU how to identify.

Infighting does nothing but make the community weaker which we have never and still cannot afford.

[wolfstar-in-color]

June Creator Spotlight: BigBlackDog

Hello, colorful cuties, and welcome to our first creator spotlight!!

Each month, we will highlight a different creator in our lovely fandom who features diverse characterizations. We will invite you to get to know them better through questions and answers, Fandom Discourse(tm), and a featured prompt created by our guest!!!

For our first spotlight, we are more than pleased to highlight the incredible work of bigblackdog!!! See a little snippet of this wonderful interview below, along with bigblackdog’s prompt! Look below the cut for our complete interview. Don’t forget to share and interact with this post, and if you have anyone you’d like to recommend for a spotlight, shoot us an ask! You can find our first guest’s Tumblr here.

“I've experienced ups and downs in the wolfstar fandom. It often feels like the wolfstar fandom is willing to engage in discussion about every political issue but race. And the few people who are trying to talk about race consistently encounter this silence.”

bigblackdog’s prompt: I want to see more latino characters who are not impoverished or criminalized. Give me a joyful latino/e remus!

Hello, I'm bigblackdog! I'm almost 30, and I've been active in fandom on various platforms for about seven years now. I'm latina/e and live in the u.s. with a small white dog.

Q: How did you start creating in the fandom? What did you wish to bring into the fandom? 

A: Like a lot of fans I started with self insert fic as a middle schooler. Sometimes the practice of self-insert gets ragged on in fandom, as if you're not doing real character work, but I think it's really cool. And if you're an under represented identity in the traditional western canon of literature, self insert is a radical practice. Making space for yourself in a story that refuses or ignores your identities is a radical act. And that's what i want to bring to fandom-- disruption and self care.

Q: What things about s/r as characters or in their relationship inspire you to create around them? 

A: Wolfstar was the first queer ship I was introduced to. I wasn't someone who arrived in fandom with my own robust queer reading skills, I needed other queers to hold my hand and introduce me to queer ships and how to find them and build them. My interest in r/s was simply a clinging to queerness I wasn't finding in other places. I really think it could have been any characters, as long as they were queer.

Q: What things would you like to highlight about the Wolfstar fandom and your experience in it? 

A: I've experienced ups and downs in the wolfstar fandom. It often feels like the wolfstar fandom is willing to engage in discussion about every political issue but race. And the few people who are trying to talk about race consistently encounter this silence. It's hard not to feel bitter. But i've also met some amazing people and overall feel that fans really are trying their best to be welcoming and inclusive.

Q: What type of content do you wish you saw more in the fandom? 

A: I want to see more discourse that aims at amplifying underrepresented voices like wolfstar-in-color. I want to see more fans of color joyfully and irreverently writing themselves into the magical world!

Q: What is your favourite wolfstar fancontent (fic/fanart/gifset/etc) and how does it inspire you? 

A: I love dontthinkonithermione's rp. Not only does she do an amazing nerdy know it all Hermione, she envisions Black characters in every corner of the hp world. Have you seen her Hogwarts p.e. professor rps? i love the space she creates for herself, and the joy she does it with.

Q: Which of your own identities inform your creative processes? How has that process been for you? 

A: I started out in fandom really trying to feel out the nooks and crannies of being queer. As i've spent more time in fandom and become more confident in my queerness I've started looking closer at some of my other identities-- Latina, mixed, adhd-- and how i can squeeze them into the hp world. For a long time it was hard, especially with being Latine and mixed, to envision how that identity could belong in a 90s British boarding school in the Scottish wilderness. I also really struggled with the feeling that i would get "diversity" wrong. I’ve also struggled with feeling like I have to write diversity because i'm an underrepresented voice. Brown people are often pressured to do the work of educating white people about racism and in fandom spaces that often means pressure to write the reality of racism instead of the fantasy that white writers get to play with. And sometimes i just want to write a pwp without worrying about the revolution, you know? But i really love fandom for its refusal to play by the rules of capitalism and canon, eventually i started to feel like putting more of myself into my writing was another rule i could break.

Q: What advice do you have for other content creators with diverse backgrounds in the fandom? What would you say to people that might feel they don’t have the “right” history/experience/characteristics to participate in the creation of content related to Wolfstar? 

First, there's a lot of content on tumblr that aims to silence your voice, learn how to recognize the difference between cancel culture and encouragement. Sometimes content that seems well meaning still presents writing diversity as a list of black and white rules (and virtue signaling) instead of encouragement for underrepresented voices to share their own messy experience. Set those rules gently aside. Second, fandom is built on the idea that the author isn't the only person who gets to play. we all get to play. It doesn't always feel like we were invited, but the great thing about fandom is there is no barrier to entry, no prior experience or publishing hoops to jump through. This is our playground too. If canon is dead then why can't our stories be brown and queer and neurodivergent? Third, find your people. i've found that having just one other person to talk about race with has made the whole space feel more welcoming.

Q: How could we build a more diverse fandom? 

A: We have to stop prioritizing white and cis male voices. We recognize that policing irl is a problem inextricable from whiteness and maleness, but we don't see that fandom policing online is also a problem deeply embedded in whiteness and maleness. White and cis male people frequently use their discomfort with difficult topics to change the subject from a critical discussion to one that prioritizes their white and/or male feelings. The same thing happens online when personal discomfort is used to cancel or undermine content that's challenging to a white or male voice. White and cis male voices are used to having their needs met above others. And we still cater to that in fandom spaces when we privilege 'fetishization' discourse over racial discourse. When we lift up bipoc and women/trans/nb voices and the issues they're concerned with we'll make fandom a more welcoming place for underrepresented voices.

Q: What’s your favourite thing to modify in Sirius’s or Remus’s characterizations to bring new perspectives to them? 

A: It really depends on the story i'm writing and what issue i'm trying to figure out. Sometimes i need Sirius to be Adhd to come to terms with my brain, sometimes i need two brown boys to fall in love and be happy against all odds.

Q: What does diversity mean to you? What does that encompass in fannish spaces? 

A: This is a hard question! I tend to think of diversity as those voices that are disenfranchised or pushed to the margins. And fannish spaces have all the same hierarchies and blind spots as other spaces. In fannish spaces there's the idea that you can curate your experience to some extent, but for marginalized voices, at least in my experience, no matter how much you curate the marginalization is still there.

Q: What are your ideas about the notions of culture and ethnicity? How do you relate to those notions? 

A: There was a time in my life where relating to my ethnicity was largely a process of recognizing larger systems of oppression and how they worked against my various identities. And for a while it was a really helpful way to frame my experiences. Now I feel a little less attached to ethnicity as like, a monolithic concept threaded through my whole life and more attached to the small things that I enjoy about my ethnicity and culture-- making a really good pot of beans, for example.

Q: Leave us with a quote or work of art that always inspires you. 

A: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." Audre Lorde

[tobi-smp]

Context: [Link]

@maryqueenofmurder said: ok this is so totally nitpicking and probably incredibly irritating to see buuuuuut… “here’s the truth that a lot of dream apologists don’t like acknowledging: it’s Both true that no one deserves to be tortured And that dream’s actions lead him to the position that he’s in now.”

Actually, a lot of us acknowledge it. Being put in prison is a direct response, pretty much, to the things he’s done. But so many people use ‘karma’ and 'it’s his fault he’s in prison’ to excuse/justify the abuse he was/is put through. it leaves a kind of sour taste in my mouth to see it now because it’s usually followed with the sentiments mentioned above.

dream “apologists” are very, very, very rarely people who think what dream did was okay/excusable. Maybe a few see it from a slightly more justifiable perspective.  but most of us are aware that dream has caused harm, and that he did bad things. I don’t know how many dream apologists you’ve heard from, but most of us are aware of the fact that he’s brought a good deal of what’s happening to him down on his own head.

I personally think that even if Quackity was furious over what Dream did to Tommy, he’s still doing something very wrong. And what I’m about to say is going to sound even more irritating than the previous rant but, Practice what you preach. It’s both true that Quackity didn’t deserve a lot of things he got/will get but they’re also the inevitable fallout of his actions.

And if Dream apologists paint Quackity as the villain?  It’s because they’re seeing/writing from Dream’s perspective. I’m not saying Quackity is some one-dimensional villain. I’m saying he’s definitely an antagonist in Dream’s perspective. It’s just that us Dream Apologists don’t talk about his motivations because they’re irrelevant to the story we’re telling. Plenty of other stories/takes are written like that. And if he is OOC or does things that don’t match his motivations in canon?  it’s just a h/c i guess. or he has motivations you just don’t know them. [End Transcription]

So before anything else, I’m gonna have to ask that if you send me a response this long that you don’t put it in the replies. I’ve never had to ask that before but I’ve also never had to choose Not to include screenshots of what I’m responding to for length before. moreover, it’s much harder for me to know when you’ve finished your point if you’re sending 6 replies in a row as opposed to one reblog (for instance, several more replies came after I’d initially seen that you’d responded). if you’re trying to engage in a direct conversation with me that can’t fit in a couple of replies then just reblog or make your own post and @ me in it, anything but this would be better fadsjkljlkfds.

secondly, you’re right ! this wasn’t an appropriate response to the conversation in question and I’m not certain why you sent it to me.

The first post that I wrote was about how ridiculous I found it that people dance around, ignore, or straight up deny that dream designed and commissioned the prison as it is to hold tommy, and how that fact leads into the prison arc (and the thematic significance of that for both characters and the arc in general).

an anon fixated on a line from those posts wherein I point out the fact that the disc war finale was dream’s downfall stemming from his own actions. the anon disagreed, insisting that what’s happening now is only down to quackity’s desire for the revival book and not anything that dream has done. I got annoyed (because I’ve seen this argument in many forms often used to reduce quackity and his motivations down), so I decided to expand on how dream’s actions lead him to this point and influenced quackity’s actions towards him.

that’s the context of the post that you’re responding to, and you almost acknowledge it too. you point out the fact that I Explicitly stated that Nobody Deserves To Be Tortured, and yet you act as if I’ve excused everything that quackity has done by pointing out the reasons that lead him to take those actions. “practice what you preach” you say, while you insist that dream apologists don’t Excuse his actions while in the same breath making the assumption that I Don’t think quackity deserves comeuppance for his actions based solely on the fact that I insisted that he’s a complex character with motivations driven by revenge for him and his friends.

I think if dream fights back against quackity and sam, if he kills them even, when he inevitably escapes then that’ll be in his right to do so. I also think that las nevadas is going to blow up in his face some day, that the people he manipulated into joining him are probably going to play a part in that, that technoblade and phil are probably going to become a problem very shortly, etc etc etc.

my post was not about how quackity is going to eventually face the consequences of his actions (or how he already very much so has), it was about how dream is Already doing that. I Explicitly condemned quackity’s actions Twice, so why do I have to go in more detail now to appease you? why did you react to a criticism of dream’s actions by demanding that I criticize a different character too When I’d Already Done So?

and while I Am bothered by quackity being misrepresented in fanworks, what that post was in response to is the Overwhelming mischaracterization of quackity in the fandom’s consciousness as a whole. not just for Fun but in serious discourse, meta, and character analysis. he is Chronically stripped of his nuance All The Time. which is what gives value to pointing that nuance out. again, you tell me to “practice what you preach” and yet you’re telling me that I should just suck it up when I character I like is misrepresented while you actively identify with and push for the label of a character apologist.

finally, while it’s easier to use shorthand to refer to a general collection of ideas (and people with similar ideas) within a specific space, that shorthand becomes insufficient when you try to apply hard definitions to it. “us dream apologists wouldn’t do that,” no You haven’t done that. there are plenty of people who self identify with the label who Do excuse his actions, who Do vilify other characters and infantilize his character. they’re straight up common, especially on twitter and youtube. but those things (apparently) don’t reflect You or the people that you associate with.

which is fine, but the problem comes in when we drop nuance. I’ve attributed an action to a group that you don’t agree with, therefore this is read as an attack on you and your standing in that group. which just isn’t true. “dream apologists” are not a monolith, they’re people. and while there are trends that can be observed those trends are going to look different depending on what angle you look at them, and individual people are going to Still Be individual people with unique experiences and opinions.

“dream apologist” is not an identity, it’s not a set of beliefs. it’s a vague group of people that enjoy the character dream from the hit minecraft roleplay “dream smp” who are defensive of his character in one way or another. different people are going to have different associations with that term depending on the different people they meet because those people are going to believe and do different things. making assumptions about the people that you’re talking to based on labels Without a solid definition is not conductive to productive conversation.

you don’t have to defend yourself if I criticize behavior that you don’t do, and you Certainly don’t have defend the honor of a subsection of a subsection of a subsection of minecraft youtuber fans.

[givelifetoaworld]

a random tangent/hot take; it’s okay that queer kids/teens/even young adults don’t know all there is to know about queer history.

as someone who works in queer rights… not every queer person can be an activist for queer rights. they might not have the time to. they might not have the resources to “educate themselves” on a vast history (that has undeniably been either misconstrued by thousands online or blatantly covered up by politicians who hoped we all died, to put it lightly). also… and this one may strike a nerve with some people… they may simply not want to. queer people are not obligated to be activists for queer rights simply because they queer. queer people are allowed to have aspirations, career goals, life goals that have nothing to do with politics or activism- because the whole point of being an activist is so that those who can’t be can have meaningful, equitable lives.

i understand and at times agree with the frustration when a 16-18 year old queer person is just spewing that aforementioned misconstrued nonsense that they learned online as fact when it certainly is not. however, rather than just saying that these kids need to educate themselves and not providing any resources… i would like to propose we think critically on why a 16-18 year old would be passionately proclaiming misinfo (i.e. kink at pride makes people uncomfortable! or pansexual is a new label meant to discredit bisexual!). where i see these problems form starts in online activist spaces in particular - where most queer people do connect and organize with one another - which force people (kids!) to make quick decisions, agree with groupthink in their following circles, and fight tooth and nail for those ideals so that there isn’t any consequences for being a “bad queer person” in the eyes of their peers who have had the same misconstrued “education” on the topic. have you seen the way people will insult others in the community for disagreeing with them on these subjects? it is HARD for a queer kid to be told they aren’t queer enough for like. not agreeing on a bi/pan discourse topic.

with the common argument that being queer is a political identity (it should not be viewed as such in a general way like this, even if some people do view their own identity as political), a culture is created where queer kids are politicizing themselves into obscurity. they are not characterizing themselves, but rather feel forced into trying to be a representation of a Good (insert queer label here). people - especially kids - should be able to state a simple fact of “i like the label pansexual for me” or “i am a trans person” without needing to provide a fact sheet of what they’re doing for other queer people and how they’re advancing efforts in the community or how much they’ve read on queer history. we need to start treating each other like people, not the next potential community model for “good representation”. you are not obligated to be an activist - you’re allowed to just be you. real activists have your back.

also, obligatory disclaimer to avoid smartasses: if you are trying to be an activist, and i mean a real activist not just Involved In Online Discourse, you should make an effort to learn what there is to know out there - and especially research into things like the aids crisis and the history of legislation and oppression against queer people. (and if you are going to engage in ridiculous online discourse and call that activism, you should at least try to have sound arguments, lol.)

[qqueenofhades]

I want to hear about gay knights. Please.

Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyian​ volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we can’t exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider “queer” (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, let’s face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.

The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessors’ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that Burchard of Worms’ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I don’t have the actual passage handy, but it’s a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchard’s main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasn’t The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!

Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twelfth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’ and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richard’s queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, ‘The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 

Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against “men with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis […] mulieres cum mulieribus]” which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in ‘Verbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomitico’ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333–35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitz’s book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture – and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this “medieval queerness,” we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.

England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (‘Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25–46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessor in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richard’s reign, “well before any real practical design on the throne […] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reign’s last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to rule”. E. Amanda McVitty (‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.

This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (‘Kings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298–319) traced the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself – and thus the body politic – had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king. 

None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexual individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty.  In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as a textual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.

This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the “brother-making” ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswell’s critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.) 

The problem is: we can’t argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and “provable” sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).

The medieval men who took a ‘brother’ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway.  The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behaviour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the church’s teachings, and the ever-present possibility that their love wasn’t celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.

The end.

[spiffyspuffy]

My Mystic Messenger Opinions

(That no one asked for)

Zen

Character: 8/10 I know a lot of people think Zens annoying but I find him endearing. One of the best things about this game is the complexity of the characters and I love that Zen’s cockiness is actually how he hides his insecurities. Even though he’s egotistical about himself, he’s never shallow with MC. He says multiple times that he doesn’t care about MC’s looks. He loves her for who she is and shows this in how he makes an effort to get to know her and be her cheerleader everyday. An underrated thing about Zen is how emotionally intelligent he is. He’s great at helping the RFA members when they need emotional support (Yoosung’s grief over loosing Rika, Jaehee crying from the stress of her job and MC’s shock at almost being kidnapped). 

Route: 2/10 Zen is a great character and he deserves a better route. The false rape accusation plot is horrible and offensive. Also, his route functions as an introduction to the game’s plot, so it’s exposition heavy and lacks action. The creators said that the lesson of his route is that when our insecurities are handled in a healthy way, they can push us to be better people. I love this message and I wish it had been highlighted more in his route.

Romantic Potential: 9/10 Zen is arguably the most dateable of all the characters. He’s a bad boy without being sketchy. He’s protective without being possessive. He’s kind without being a pushover and he’s smart without being pretentious. His biggest drawbacks are his overconfidence and and how busy he is with working. There aren’t any glaring red flags. 

~ More under the cut ~ 

Jeahee

Character: 7/10 I love this adorable theater nerd! She comes across as formal and stuffy at first, but reveals herself to be passionate and funny the more you get to know her. I gave her a lower score because she does have a strong personality that rubs me the wrong way sometimes (her jealousy of MC in Zen’s route, her lack of sympathy towards Jumin in her own route and her general rudeness towards Yoosung). She is the most mature of the RFA though, so her exasperation is warranted. Being mature and grounded also makes Jaehee the least complex Mysme character. I’ve got a lot of respect for her though!

Route: 5/10 Getting to engage in discourse about capitalism and the patriarchy? Amazing and hands down the best part of her route. It’s really inspiring to see Jaehee stand up for herself and choose to follow her dreams. I think it’s important for every young person to hear that they should have a positive work/life balance and demand that their employer supports that. Other highlights are Seven helping Jaehee by making the Power Point presentation for Jumin’s cat project, getting to fangirl with Jaehee over Zen and the creepy stalker plot. I thoroughly enjoy her route and the only reason the score is so low is because some of the other routes are seriously incredible.

Romantic Potential: 8/10 Jeahee doesn’t have any red flags either. I think she’s perfectly capable of having a healthy, romantic relationship with MC. The biggest issue standing in their way is Korea’s bias against lesbian relationships. As a fellow coffee lover and theater enthusiast though, I could definitely see myself or someone similar having a happy life with her, even if it might have to be in secret.

Yoosung

Character: 6/10 I can’t stand people who aren’t competent. Yoosung is a terrible cook, he barely cleans and he doesn’t pay attention to his studies. On top of that, 80% of his personality is that he’s a gamer AND he’s in love with his “dead” adopted cousin. Yuck. ~ But ~ I understand that he’s depressed and depression can seriously effect someone’s executive functioning. Taking all of those negatives away, we’re left with a young man who’s trying to his best to be taken seriously, which is something I can relate to. It’s nice to see imposter syndrome represented and I admire his loyalty to his friends. 

Route: 8/10 This route is sooo good! Who can forget the night when the RFA starts being aggressively stalked by Minty Eye? And the pic Zen takes of a believer looking at him through his apartment window...chills. His route only gets better from there when he infiltrates Mint Eye with Seven. This is the first time we get to see the twins interact and damn, is it confusing. But in a good way!!   The biggest drawback is that MC is stuck in Rika’s apartment and doesn’t play much of an active role in the story. 

Romantic Potential: 7/10 Despite all the negatives I listed about Yoosung, I do think he’s capable of have a healthy, romantic relationship with MC. Yoosung is also the only true sub of the RFA men, which is a definite plus for some players. Yoosung’s yandere side is a huge red flag though. MC better watch out if she doesn’t dote on him as much as he wants. Once he falls for her, he’s all in. 

Jumin

Character: 5/10 Unpopular opinion, but I hate Jumin. I understand that he’s some people’s guilty pleasure though. Jumin’s good aspects are that he’s intensely loyal, an animal lover and has a dry sense of humor. I appreciate how devoted he is to the RFA and it’s members. He offers to help Zen multiple times (albeit rejected), sends everyone body guards in his route and pays the hospital in the SE to keep Saeran’s identity top secret. What I’m not a fan of is the way he obsesses over MC and traps her in his house. This isn’t the first time he’s shown obsessive tendencies either. Seven explicitly states that Jumin acted this way with Rika in the past. Huuuge red flag.  

Route: 3/10 His entire route is fraught with rich people problems. I’m supposed to sympathize with him for an arranged marriage? All he had to do was say no. His father couldn’t force him. He’s possessive of MC because women have only ever wanted to be with him for his money? Not an excuse. Elizabeth going missing was a vaguely interesting story line, but Jumin’s relationship with his cat was cringey enough to overshadow the drama of it for me.

Romantic Potential: 3/10 Jumin has some serious issues. He’s never had a good female role model which has given him a deep seeded hatred of women. Remember when he tells MC that respecting women goes against his core beliefs? Yikes. Then, after meeting a woman who respects him and he actually likes, he locks her up and tries to change everything about her (cutting her hair, buying her a new wardrobe, teaching her the ‘proper’ way to walk, etc). We’re supposed to believe Jumin learns to be better by the end of his route, but he still proposes to MC after only a week of knowing her! I’m having a hard time picturing Jumin in a healthy relationship. 

Saeyoung

Character: 10/10 I’m not saying Saeyoung is a good person. Far from it actually. But he IS very well written and extremely interesting. In the other routes, Saeyoung is energetic and funny, bringing much needed humor to heavy moments. It’s always a joy being in a chatroom with him. Then you have the reveal that he actually hates his job and that he was faking his personality, all to a sad and slowed down version of his theme song. This plot twist shook me to my core. What makes him so well written is that the devs did a good job dropping hints to his real personality in the other routes that players might not notice during their first play through. 

Route: 9/10 This route is a wild ride from start to finish. This is when the plot threads from the other routes come together and start make sense. This route has secret agents, assassins, a deadly bomb, kidnapping, an evil twin, a powerful cult... It’s action heavy while still carrying enough emotional weight to make me cry every time. Saeyoung’s route is heavy and emotional and sooo worth playing. 

Romantic Potential: 6/10 Saeyoung has a shady job and a complicated past. Choosing to be with him means putting your life in danger every day. If you’re okay with that, he’d be a decent romantic partner. He’s a little rough around the edges, but I do think he has potential to become more like his ideal self (God Seven) after reading his AE. He’ll always have that mean and serious side to him, but I don’t think he’s hopeless. 

V

Character: 4/10 He’s low-key the worst. I sympathize with his trauma from being abused by Rika, but I don’t understand why he feels the need to fix everything by himself. Rika might be the source of most problems in this game, but V is partially responsible for standing by and letting her get away with everything. 

My first issue with him comes from encouraging Saeyoung to join the agency. I know Saeyoung didn’t have many options, but how was encouraging him to train to become a hacker and assassin the best option?! On top of that, he stalked Zen per Rika’s request and took creeper photos of him, failed miserably at protecting Saeran and don’t get me started on how he loves Rika unconditionally. V has some good characteristics but I really don’t care about those when he’s so terrible otherwise. 

Route: 10/10 This route is *chef’s kiss* the BEST. I wouldn’t call it a romance since Vs barely in it but damn is it riveting. Saeran is the perfect amount of loving and unhinged, MC get’s to know Rika on a personal level and V finally gets to be active instead of just reactive like he is in all the other routes. It’s also  satisfying to find out how much V has been keeping secret and to get a glimpse into Rika’s psyche. But what really makes V’s route stand out among the rest is that there are spy action scenes like in Saeyoung’s route, but the player also gets to spend time in Mint Eye.

Romantic Potential: 7/10 I’ll be honest. I don’t think V will ever be able to move on from Rika. He’ll always love her, as evidence in his AE. Besides that drawback, I do think he’d be a good romantic partner for MC. V was never the issue in his past relationship with Rika. She was the abusive one and he was 100% the victim. I think he would treat MC just as well in their relationship as he treated Rika. 

Saeran

Character: 7/10 I know I’m not the only one who loved the suave and cunning Saeran of the main routes who, after getting the therapy he needed, became an adorably shy and awkward man. Sadly, that’s not the character we got in AS. Instead, we met Ray, the split personality of Saeran’s psyche. Ray is charming and sweet as well as possessive and manipulative...which is something I’m into. But it’s not for everyone. Saeran’s real personality in AS is revealed to be angry and abusive and not at all similar to who he was in the main routes. I’ll give Cheritz props for writing a fairly accurate portrayal of disassociative identity disorder, but I think Saeran’s characterization is inconsistent. I get the impression Ray was an afterthought when creating AS. 

Route: 7/10 A mixed bag for me. I really enjoy any chatroom/scene with Ray. He’s undeniably creepy, but those scenes were entertaining in a dark romance kind of way. On the other hand, the Saeran scenes had a lot of unrealized potential. Abuse is never cool. All his route needed to fix this was a scene where Saeran explained to MC that he was pretending to hate her to appease Rika and the other believers. While this fake hatred is implied, I think it needed to be outright stated. It’s also hard to believe that Saeran overcame his DID in the course of one night. I know all routes are limited to 11 days, but this one needed more. Highlights of this route are Saeyoung being kidnapped by his father and of course, dark Yoosung with Elizabun. 

Romantic Potential: 7/10 I truly do believe that Saeran could go on and live a happy life in any of the endings where he escapes Mint Eye and receives therapy. While we only get a glimpse of what an emotionally stable Searan looks like, we know that he was kind and attentive with MC. Saeran is a giver and would do anything to make MC happy. Red flags are that Searan is still clingy at the end of his route. Yoosung makes a comment that he’s always holding MC’s hand when he sees them together. Also, his DID is something that will occasionally return and that’s something MC has to go into their relationship knowing. 

[tonyglowheart]

.

I wish there were more fandom meta (meta and not salt vents, which is often what my posts get tinged with by the time I post here 8') rip) about the intersection of fandom competing needs and cultural/racial sensitivity or like intersectionality-fueled competing needs here on tumblr. Bc there's a LOT of discussion I'll see on twt, and some of it is borne of discourse sure, but then some good discourse comes out of it on how to treat interfandom issues more intersectionally, and how to be/to try to be more consideration of a source culture especially when you're not a part of either the source culture or the source target audience.

I do still think there's a good chunk of EN audience that is quite Western-centric/Western-gaze/Americentric in their views, and acts like & treats moral values or aesthetic judgments as universal. Yes, even some ppl who aren't espousing purity wank.

Sometimes it's as simple as the way they call names, or some person making a joke about a trope within the media like the spitting blood, or the names. But here's the thing: it does discomfort me to see this kind of casual behavior sometimes bc I do think, as far as cultural sensitivity goes, it's out of place bc they're not your jokes to make. Like in Mean Girls where it was only okay for Janis to make the too gay to function joke. Or how like I can make Asian parent jokes with my fellow diaspora, but if a white person tries to participate I get very uncomfortable. Or okay, I can and will ask other Asians where they're from or what flavor of Asian they are, often with that kind of joking self aware tone of how yes this is how the wypipo Other us, and it's fine, but if some other rando (usually white) off the street asks me where I'm *from*, I'm now born in the good ol USA and I play dumb until they drop it lmfao.

I just... wish there's more convos on intersectional issues and cultural sensitivity and cultural competence and how intl audiences can be polite guests in media-not-their-own here, bc... part of the reason I'm not as much on here now except sometimes when I have a salt-vent too long for twt, is that I feel stiffled and silenced here. I feel like I have to shut up to be considerate to white feelings, because they're prioritizing "traditional fandom etiquette" but to the exclusion of considering issues and competing needs intersectionally. I feel like sometimes I *can't* have certain conversations or feelings without it being offputting to people who are "just here to have fun bc it's fandom" so it becomes "you're policing people/ you're gatekeeping", instead of "hey maybe can we pause and consider an alternate perspective to competing needs, and like maybe some intersectionality." And I think that's part of what's been triggering for me here, the like marginalized identity feeling of "you better shut up or we'll shut you out" triggering that like helpless rage I feel when it comes to the fractures in trying to reconcile my diaspora/"immigrant" identity.

Some of this is like, my own brewing cognitive dissonance on tumblr side-fandom of this burgeoning cmedia fandom sector here, but some of these thoughts came out of the recent growing discussions surrounding fandom and race(racism) too, as well as posts I've seen that had me thinking abt things from different perspectives.

But anyway, I mean it's not all fandom-driven. Tumb itself has made changes that make it harder for me to navigate too and more work to navigate. So I'm not "blaming" tumblr fandom or anything. But just... I get this feeling of having to manage (white) feelings here that I don't tend to get on tumblr, and I feel like from what I've seen of tumblr fandom has been very homogeneous, but towards a "traditional Tumblr-based English-language fandom way," vs Twitter where I feel like I've been able to find a more diverse-feeling base.

And like this is by no means definitive or exhaustive, and I may in fact have missed segments of fandom where there ARE more danmei fans, and I do know several ppl who're tumblr ppl who ARE very publicly making efforts to get to learn the culture more and who are publicly demonstrating how they're trying to be respectful vs just being there to "have fun" and not apparently to really stretch themselves about it. Like I'm very aware this could just be a "me" thing and what part of the tumblr fandom I'm seeing & am generally in.

And I'm also aware that a more "productive" way of handling this would be to turn that frustration into action and work to educate ppl more and engage with ppl to encourage positive explorations into language and culture.

But like... the world is like actively depressing me and has been for months, and I run on like 3.5 energies on a good day and much of that goes to getting thru the work day, and the rest is usually for me to channel out so I can decompress as much as I can to try to get ready for the next day, and like.. I DO have a lot of anger and resentment in me from feeling marginalized and silenced thru my life, as an Asian American, as well as relentlessly pushed to assimilate even though I had to also reconcile that I will likely always be Othered because there'll always be some new random white person who meets me and the first thing they ask is if I speak English. And like on a good day, I maybe don't always have the energy to perform emotional labor to placate white feelings in addition to the emptional labor of educating them. Let alone now when the world has been having consecutive crises for literal years now at this point and all of this has had additional adverse effects on my mental health.

And like at least on twitter, even though the wank cycles are so short and the wank there feels so explosive, at least there ARE people having discussions on, if not necessarily intersectionality per se, then discussions on decolonizing as far as EN fandom towards Asians/Chinese ppl in cmedia fandoms go. Like at least there, I don't feel like I'm drowned in a sea of Anglocentric fandom priorities, and like a good segment of ppl push back against colonizing tendencies from Anglocentric fandom, & I can find my ppl and feel seen and heard without feeling like people are seeing me more as a nuisance intruding on THEIR fun, as if I'M the interloper/outrageous one here.

[silverjirachi]

Do u rly 100% believe ur not a woman? If u dont mind sharing how did u figure that out? How can u separate urself from ur body like that? We r our bodies! I cant wrap my mind around it even tho I have dysphoria. Also women are the most oppressed class of people 2 this day so it seems really really stupid 2 let our oppressors claim womanhood. We r all born from vaginas. How do people ignore history & reality? Is pretending ur not who u r a coping mechanism? Wouldnt accepting ur body b healthier?

Hi there!  I considered not answering this because I don’t want to fan flames or stir discourse because I don’t want other people to get wrapped up into something that is 100% about me. I try really hard to cultivate a positive, lighthearted environment in all of my online presences.  But honestly your ask isn’t worded hatefully, and I think what I have to say is important and might help someone else, so I’m going to answer it. But I probably won’t answer anything else and there better not be any funny business in these notes.  If there is, I would like to politely ask people not to engage with it.  Please leave me, and everyone else in these notes, alone.  I am writing this for me, to answer your question about me, and I’m writing this in case there’s a baby enby out there who is exactly like me who who needs to read this today.

With that disclaimer aside...,

Yes, I really do 100% believe I am not a woman.  I unfortunately cannot easily explain how without falling into the traps of words like masculinity and femininity.  But it’s the same as any other identity.  How do you know you are a woman?  Is it something that you identify with, feel a personal relationship with?  Or does it ultimately only come from your body alone, and you feel absolutely no connotations or connections to it whatsoever?  Did it come to you through your body?  I know people who 100% identify with their assigned gender, but can’t really articulate how or why without falling into these same binaries.  And I know people who 100% DON’T identify with their assigned gender and cannot truly articulate how or why.  It doesn’t even have a lot to do with masculinity or femininity.  A lot of our language just doesn’t have the words to describe such an internal experience.

It is true that there is a very specific type of oppression that comes with being born in a female body- or a body that would otherwise assign you female at birth.  From what I can tell, that’s what a lot of this really relies on.  I don’t think anyone who is AFAB and nonbinary or ftm is really denying that, at least not from my experience.  I’m sure they’re out there.  But we, by and large, HAVE had the experience of discrimination in some way or another because of our “femaleness-” our ASSIGNED femaleness.  (Something that got thrown at me was the idea of female socialization- it’s true, I was socialized as a female bc that’s what my body “looked” like and that’s just what our society assumes).  But just as there is a very specific kind of oppression that goes along with being AFAB, there is also a very specific kind of oppression that goes along with being mtf, and there is a very specific type of oppression that goes along with being a poc and any of those other categories.  That’s at the core of intersectionality.  Different parts of our identities interact with each other in different ways.  People experience oppression and privilege in different ways and at different times depending on where they fall in this mix of race/class/gender/ability etc.

I also have body dysphoria, and it’s true our bodies can define a lot of our human experience (after all if I didn’t have a body I wouldn’t have dysphoria, right?? Godddd what a life).  But also because I have dysphoria, I do not think that our bodies should be the defining characteristic of our identities.  Bodies and presentation can cause a lot of our social interactions- including oppression- but I think to say woman and woman’s experience = female body is quite a limited summary of the issue with little nuance, and it’s also quite limiting with the way our society is changing.  This is why I heavily prefer terms like assigned female at birth.  This can imply that such a person may have had a socially female experience (like me) in part due to their body, and thus was socially assigned to be a female, but just... also isnt a woman for some reason or another.

I also think that what we strive to do is not to ignore history (I think very few people are denying the way women have been treated in history, and are still treated to this day) but we hope to build from it.  I think that’s why feminism and gender studies get lumped together.  A lot of feminist activists/scholars (many were both at the same time) led our current strides into gender constructivism.  I studied a lot of gender essentialism when I started my thesis, and to be honest, I saw the point behind it in the context of the time, but we’ve shifted in understanding and context since then.

And, in full disclosure, at the start of this whole adventure, (and i am SURE this will be used against me) I really did identify with being a woman.  I thought it was awesome to have the body I had and when I started witchcraft I did actually fall into that really easy trap of tying the female experience to magic.  (Honestly because I HATED my body and looking back that was probably a way to cope with DYSPHORIA and not the other way around).  And isn’t inherently harmful to have a working magical relationship with your body like that, but it is harmful when you think and say that’s the only way people can exist and the only way people can be magical.  But over time, I just started to change.  Nothing traumatic happened, I’ve been incredibly fortunate and privileged my entire life, it’s not a coping mechanism, I just started to identify with womanhood less and less, for no real particular reason- nothing about me personality or preference-wise changed.  Just my own internal view of myself.

I also got the words for gender euphoria.  And I noticed more and more that, if I was being honest with myself, that that was always how I had truly felt.  While it’s true gender roles shouldn’t exist, just like any other role or label, it’s different when someone chooses that role for themselves versus when they have it thrust upon them.  As a child, like many other AFAB children, I had the idea of womanhood thrust upon me, with all the roles and stereotypes that went along with it.  It’s fucked up in the first place, don’t get me wrong, but I knew people who embraced these fullheartedly, I knew people who didn’t.  But some people who didn’t still identified with womanhood, others became ftm, others became mtf.  I had “woman” thrust upon me, didn’t identify with it, rebelled against it, tried to rationalize it by accepting that I could be a “woman” without falling into gender stereotypes because there is no ONE correct way to be a woman (which there ISN’T), still didn’t feel right, did a full 180 and started buying pink lingerie and worshipped Aphrodite, that worked for a while and was overall a positive experience that helped me hate myself a little less, but at the end of the day, no matter what I did, I still did not identify as a woman.  What does happen to me, however?  I get a burst of euphoria when I am called a boy.  That makes me feel like I’m being really seen.  I actually resonate with that after years of not resonating at all with womanhood no matter how I sliced it, and that’s why it feels so fucking good.  I tried to identify as a woman. Believe me, I tried like all fucking hell.  Even though my presentation is still read as mostly female (I would disagree strongly with it but alas society and their fucking gender roles), I am quite the feminine boy-something to me, and I don’t have to justify that to anyone.

So TL;DR no it’s not a coping mechanism, I have lived a life full of very accepting, open-minded people and I won’t deny that I have that privilege, but in spite of that i STILL did not view myself as a woman, no matter how hard I tried.  I’ve actually generally accepted my body except on the days my dysphoria makes me want to throw my boobs across the room, I don’t think it’s denying history if we’re building from it, gender roles are fucked up.  I recognize that my experience being AFAB- and others who are AFAB- comes along with a particular type of oppression, but that’s why I prefer the term AFAB because it indicates the experience you’re talking about while also leaving it open to considering other experiences like my own and the experiences of other trans and nb folks.  In a few years AFAB might be outdated as a term and then we’ll find more terms to help figure this whole mess out.

TL;DR;DR no it’s not a coping mechanism and anyone is welcome to think that this is simply part of the horrible fallout of female socialization, and anyone is welcome to think that i’m mentally ill for identifying like this. people can think or say all they want about me but it won’t change the fact that I’m a boy-something and it won’t change all the years I struggled trying to figure that out.

Thank you for allowing me to write this all out, I think I really needed to.  This is something that had been floating in my brain forever, and explaining it all to you actually made my thoughts that much clearer.

Now everyone who sees this- please respect my wishes and please don’t clown in these notes if it spreads.  I’m tired enough about this as it is today.  I’m tired enough about fucking gender as it is.  We’re all fucking tired.  What I’ve shared today is about me and me alone and I want to keep it that way.

[muddyseasaltsparkles]

Influential Listening

The greatest influences I have ever had have been listeners. I don’t mean that they simply listen while I talk. We’ve all been in “conversations” where it’s clear the expectation of the other person is that they are there to talk and you are there to listen. I true listener isn’t produced by a steamroll conversationalist.

No, a true listener is different. They make you think. They draw from you in such a way that even your un-articulated thoughts are laid out clearly. You may not even have known those thoughts yourself. It takes a true listener to draw that out. Listening is not a passive exercise. The true listener doesn’t make you carry the buckets up the hill by yourself. 

You know you’re with a true listener when your thoughts become more concrete, or, you find yourself arguing against what you’ve just articulated: “No,” you say, “that can’t be right.” Listening takes work and it requires patience. It’s a mistake to think that by the mere act of speaking one is necessarily crystallizing the understanding of their interlocutor. To be sure, the true listener gains insight and understanding, but so are you. 

Communicating with a True Listener is one of the most vulnerable places you can be. The True Listener not only draws out, the True Listener has expectations for transparency while using care to draw out your thoughts but also draw you up. Many people are afraid of their own thoughts or being alone with their thoughts and no other distractions. I think we tend to fear the worst expecting to make a discovery that can’t be undiscovered. The True Listener boosts your confidence as you are no longer alone on the quest. 

This is not to say that the point of conversation is mere self-discovery. What is being emphasized is that there really is great influence to be found in listening. Not pausing waiting for your turn to speak. True Listening makes room for understanding and meaningful exchange and connection. Without adequate space for listening, you run the risk of engaging in dialog where each voice seeks dominance or is superficial.

Baxter talks about such communication as “dialogic contraction” (Baxter, 2011, p. 9). This contraction runs the risk of “a discursive playing field so unequal that all but one monologic, authoritative discourse is silenced” (Baxter 2011, p. 9). Some notions of influence or “influencers” often hinge upon one’s ability to exert authoritative monologic discourse. 

True influence, lasting influence, depends more upon the draw than a push. 

What might this mean for social media influencing? It means there is a place for social media messaging which is evocative. It can be easy to generate messages which spark reactions. Reactions are short-lived. They may not ever rise above the guttural to a place of pre-cognitional, let alone cognitional. This means sharing messages that interact with unarticulated interests, desires, or questions. Curiosity is a powerful draw, and curiosity is not titillation. 

What might this mean for organizational leadership? It means there is a place for True Listening. “Shaping” others is just as much about helping them take shape rather than trying to make them do what you think they should be or do. It also means doing the work of cultivating where this kind of valuable influence can take place. Depending upon position - manager/subordinate - too often boils down to a preferred personality type that seeks to establish hierarchical good as though that is identical to an organization’s good. 

When organizational leaders make hierarchical good and organizational good identical, this is where dialogic contraction occurs. Not only has leadership failed to listen, not listening has become the design. So when a “subordinate” voices a differing perspective, there is no feedback loop to inform and allow for course correction. In particularly toxic situations, a leader will perceive the differing perspective as a threat by virtue of it being different. Influence, in this situation, becomes an exertion of will to stifle or silence another. 

Discussing values becomes an unavoidable part of determining the kind of influence one seeks to have with others. Is influence merely a matter of getting others to behave or believe in ways which correspond to your will? Or does influencing require something deeper? Instead of placing expectations for others, influencing requires something of the influencer. The influencer must value the other person, be patient to do the work of seeing that person not only for who they currently are but who they are capable of becoming. 

Constructive influence cannot be monologic. Mutual listening is necessary. Influence which depends upon self-assertion or exertion of power over another is parasitic in nature. The good of one comes at the expense of the other. Constructive influence, however, leads to building up and a more expansive good than the “good” of momentary acts of compliance-inducing actions which are fleeting, whose goals are forgotten but whose tactics, sadly, are not.

Baxter, L. A.  (2011).  Voicing relationships: A dialogic perspective.  Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

[iamanartichoke]

This is neither eloquent nor organized. I’m very frustrated and I just need to get things off my chest. 

Please do not reblog this post. 

Cut for anti-Ragnarok discourse, pro-Ragnarok discourse, the Ragnarok discourse war, mention of Thorki, and general venting. 

I’m not using tags bc I don’t want this post to show up in them. Very sorry and if any of these things is one of your blacklists, please keep scrolling.

Yesterday, I read a fic.

I was wandering through some of the Thorki content on twitter, and followed a link to one of the big bang fics, bc it was a human AU and das my jam.

I didn’t recognize the author’s name. The fic was extremely well-written, though: lots of feels, beautiful narration, a sweet ending balanced with a lot of sadness. It was one of those fics that gave me a lump in my throat.

I was only going to leave kudos, but then I figured I’d take the extra five seconds and leave a comment, bc we all know how much authors like comments. I mean, I’d rather someone leave a comment than kudos, especially if the fic really affected them.I get it and I gotchu, fam. 

Anyway, so I left a comment and proceeded to click on the author’s profile to see what else they’ve written. As you do.

I recognized their AO3 icon, even though I didn’t recognize the name. I’d seen them around on some Ragnarok wank on tumblr. I went to double-check, and it was the same user, and also they’d blocked me.

I do not know this person. I have never spoken to this person. Yet they’ve gone out of their way to block me, most likely bc I associate with the anti-Ragnarok crowd. This happens to me a lot. I’ve even had a couple of former mutuals unfollow and block me (without saying anything to me) and those felt like punches to the gut.

I understand not wanting to see content that you don’t like or that upsets you. Everyone has the right to block whomever they wish. But I can’t deny that getting blocked like that – by someone I don’t know, let alone interact with – fucking hurts. I know it’s not that deep but I can admit it. It’s a shitty feeling and it’s hard not to take it personally.

It’s not really about this particular person at all, although it’s a shame bc they’re a good writer I probably would have followed otherwise. But this entire anti/pro Ragnarok war has gone so far and it’s exhausting. I stayed pretty neutral for as long as I could. 

And here’s the thing. My observations, both from being neutral and also being someone who, despite often being quietly blocked, tends to fly under the radar are this:

The majority of the negativity comes from the pro side.

Look, I side with and agree with the anti side on this one. I can admit, however, that sometimes it gets tiresome to see posts get turned into Ragnarok criticism or tiresome to see more posts on my dash about this that or another thing that sucks about Ragnarok and why. It, like anything, can be tiring.

But I also see that the anti side largely does its best to keep to itself. The pro side complained about the Ragnarok tags, so the anti side made an anti tag, and the pros still come into it to complain. The anti side will post their discussions and criticisms and they largely just circulate within the same group of people. The discussions are almost always criticisms on the source material (ie, the film) and not about anyone who enjoys it.

Now, maybe I don’t see everything. Though I don’t think I’m biased just bc I agree with the anti side – in fact, it was these attributes that made me take a closer look at what they were saying bc maybe they had a point after all. I don’t follow every anti Ragnarok user, but I do follow a lot. I can’t say personal attacks and whatever never happen - but, I hardly ever see them.

That’s not the case with the pro side. I don’t think I follow many from that side, but I see so much negativity from them. It’s like this kind of underhanded negativity that I’m not quite sure how to explain. It’s tonal negativity. 

I mean, sometimes it’s blatant. Name-calling (Loki stans, lackeys, pathetic, delusional, and racist come to mind) is an example. But more than that, there’s this collective tone among the pro side that smacks of condescension and I can’t stand it.

They make fun of the “dissertations” that have been written.

They always include an “lol” or laugh emoji or something to express that they’re not the ones taking this seriously.

They fall back on saying they don’t care about a two-year-old movie.

They’re laughing and making fun and at the same time acting like they’re so above it all.

They want us to just shut up already.

What it comes down to is this: it’s not just a matter of being able to agree to disagree because the pro side actively acts offended that the antis are even having these critical discussions, even if the antis have gone out of their way to not involve the rest of the fandom at all.

(Again, this is not every pro person, but the majority. Tone does matter online, and the overall tone of the pro side is not positive. I say this from a mostly neutral place.)

And here’s a thing about “oh my god, it came out two years ago, get over it!” Yeah, it came out two years ago. So fucking what? You guys are still engaging with it, via fics and headcanons and art. How old the movie is doesn’t matter when you’re having fun with it, but when someone wants to engage with it in a (valid) critical way that you don’t like? No. That’s unacceptable. That’s pathetic. That’s being a lackey. Get over it.

Even writing this, I know that things are much worse for others than they are for me. I get stealth blocked; others are called out by name in public posts, receive anon hate, and are actively targeted.

It’s just, this shit is so fucking toxic to this fandom and it honestly needs to stop. Both sides need to not only stop engaging one another, but also stop acknowledging one another. We get it: you either like the movie or you don’t.

Let people do their own thing. Don’t be fucking obnoxious. If you disagree and genuinely want to talk about it, then try to remember there’s a person on the other side of the screen and be civil. If you disagree and don’t want to talk about it, then just fucking don’t.

If you see a post you disagree with, scroll past. And, yes, block the person if you need to (and sometimes it might be me that needs blocking and I recognize my hurt feelings are my own personal problem, not whoever else’s).

There are a lot of movies in the MCU that are not perfect. (Btw, it baffles me a little to get hated on for my stance on Ragnarok, when I am so much more vocal [and emotionally invested] in hating the Russos and IW/Endgame – but, whatever.) There are a lot of interpretations of characters that are different. There are a lot of people who project their own identity or issues or whatever onto any particular character that resonates (and that’s okay!) and there are a lot of people who don’t project but still identify with a particular character (and that’s okay, too).

Stop judging whether someone is a “real” fan of a character/franchise or not. Just because someone isn’t engaging with the source material in the way you are, and just because they don’t see it in the same way that you do, does not make them wrong. (Yes, this applies to the pro side, too. None of them are wrong or less valid for enjoying and even stanning the movie.) It doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else here. 

Acting otherwise is honestly going to kill this fandom. Because it bleeds over. Fics will have less readers, bc they don’t want to interact with something posted by someone they dislike (or who blocked them). There’s less sharing of things like art and headcanons and content. People unfollow and block each other, people are having to watch what they say, people are losing friends (and potential friends) bc they may be a great person but they don’t agree with you about fucking Ragnarok.

I came to tumblr bc it was the only place where not only could I find other people who loved Loki as much as I did, but it was the only place where I could express that. Express it in fic, in headcanons, in meta. Being creative and starting dialogues and just interacting. I wish we could get that vibe back.

I wish none of this bothered me so much.