#apologist discourse

[fannedandflawless]

Selective Loyalty and the Lily Problem

This post continues from my previous analysis, "WHO LIT THE MATCH?" — specifically section 5.) Loyalty Worn Two Ways, where I compared Lily Evans’ loyalty to that of Bellatrix Lestrange. The response to that post made it clear: we need to talk about Lily.

"She was written with strong loyalty." That’s what they say. But loyalty, when selectively applied, isn’t virtue — it’s comfort dressed as conviction.

Let’s talk about Lily Evans. The girl who stood up to bullies — sometimes. The girl who defended Severus — once. The girl who walked away — and never looked back.

🔨 The Double Standard No One Wants to Name

Lily called Severus’ Slytherin friends cruel when they hexed others.

"You think that’s funny?" she asked. "You think that’s all just a laugh?"

But when the Marauders hexed Severus in front of a crowd — dangled him upside-down, flashed his underwear to the world, humiliated him — it was brushed off as mischief. She scolded James, sure. Called him a “bullying toerag.” But she didn’t disown him. Didn’t stop speaking to him. She married him.

Why is one hex cruelty, and the other mischief? Why is one unforgivable, and the other… flirtation?

When Severus defended a fellow Slytherin, it became proof he was on the wrong path. When James hexed Severus, it was part of the journey to redemption.

Lily’s moral compass didn’t shatter — it shifted. And Severus saw it happen in real time.

⸻

🎭 The Performance of Principle

It wasn’t just the bullying. It was how she measured it.

Lily had the self-righteousness of someone who meant well — but only when it was safe to mean well.

She never went after Sirius, who cast the spells. She never called out Remus, who stood by and did nothing. She never looked James in the eye and said, “You humiliated my best friend and I won’t stand for it.”

Instead, she turned to Severus, and said:

“You’re choosing the wrong people.”

They all did. And yet only one was punished for it.

⸻

🔍 She Forgave James — But Never Severus

This is where the comparison starts to sting.

Lily was willing to believe James could change. But not Severus.

She gave grace to the boy who tortured her friend — but not to the friend who broke under pressure. She extended second chances to the boy she dated — but cut off the one who needed her most.

That’s not just a mistake. That’s selective loyalty.

⸻

⚠️ Not Villainy — But Still a Problem

This post isn’t about demonising Lily Evans. She was young. She was flawed. She was human.

But so was Severus.

And for a fandom that preaches kindness and forgiveness, it’s strange how selective that kindness becomes when his name enters the room.

⸻

♾️ Coming Full Circle

When Bellatrix was loyal, she was honest about it. When Lily was loyal, she chose who earned it — and who didn’t. One was mad. One was adored. But both were uncompromising.

Maybe that’s what makes it hurt.

Lily believed in goodness. Just… not always in the people who needed her to.

⸻

Related post: WHO LIT THE MATCH? Coming up next: The Devotion That Never Grew Up ⸻

If you found this post stirring, you may also like… A collection of emotional deep-dives into Severus Snape—the man who endured, unravelled, and remained:

Severus Snape: Widower of the Living

The Virgin Theory: Severus Snape, and the Sanctity of Unlived Intimacy

The Dignity of Suffering in Silence: Snape as the Ghost of a Living Man

[pheracy]

Y'all think Jayce created those mechanical artificial fingers for Ximena just like Jinx created her own? What if that was Jayce's first creation and one of the reasons he got interested in engineering 😭

[a-secret-bolton-vampire]

CW: Rape, incest, CSA

This is actually not a strictly A Song of Ice and Fire post here, but it overlaps in some ways so I figured I'd write this.

Anyone who has not read the web serials Worm or Ward and wishes to avoid spoilers, don't read this post:

Disclaimer out of the way, I've found striking parallels between fandom reaction for both A Song of Ice and Fire and Parahumans regarding how characters who survived sexual abuse view their abusers, in a dangerously disturbing way.

For this I'm going to specifically be using the examples of Aeron and Theon Greyjoy from A Song of Ice and Fire to compare and contrast to Victoria Dallon in Ward. All three were psychologically and sexually tormented by their abusers during the course of the series. Theon is a young adult by the time Ramsay gets his hands on him, but Aeron and Victoria were both children when they were molested by family members so they will be the main two characters to compare.

In the case of Euron and Aeron, there are a (sadly very vocal) minority who are ready to dismiss Euron's danger to others by specifically using Aeron's abuse against him. Sure, Euron is evil and horrifically abused him and Urrigon when they were children, and it is understandable that Aeron would be mortified of Euron. After all, he tries to warn people about Euron repeatedly, only for his attempts to stop him to all fail.

The response by this section of the fandom to claims of Euron being built up as a major threat are essentially that Aeron's trauma is in the way of his ability to perceive Euron objectively. Is Euron actually as dangerous as Aeron claims? You can say the same for Theon and Ramsay. After all, Theon is half-mad warning Stannis about Ramsay, and Stannis is bringing some Rational Realness to the forefront by saying "what do I have to fear him for?"

Since GRRM is never releasing another A Song of Ice and Fire book it's hard to say what he intends but he could definitely intend for this to be the case. That said, there is a story featuring a similar character that is completed. Ward!

Victoria Dallon's sister, Amy, is a cape with healing abilities, though as the series progresses we know that healing is just the tip of the iceberg; she can change the biological makeup of living things. Amy is adopted, and has never felt any love from anyone other than Victoria. Amy develops deep romantic love for her sister, however, and then begins a series of bad decisions that just serve to deepen her already deep mental breakdown.

Amy proceeds to; alter Victoria's brain chemistry to give her compulsive romantic thoughts about her, then following healing Victoria after a battle, she spends several days alone with her, during which she repeatedly rapes her, erases her memories of said rapes, until her mental health deteriorates even further and she is unable to use her power properly and turns Victoria into the Wretch: a mass of flesh and limbs and heads, rather than anything actually human.

Then Victoria spends 2 years in a mental institution, stuck in a body she hates, all the while fighting the compulsions Amy left in place. When she finally returns Victoria to normal at the end of Worm, it is actually against her will and not because she had a change of heart or got more confident.

Then we get to Ward, where Victoria is the main POV. As is very obvious, Victoria is struggling with extremely intense PTSD, mentioning Amy is enough to trigger a dissociative flashback, and she wants absolutely nothing to do with her anymore: and fucking rightfully so.

Victoria also warns people about Amy. She warns her therapist to try to reach out to Amy before she hurts someone else, she warns literally anyone who will listen about Amy and what she might end up doing. We may not know what it is that Ramsay and Euron end up doing, but we do know what Amy does.

She refuses all help and doubles down on bad decisions, enslaves people with her powers, later imprisons and torments and touches Victoria again against her will, and becomes the dictatorial monster in charge of an entire planet. Victoria's warnings prove to be extremely prophetic and extremely real.

Now lets get into some discourse shall we?

Despite Amy being a rapist who rapes her sister, enslaves others via mind control, and literally never once improving as a person or acknowledging that her actions even caused harm, there are still those who think Amy isn't at fault. Some might find this post, but I don't really care. Amy is at fault for things Amy did. Victoria is not at fault for hugging her sister like a normal human being when Amy is upset, Amy didn't do her a favour healing her because then she just raped her and then really couldn't fix her back to a human body, and Amy isn't absolved of these sins because she healed a lot of people.

Essentially, Victoria is sometimes blamed for being raped by her sister, the rapist, despite Amy canonically being a manipulative lying liar rapist.

Okay so that doesn't seem to related to what the fandom says with Euron and Ramsay, right? After all, we don't really blame Aeron for being molested and Theon for also being sexually tortured and abused by Ramsay, do we? There are factors as to why that is (mostly that Aeron and Theon are men and Victoria is a woman; if you don't buy this argument look at people who say Cersei deserved to be sexually assaulted by Robert or try to use "the times" as an excuse to overlook Daenerys also being raped by Drogo) but there is an overlap here.

Amy being able to get away with that she did only to go on and hurt so many other people is a meta-commentary on the way survivors of sexual abuse are disbelieved or blamed for what happened to them. Naturally, those real like abusers end up going to abuse other people too. Fuck, even in the fandom, Victoria is still fucking blamed for things that she had absolutely no choice in the matter.

Which leads back to Theon and Aeron. Yes, trauma impacts the way you remember traumatic events, and that means objectivity can get lost at times. It can for Victoria and Theon and Aeron. But that trauma, the dissociation, memory problems, all of these together, are there for a reason. And that's because someone came along, ruined another persons life for their own pleasure and satisfaction, and then got away with it.

Victoria warned the world about what Amy would do, and she was unfortunately correct. Theon and Aeron warned others about Ramsay and Euron. Survivors should be believed, and not be dismissed. After all, it isn't our fault that we got abused. People may hear things about Euron or Amy or Ramsay, but the people who truly know who they are---what they are capable of, what they are actually like---are the people they abused.

So yeah, it's kinda fucking lame when I hear someone go "Stannis gonna prove Theon wrong with facts and logic" as if he doesn't, I don't know, have insight into Ramsay's psychology in ways Stannis doesn't. Same with Euron. Same with Amy.

Also fucking read Ward it hurts as intensely as it kicks ass.

[qiu-yan]

sensitive topic incoming

not a haterpost i promise.

sect leader yao is not a reliable source

further explanation/hypothesizing:

it happened exactly as sect leader yao said: self-explanatory. the version of events preferred by jiggy antis

he mercy-killed rusong: maybe rusong was already showing signs of a life-altering disorder as a result of the incest. or maybe jiggy just felt that, if the incest information ever came out, rusong would be doomed to a life of suffering in a heavily prejudiced society. jiggy himself had spent his entire life suffering and getting kicked around due to his own proximity to society's pariahs/taboos, so perhaps he felt that he could not subject his son to the same miserable existence. thus, jiggy gave rusong a more peaceful end, before (in jiggy's mind) society could force rusong to suffer.

he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this is really only a "kill" under a utilitarian moral framework. by this explanation, maybe jiggy found out in advance that someone was planning to kill rusong; however, for any of the other reasons listed here, jiggy decided to do nothing and allow the assassination to happen. thus jiggy would consider himself guilty of allowing rusong's death to happen through inaction.

he did it to justify eliminating an opponent of the watchtowers: maybe the advancement of the watchtower project, which jiggy knew would make society a safer place, had hit a deadlock because of a particularly stubborn opponent. so jiggy killed rusong and framed the opponent in order to engineer a situation in which his annihilation of the opponent would be entirely socially sanctioned.

and here is where the utilitarian arguments come in. perhaps jiggy knew that the watchtower project would improve the lives of millions of people and would make society as a whole safer. and he saw that one political opponent as the final major barrier. and jiggy could think of no other way to get rid of this guy. so jiggy weighed the lives of those millions of people against his one son, and concluded those millions of strangers were weightier; his son became his iphigenia.

of course, this is still a rather unhinged plan to just come up with on your own, so perhaps a better explanation of events is this reasoning paired with the "he allowed rusong to die through inaction" series of events.

rusong was killed by political opponents and jiggy blamed himself: now we reach the "he didn't do it" section of the potential explanations. jiggy has a habit of claiming kills he didn't strictly perform himself; so long as the chain of cause and effect can somehow be traced to somewhere near him eventually, jiggy will claim credit for someone's death. this is how jiggy takes credit for the death of jin zixuan: even though [novel canon] no one forced wei wuxian to lose control of wen ning and no one forced wen ning to attack jin zixuan, jiggy still acts as if he can call himself jin zixuan's killer, simply because he sent jin zixuan to wei wuxian's location.

jiggy, in pursuing the watchtower project, aroused a lot of public anger. jiggy made himself, and by extension his wife and his child, the political enemies of many, and thus political targets as well. thus, if an enemy targets the life of jin rusong because they are jiggy's enemy, jiggy is entirely justified in feeling as if rusong's death is his fault. after all, if he hadn't pursued the watchtower project, then maybe rusong would still be alive.

jiggy said "he had to die" as a Cope: losing your son sucks. perhaps jiggy, in the despair following his son's death, tried to cope with the new reality by telling himself that rusong would have had to die anyways, because he was an incest baby. if rusong was always slated to die, then the fact that rusong is now dead can now be survived. thus, "rusong had to die" becomes an emotional coping mechanism for jiggy.

no, jiggy himself is uncertain if he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this one is a a bit fanciful but bear with me here. on one hand, jiggy loves his wife and son. on the other hand, jiggy is horrified by his marriage with his wife and by the existence of his son, because his wife is also his sister and his son is the product of incest. jiggy lives with not only this horror but also the constant fear of exposure, because if this information ever got out, the lives of himself, his wife, and his son would all be over.

rusong's growth thus becomes a source of dread, not hope: every day lived brings the possibility of rusong developing some disorder or condition that eventually proves the incest. is it not possible that jiggy, living every day under such fear, might come to believe that things would be better if rusong stopped growing older? if rusong died--then gone too would be the evidence of the incest, would it not?

now along comes the political opponent who assassinates rusong. jiggy does not see it coming and jiggy is thus unable to stop it. but afterwards, upon beholding the corpse of his son, what does jiggy feel? rage? despair? no--relief! he feels relief! though he also grieves, the constant fear shrouding his entire life has, for once, lifted!

but if jiggy is relieved by the death of his son, what does this imply? can jiggy truly say, with full confidence, that he did not see the assassination coming? can he really say, with heaven and earth as his witnesses, that his failure to stop the assassination was not to some degree a choice? is there truly no small part of him that did in fact see the assassination coming--yet, knowing it would be so relieving for him, simply chose to do nothing?

but if jiggy did not see the assassination coming at all--if rusong's death truly cannot be pinned on jiggy at all--then what does that say about jiggy's power? about jiggy's safety? jiggy being innocent of killing through inaction means that jinlintai really is somewhere assassins can penetrate into. then jiggy's son really was killed by a force jiggy had no way of stopping. then, in this situation, jiggy really was powerless.

you can remove the ambiguity and argue the case either way: jiggy knew about the assassination and let it happen, jiggy legitimately knew nothing and could not have stopped the assassination. but the ambiguity makes this scenario more interesting to me. jiggy lives for the rest of his days uncertain if he chose to allow his son to die through inaction, or if he really was just weak enough to fail to protect his son. maybe jiggy's memories of the incident even manage to start distorting after a while, implying either one or the other depending on jiggy's own mental situation.

thus, when jiggy says "rusong had to die," he's uncertain if he's justifying his actions or delusionally coping with a reality he had no hand in making. when jiggy says "i killed my son," he's uncertain if he's even telling the truth or not.

ah well. this is basically original fiction at this point. it's just a potential scenario.

anyways, these are just a few scenarios based on various meta and fanfics of this subject ive read over the past few months. you can probably come up with all sorts of explanations. whatever you come up with, though, should be better than just blindly taking sect leader yao at his word.

[kinnbig]

in relation to this tweet from Jojo, which I love - I’m amazed by the number of posts I’ve seen suggesting that Nick is an innocent victim of manipulation from Boston. no one is saying Boston isn’t messy as fuck, but he’s been so clear about his feelings and what he is/isn’t looking for. he’s told Nick multiple times that while their relationship might develop in the future, he is only interested in casual sex for now - and Nick has willingly agreed to this kind of casual, non-exclusive relationship. Boston has absolutely no obligation to be ‘faithful’ to Nick, or to tell him which of his friends he’s attracted to. Nick wanting things to be different doesn’t make it so.

violating privacy and boundaries is clearly a theme with Nick - he expresses interest in Boston by leaving suggestive photos on Boston’s phone, having already gone through (and jerked off to) Boston’s personal pictures. bugging his car takes it a step further.

(I think there’s something to be said about the way Boston’s promiscuity and open sexuality seems to make his right to privacy seem trivial or less important than that of someone more reserved - it’s fine that Nick jerked off to Boston’s personal photos, because Boston slept with him after; Nick only secretly recoded Boston having sex because Boston led him on; Boston’s a whore, so it doesn’t matter, he was asking for it… but that’s a post for another day)

this isn’t to say that Boston is an innocent victim of Nick’s behaviour either - my point is that categorising them simply as Manipulator and Victim is reductive to the complexity of both characters. they’re both interesting, fucked up, flawed people, and that’s what makes them compelling as characters - and what makes it fun to watch as they make each other worse.

[zukosdualdao]

I’m amazed that az*la stans are so upset that she’s being portrayed as a school bully. like, in what world would az*la not be a bully? did we watch the same show? is it amnesia?

anon, i should preface this by saying that i’m not super familiar with anything that happened in the new comic (i think?) other than a few spare details i’ve heard about on the fringes. i’m someone who reads supplementary content at my own pace, and sometimes never, and tbh, nothing that’s been added to the world of atla recently has been of much interest to me. (that’s not a gripe at you at all for asking this; just an acknowledgment that i don’t have all the details.)

that being said: this doesn’t surprise me at all. i don’t think it’s so much that they’ve forgotten what she was like in the show, but that a big part of what many azula stans do when talking about her is actively reframe her role in the story and make her out to be the ultimate victim of… well, everyone. and she wasn’t. she was ozai’s victim, certainly, but she was not the wronged party in the vast majority of her relationships. but in order to justify everything she does (so that they can feel okay about relating to her)* they end up making her out to be. it’s not at all surprising to me that they would have trouble reconciling that with her being portrayed as a bully (which she’s ALWAYS been portrayed as, as you say.)

* this is not me saying it’s inherently bad to relate to azula. she’s a deeply emotionally resonant character for many; while less so than others, there are ways in which i myself relate to her. and that’s not the issue. what IS an issue is that many people relate to her and because of that don’t want to admit that she is deeply flawed or was ever in the wrong, either because they don’t want to be thought of poorly for liking and relating to her (and i wish i could impress upon those people that it’s literally fine and cathartic to relate to a villain, you can do that without justifying everything they do). or because they want an outlet to say that azula never did anything wrong so they don’t have to take ownership of areas of their own life where they’ve caused harm/should reflect and grow. (and again! literally everyone has those areas! it’s not a bad thing. the bad thing is refusing to acknowledge it.)

[brsb4hls]

Maybe the 'humanization' of iwtv's amc version threw people off a bit.

I know I felt a certain kind of disconnect due to a horror show looking like a gay hipster drama.

But the show is still about monsters.

In the actual sense.

As in 'not human'.

And monsters act differently and have a different 'moral codex' if you can call it that.

So constantly pitting them against each other in a way where one party is measured by human standards makes no sense.

They are all equally horrible and by vampire standards that makes sense.

I get everyone is rooting for their fave and has therefore more compassion for one specific set of trauma, I know I do, but the discourse about who is the evil one is still extremely off.

Like, we should be looking from a human perspective, so everyone is evil, since they would all kill us.

[hikaaa-bi]

i find it funny how people praise the owl house for breaking the trend of redeeming the villain when the show instead took the laziest path with dealing with their villain. i mean, i get it. not all villains need to be redeemed and sometimes, it's just fine to kill them off or defeat them. no character is irredeemable, but sometimes the point is that people refuse to change.

but what they did with belos was just lazy. he didn't need to be redeemed, sure, but his ending was way too anti-climactic. he was such a complex character to just be labelled as Pure Evil™ and killed off at the end. he didn't need to be redeemed, but he at least deserved to be acknowledged as the three-dimensional complex character that he is. he wasn't just a disney-esque villain who did everything for power and had no depth to his personality. he was a symbol of religious trauma and how it affects people. he was a horrible person but also a sympathetic one, because i can only imagine how harmful growing up in the puritan era would have been.

like i said before, the show being cancelled is not an excuse. i was so excited to see all the religious and spiritual themes in belos's past, and all the theories that fans were coming up with. hell, some fans did a better job of representing belos than the show ever did. i just feel like it was a whole bag of lost potential. belos could have been one of the most insanely complex and well-written villains but the creators of the owl house wants to impress its fans, so they pull a "haha we're not like other shows because we can't sympathize with the villain!" newsflash: you don't need to redeem the villain in order to portray them as sympathetic. azula from avatar and simon from infinity train are good examples of sympathetic villains/antagonists who don't get redeemed.

it's even more ridiculous considering how rushed and badly written lilith's arc was, even though she cursed her sister, tried to kill a literal child, and almost got her sister turned to stone. you'd think if the show despises redemptions so much, they wouldn't give lilith a lazy and rushed redemption arc like that, only to render her useless for the rest of the show.

[antispopausandstuff]

while Adora faced the full brunt of Catra's abuse for her entire life, there is a consistent detail that i don't think either the animators or writers noticed when it comes to Catra.

it might not be 100% continuous, but, often, when Catra is demeaning // manipulating // abusing someone, the person will be cornered, whether very literally or almost literally.

now, it's really, really easy to see this with Adora, as she's comparatively the most victimized. in every situation, whether it be in a literal or metaphorical sense, Catra is always putting her in a situation that only she can control. there is no equality involved, no 'takes two to tango', she is taking the lead and forcing Adora to dance along with her, or be damned.

but, wouldn't ya know it, abusers don't only have it out for their main source of power and ego.

when she comes across Entrapta, the scientist is quite literally restrained against a wall and forced to listen to Catra's lies. of course, it turns out Entrapta wasn't restrained at all, but it's not like Catra knew that until she saw it. in her eyes, that was what was happening and she took advantage of it. either way, it worked.

Scorpia ends up being no exception to this rule, despite how much... 'better' Catra is when she's around her. if she was 'pinned', prior to s3, then it was more metaphorical than it was physical, unless i'm misremembering things. this is likely because, strangely, Catra was a lot more honest with Scorpia. of course, it was about her disliking towards her, but more honest nonetheless.

but, during and after s3, most of the worst of Catra's abuse towards Scorpia is when she is against a wall or unable to properly move.

after shocking Entrapta and sending her to death, she pins Scorpia to the wall by threatening to do it to her next, pointing the baton at her.

in s4, when Scorpia tries to talk to Catra about Entrapta the first time, she is then actually pinned by being shoved back and intimidated by Catra's claws.

when trying to talk about Entrapta for a second, while also trying to support and encourage Catra, she's unable to move as Catra is towering over her, and they're on a platform where she is much more likely to fall over if she moves from her spot.

the only time Scorpia isn't held to anything is when she leaves. it's a long hallway, where she's on one side and Catra's on the other. unless a fight ensues, there's no real way for Catra to hurt her at the distance they're at. she can walk away.

and this happens with Lonnie, too.

there's only one time Lonnie is alone ( on-screen ), and when she is, Catra kicks her. because she was angry and Lonnie was someone she could take it out on.

and Lonnie is against a 'wall' in that small room. they're controls, iirc, but it's not like she'd have been able to do anything with those. not against Catra. even if there was an alarm, would anyone have really cared that a superior officer abused their subordinate? in the Horde?

but every other time Lonnie isn't alone? Catra is still degrading, but not nearly as much. or, at least, not without a consequence.

one particular scene is when she shouts at Lonnie that she's pathetic. she's callous, bitchy, just being cruel for the sake of it ( or cuz stress ig, boohoo ), and when Lonnie pushes back, she's about to claw her. but then Kyle steps in and tells her to stop.

the biggest difference is that Lonnie wasn't alone. Kyle and Rogelio were with her. in that instance, Catra was the one 'pinned'. while it's not likely anyone else would've cared about Lonnie, they did, for better or for worse.

Scorpia and Adora had no one else to turn to.

Catra's at her cruelest when her victims are alone.

like an abuser.

[housemdork]

does anyone else have big thoughts about that big thief x hilson edit that’s making the rounds on twitter? or is it just me

[jellybellyblimp]

I’m really tired of the notion of “x character defender” or “apologist” or whatever. Like burn that shit out of your fucking vocabulary it has killed your critical thinking skills. Liking characters isn’t about defending them or apologizing for them or even thinking they are remotely nice people because they are not real people. Your enjoyment of them is not the same as liking or interacting with a real human being. My actual favorite type of character is the failed revolutionary, specifically the kind that identifies a real problem with the system but who’s solution is misguided to down right evil (Anakin Skywalker, Luke Castellan, Gale Hawthorne, Morgana and Mordred, etc.). They are usually the villain and they do reprehensible things, but the point of their stories is so often that they were right. Right Revolution, Wrong Methodology. But I am not defending or apologizing for their actions, I simply find them fascinating. I want to discuss them, theorize, explain, explore.

I think the current “Queen of Dying on the Alter of Discourse” right now is Shauna from Yellowjackets. Who does awful shit like truly unforgivable, but is also a scared kid who lost her best friend and had to give birth alone in the wilderness and bury her own baby. The magnitude of fucked up shit that has happened to her is immense, and finding her interesting enough to be your favorite is not a moral standpoint. Liking her and wanting to discuss the nuances of her choices and behavior is not a reflection of your morality, it’s a sign that you’re interested in critically analyzing the media you consume. We cry for more morally grey nuanced characters because we are drawn to that complexity, but as soon as we have it people insist on throwing temper tantrums because liking a characters must equate to condoning their actions.

You are burying yourself in useless terminology like apologist and defender and it is robbing you of engaging critically in the media you consume. You wanna discuss the death of media literacy? I’m pointing at least some of you at fandom discourse as a compounding factor. Fandom is beautiful in many ways and can absolutely be a space to learn and grow and analyze but equally it robs some of you of any agency or willingness to think for yourself.

[underwaterspiderbird]

there’s no such thing as “light” or “dark” sides of the force, there never was. its all just different expressions & experiences of the same energy field. “falling to the dark side” is but a religious scare tactic akin to “you’re good and are going to heaven if you believe what we believe but if you don’t you’re gonna burn in hell for all eternity”, no amount of palpatine’s generation of fuckery, the psychos within the sith that could also be found within any group of ppl, or jedi worship will ever convince me otherwise.

suck it bitches

[lgbtlunaverse]

So I made a Mistake and binged all of SU over the course of two days after seeing a handful of scattered episodes of it as a kid and like... I knew ahead of time that there was an unholy amount of discourse about it and coming out of the show I thought I'd succesfully identified all the controversial topics, only to come back to the internet get hit over the head with a giant mallet labeled "Lapis lazuli is an abuser"

[ameiniateria]

consistently I'm a little annoyed about the rift between c!Tommy and c!Dream fans in this fandom. like I like your guy too! I think he's great! actually, I think our guys have a lot in common! I'd love to see your take on this really messy, complicated relationship!

oh wait you think c!Dream is a pure evil, completely heartless villain that exists to do nothing but torment c!Tommy, who is of course a sweet innocent uwu baby who did absolutely nothing wrong, and therefore deserves to be murdered twice, imprisoned, isolated, starved, and tortured with no control over his own autonomy (but prison was actually way better than exile, which was the worst thing that ever happened to anyone on the dsmp. obviously. because c!Tommy tried to kill himself. yeah. don't think about c!Dream walking into a wall of lava and burning himself to death multiple times because he was so incredibly desperate for human connection. that was to escape, right? c!Dream couldn't possibly feel real emotions -- that would mean he's a person that -- oh no -- deserves compassion despite the terrible things he did. oh no -- that would make him -- gasp -- a lot like c!Tommy!) and actually he deserved more than that. he was never actually punished. c!Dream always won (citation needed).

also, c!Tommy was a child. do I have to say that again. well, I will anyway. c!Tommy was a child. c!Tommy was a child. c!Tommy was a child.

great.

[marshmallowwitharubberband]

For some reason, my recommendations dash has been filled with Jiang Cheng discourse (both pro and anti) and I found it very weird until I realized it's actually the same two accounts indirectly throwing rocks at each other.

Like,

blog 1: Jiang Cheng has stinky feet

blog 2: so now antis are saying Jiang Cheng has stinky feet, but they forget that...

or

blog 2: Jiang Cheng would donate to rescue shelters

blog 1: I can't stand apologists claiming Jiang Cheng would donate to rescue shelters when he...

And it just keeps going with both talking like they're rebutting to a whole group of people when it's actually just them.

I personally find it very funny and I wonder if it's on purpose to avoid direct confrontation or if they also haven't realized they've been having beef with the same person all this time.

[bluedalahorse]

Periodically I wonder what Young Royals fandom could have been if bad faith anon discourse about so many characters and plot points hadn’t been so Everywhere during the fandom’s heyday.