#because it was an inherently impossible standard to reach and they are inherently imperfect with their dog teeth and claws

[hella1975]

right so dog imagery dabi is so insane and I tried to look up dog poems and all that came up was laika so yeah. ‘I know I will die but that is fine’ ‘she had so little time left to live’ ‘we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, knowing that she would not survive the flight’ ‘and they call me laika, but I'd just like to say that I was born little curly and I'll die with that name’ ‘the more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. we shouldn't have done it... we did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog’ ‘surely they'll come to get me. surely they didn't love me all that time for this’ ‘I'm a halfway thing, more bullet than dog’ ‘laika to ground control I miss you. if you would come out here and pet me I swear to dog I'll be good, never bark again’ ‘what you’re about to do will live on forever even though you’ll be dead and gone’ ‘I took the collar off I’m holding my own leash and walking myself outside this door. I don’t think I want to be a good dog anymore’ oh I’m feeling SICK he was raised to die they don’t expect him to come home they both quite literally BURNED UP! even a parachute would’ve shown that they cared. but they don’t. don’t sink in me with your dog teeth don’t sink in me with your dog teeth don’t sink in me with your dog teeth

once again me and aiaia remain on a very weird niche radio wave yet our frequencies are perfectly matched like YOU GET IT i went through sooo many title ideas before settling on dog teeth for the touya wip and like yeah it's the god's country ethel cain of it all but also there's a reason dog days is one of my top ethel songs ever like i fr see the word dog in media and lose my shit. dog imagery, specifically teeth, is so so compelling to me and laika is just the beginning. like touya is so laika coded he's a failed experiment he's an uncomfortable tragedy he wasn't worth the progress he accomplished he's out of sight out of mind. but it's more than that. dogs as the ultimate symbol of obedience, of submission, yet existing at once as symbols of aggression. we took this wild animal and made it palatable to the point its predecessors would tear it to shreds. we took this wild animal and filed down the claws and pulled out the canines and told it to sit and be good. sit and be good and be silent. we kill them when they bite. they are a lesser creature begging at the dinner table for attention. you walk a fine line between god and animal, dont sink into me with your dog teeth. i get mean when im nervous like a bad dog. they are animals burdened with our own moral system that we forced on them but they are animals and i think the fascination i have with dog teeth as a theme specifically is that they are the proof of it. a dog can lick your hand and sit when told, it can be good, but inside its mouth are teeth made for tearing. even a good dog bites. even a good dog kills. sometimes they do it in an attempt to be good, placing a bloody carcass at your feet. a dead bird, neck snapped, teeth stained red. they do not understand our human horror. they dont know why we're shouting. you must learn to love, to love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much as the violence of your own love. you must learn to be confused but never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your children and not know why. you must lose yourself wholly in activity; you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. you must learn how to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show your excitement too much or overplay your hand. if you want to be a dog, you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all. we forced upon them a language of love and never taught them fluency. they stutter over too-sharp teeth and mispronounce old instincts. we made it so the only thing that mattered was if they were a good dog or not, anything else was irrelevant. do not bite the hand that feeds you. do not question the person that owns you. and the tools that are the very essence of the real animal are pulled out. i will remove all my teeth because i want to remain kind despite my anger. spitting love past bloody gums, never ever getting enough to be sated.

[angels-heap]

Okay hello I feel like you are Wise and Know things... it’s kind of hard to explain but is it wrong to just... Enjoy Things? With all the HL pisscourse going around it’s making me nervous about liking things like TF2 and missing something critical and huge in the media I consume and being labelled as a bad person for doing that. ESPECIALLY for liking characters like GLaDOS or Wheatley from Portal. I want to just Enjoy Things but there’s guilt tied to not being critical about every single detail

Thanks for reaching out, friend, and I’m so sorry to hear the current nonsense has you feeling this way. I have a hunch you’re not alone, and although I don’t claim to have all the answers here, I hope hearing my thoughts on this helps alleviate some of that guilt. This got long and I’m not putting it under a cut because it’s important. 

The short answer to your question is no; it is not wrong to just enjoy things. You don’t have to constantly examine all your favorite media under a microscope and incessantly highlight or dwell on its faults to be a good person or a good consumer of media, and here are a few reasons why:

(CW for brief mentions of all the squicky/potentially triggering things that tend to come up in ship discourse conversations.)

1. It is virtually impossible to find a truly unproblematic piece of media.

And that’s okay! Media is both created and consumed by people, and people are notoriously imperfect and complex. Sometimes creators choose to explore dark or taboo themes that are always going to squick some people out, no matter how well (or poorly) they’re handled. Sometimes content creators are actually terrible people who deliberately try to perpetuate their messed-up ideas through media. Sometimes creators’ deeply internalized prejudices seep into a work in a way they may not even consciously realize. Sometimes consumers’ experiences or prejudices color the way they perceive a piece of media and may lead them to a very different interpretation than what the creators intended.

Point is, there are a lot of shades of gray here. We should always strive to do better as creators and consumers, but the goalposts for “perfection” are always moving.

There’s almost always going to be something about your favorite media—no matter how benign it is—that rubs some people the wrong way, or (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuates harmful stereotypes, or starts out okay but doesn’t age well down the line. Period. That’s an uncomfortable truth that we all have to sit with. But don’t despair, because…

2. It is still okay to engage with and enjoy media that you know is problematic. Even if it’s really problematic. For real. I promise. The media you consume does not determine your worth as a person. 

Since you specifically mentioned Valve games, I’ll start out by clarifying that (as of July 2020), Valve games and their fandoms are pretty benign overall. Perhaps in the future, more of the humor will start to age poorly, or Valve will make some extremely questionable design choices with their next game, or Gabe Newell will be outed as a prolific serial killer, or whatever, but for now, there’s really nothing about Valve games that should make the average person go, “holy shit, you’re into that?!” when you bring them up in polite company. (And anyone who insinuates otherwise re: Half Life shipping discourse is either very confused about the definition of certain words or is maliciously trying to stir up controversy.)

That said, everyone has a different threshold for what they do and don’t want to see in media, and those boundaries are totally valid! But it is absolutely possible to enjoy even notably problematic media (e.g., Game of Thrones, the new Star Wars sequels, old movies where the directors were huge assholes to the female cast members, etc.) without being a bad person or a bad social justice activist. Instead of rambling about that at length, I’m going to link you to this excellent blog post on the subject.

The big takeaway here is that you can love a piece of media while also acknowledging its faults. In fact, I’d argue that a key part of loving something is being able to think critically about it and trying to hold its creators to a higher standard whenever possible. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be constantly analyzing it or prefacing every single public acknowledgment of your love for it with an “I know this is problematic and I swear, I just like it for XYZ” disclaimer, because…

3. Tumblr’s black-and-white thinking about media consumption is not healthy, “normal,” or (usually) present to the same degree in other virtual or real-world spaces.

I think most of the people on Tumblr who seem to be on a constant (and ultimately futile; see point 1) quest to find the One True Unproblematic Media have good intentions. I really do. And I applaud them for actively trying to understand and un-learn their own biases while becoming critical consumers of media.

Unfortunately, for a bunch of complicated reasons I still don’t totally understand and won’t get into here, some online communities tend to take these things to such an extreme that, in their quest to create a safe and/or inclusive environment, they actually end up creating an even more hostile one. To reference the recent drama again, nowhere is that more apparent than with “pro-ship” vs. “anti-ship” discourse.

Basically, “pro-shippers” believe that fiction is entirely separate from reality and therefore, “problematic” content (up to and including p*dophilia, inc*st, noncon, etc.) has just as much of a right to exist as any other content; this makes some sense on a purely intellectual level, but in the real world, obviously things are much more complicated than that. “Anti-shippers,” on the other hand, claim to be specifically against the aforementioned Big Three Bad Things in theory, but in practice, they’re basically the fandom purity police; they strive to criticize and shut down any media or fandom activity that could be even remotely construed as problematic, because they seem to have a (perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately misguided) perception that discussing anything “bad” in fiction will glorify/condone/promote it in real life and that all creators of “bad” fiction are inherently malicious. Often, they’re willing to twist definitions and jump through some very strange hoops to justify why something is “bad.”

The truth lies somewhere between those two extremes; fiction absolutely can (and does) impact reality, but not in such a clear-cut cause-and-effect way. People can see or read about dark/complicated/problematic things without condoning or enjoying them in real life, and conversely, people can dislike even relatively benign things without having to have an extreme, profound reason for feeling that way. People can also enjoy “bad” media while being fully conscious of what’s wrong with it and taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t negatively influence them, or they may lack the knowledge/context to understand why something is “bad” at first and change how they engage (or don’t engage) as they learn. There’s a lot more nuance to this issue than Tumblr is willing to acknowledge, and as a result, a lot of innocent people who just want to enjoy things in peace get sucked into some truly absurd drama that can be really hard to deal with. And that sucks. A lot.

So, TL;DR: Almost all media is at least a little problematic, but that’s okay, because the media you like does not determine whether or not you’re a good person. (And especially if your primary interests are Valve games... you’re good, mate. Seriously.)

The fact that you’re even asking me this question shows me that you’re being a thoughtful, responsible consumer of media, and that’s all anyone can reasonably ask of you without being a gigantic hypocrite—because whether they’ll admit it or not, everybody who’s perpetuating this discourse both on and offline likes something “problematic.” It’s impossible not to, unless you live under a rock and consume exactly zero media. Take care, and try not to let the discourse get to you! Go forth and enjoy things! (As always, my inbox is open for follow-up questions.)

ETA: Here’s another excellent tumblr post on this topic! And another one!