#cancel culture isnt real

[thebookloverscoffehouse]

TW: Harry Potter, JKR*wling

I hope the Harry Potter tv-show fails harder than the Rings of Power

[dughole]

it’s not like there isn’t room for valuable discussion on like, hey what aspects of this personal career & life come w ethical concerns when u follow them out a bit like. i can see why someone would be well within reason to not like kurt’s use of rape as a metaphor even with how vocally & financially it was clear where he stood. or the ethics of writing a piece of music abt a real sexual assault w polly or or or. but imo those are questions that should be like, framed Around the ppl they involve not like - Directed at them generally… at least when like, good faith can b reasonably assumed.

[lovecatsys]

i feel like some people really hate the idea of "problematic" or previously hateful/bigoted people growing and changing and renouncing how they used to be. like it's too complex for their minds to understand and they need to keep these people in their little "bad people" boxes so they can hate on them eternally.

[ohmtoff]

although im happy the triplets are friends with tara now i better not see them link up with zach justice😐 get that racist weirdo out of their sight im beggingg

i love tara but zach’s whole issue with fannita and how tara’s still friends with zach after that rlly made me question her lmao

[otter-byte]

I will say the amount of time you spend caring about "cancel culture" or "culture wars" is like,,, directly proportional to the time you spend on platforms using conflict to drive engagement (i.e. news websites, twitter, reddit)

[multi-musemenagerie]

'lewd wishlist' > sokka

((Kind of the same for Bruno, unless I'm gonna go dark.

I would also love a thread with adult Sokka returning to visit Piandao and them falling in love and all that good master/pupil dynamic. Especially because it was very normal back in the day for squires to be in relationships with their knights/samurais.))

[westurn]

one thing fandom twitter does is have a bunch of big accounts piling on one small account and making their life hell for something that is. not good. but still not something said by anyone with any power or influence and is not deserving of the deluge of hate they get back for it.

[calder]

hello! i stumbled across your blog very recently and am curious as to what the tag v13 means- sorry if you’ve answered this before, i’m on mobile!

fallout is based on wasteland. wasteland is based on a canticle for liebowitz. a canticle for liebowitz is about catholics bickering about fiction in the dust of america for hundreds and hundreds of years. it is about religion and the concept of a dark age

VAULT 13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure was the ip's name in the conceptual phase. the very first VAULT 13 worldbuilding pitch doc--a timeline--spoke of a Dark God, a term deployed throughout Fallout but only contextualized in the fallout bible, which does not actually use the term. Laura has a special voiced line just for Tell Me About: Dark,God: "The what?"

Project V-13 was interplay's original Fallout Online, which was cancelled by the publisher bethesda like fifteen years ago now.

pylon v-13 is a location at the end of Fallout 76's map where a character from Project V-13 built a time portal and disappeared. it is the most cursed location in the game

by accepting its premise, we arrive at v13 lore, the rejection of canon in light of canonical time travel and multiverse, which has always been a thing, and is also literally a joke. it's the realization that fallout is defined by creativity, interpretation, expression, and argument. it is the understanding that non-canon lore and controversial lore are basic and vital pieces of the history of the setting. and it's the begrudging admission that fallout is a cultural legend, irreplaceable and beyond anyone's control. fallout makes sense to everyone and demands our imagination. it always will

enabled by all the most hated and rejected lore, my characters are time-travelling supervillains who know the things i know, and scour the wastelands endlessly to expand their knowledge. this diegetic headspace and cosmology is a lens i use to explore the concepts of conspiracy theory, paranormal thought, religion, and occultism, all of which i am deeply critical of. i have learned a lot about these matters because i was able to fully engage with them in the context of fallout.

also the talking deathclaws lived in vault 13 and the courier carries the vault 13 canteen. there's also some esoteric shit about 13 high priests, 13 ghouls, and 13 landmarks. it's a pretty specific throughline. it's there if you're mad enough to look for it. and we'll never really know what it means if anything

thats what it means. to me

another thing i always say is. any setting where humans don't see ghosts is a strange fantasy. humans have always seen ghosts. don't mean ghosts are real. just means folks see ghosts. and at some point you gotta talk about it

hope this isnt complete nonsense

[lovesickbrat]

prefacing this w nobody is trying to “cancel” sylvia plath shes dead cancel culture isnt real im just having a conversation

not saying this is the interaction i had last night bc it isnt and i had a rlly productive conversation w the girl but i think its v interesting how sylvia plath and the bell jar are looked at as universal depictions of women suffering from severe mental illness when in many of her works plath is violently racist and anti semitic and i think it just shows how white women are seen as the default experience and we’re all expected to relate to them and id we’re (woc) uncomfortable we are seen as in the wrong but the experience of bring a mentally ill woc is seen as an anomaly and no one can relate and that’s why so many yt women wont read our stories

it also shows how deeply ingrained this behaviour and thinking is in our society bc white girls at best don’t notice the violent bigotry (that woc notice within the first few pages) until its pointed out to them and at worse silence woc who speak about it and tell us to shut up

both groups will enthusiastically recommend the story to (its even considered a FEMINIST story) woc w no mention of the bigotry and seem surprised it’s even there and that speaks to the greater issue at large which is the myopia of white women and their womenhood

[somedreamlove]

my opinions post george’s response

george’s interpretation that she welcomed his affections is very reasonable. all of her actions, like leaning into him, laughing, playfighting him back, sitting back down next to him, staying after her friends left and walking him to the elevator are all very reasonable for George to feel like she was into it

please log off, ‘verbal consent’ isnt a thing that usually happens in real life for these things, and besides, something like 90% of communication is nonverbal anyway. putting the onus on george to ask for verbal consent in every tiny little thing is just not now relationships work in real life

however george shouldn’t have said that she was definitely into it—that’s assuming her thoughts which he can’t do and usually what people mean when they say ‘victim blaming’—but he can say that that he could reasonably assume interest based off her actions

george’s recollection of events is much more coherent. where their stories conflict he backs up his with evidence which proves her version wrong in parts, making george’s account more believable to me

the first time, from george’s perspective, that she indicated non-consent (not going with him into the elevator) he accepted it and backed off

george is not responsible for making sure she wasn’t drinking. if she’s under legal drinking age, it’s her responsibility to obey the law and not drink

I personally don’t buy the age gap stuff. she’s a legal adult, and therefore has the freedom to choose to be sexually involved with another legal adult. it’s literally absolutely legal. saying the age gap is george’s responsibility is just removing her agency as an ADULT.

this miscommunication should have been communicated in a mature, adult way in private when it happened if it was an issue and not months after the fact, publicly.

the fact that she seems unwilling to listen to his side of the story (her hostile quote retweet) implies more bad faith callouts on her part than truly trying to reconcile and heal

i wish for him to continue content creation and i don’t believe in cancel culture and that anyone should be deprived of their life and work. we’re all imperfectly human, make mistakes, hurt others, and should be given the opportunity to learn and grow from it in compassion. see the good in people because we all have the bad

[livepoultryfreshkilled]

just watched the meromorphic video essay (x) on morel orel. disappointed, and here's why:

surface level interpretation overall despite over an hour runtime, bad pacing

got some unspoken but clearly shown plot points wrong (orel did not KILL CHILDREN FOR THEIR BLOOD. it was obviously him getting his friends to drain their own blood into the bath. they were all shaking and holding their wrists over the tub. missing a key detail like that makes me doubt his takles on this media entirely)

heiniously underacknowledged the complexities of alone (ms sculptham wasn't just raped, she was part of her own plot to get creepler i think cause there was a whole thing about her dying her hair, "i just left the door unlocked," and he didn't even mention that she got an abortion with a coathanger. come on)

NITPICKY, ADMITTEDLY: cited a personal reddit post on representation of rape victims in media, which was not enough of an analysis of rape culture or the episode to serve as a source. but its a personal video essay he can get jiggy with it but i disliked it PERSONALLY. the post did make good points about how joking about rape in the previous seasons was greenlit but addressing the effects of that rape on the women got the show cancelled, but that wasn't even mentioned in the essay and it SHOULDVE BEEN

claimed it to be a criticism of "Southern Baptists in the Bible Belt" when it is explicitly portraying MIDWESTERN. american middle class nuclear family WASPs. SPECIFICALLY. the lack of faith, the prioritization of protestant work ethic and money, the structure of the puppington family (especially clay, literally a deconstruction of the glass of scotch pipe belt whupping american father) and like. the entire everything being about MIDWEST WASPs was key to the portrayal of the show. "southern baptists in the bible belt" come the fuck on

acted like it was a reveal that bloberta was racist? they're literally all racist. this is a portrayal of the ideal white supremacist WASP society. monoracial. they push this idea from the jump they are all racist dude to act like season 2 was where it showed up and saying thats the example of the tonal shift is just. naive at best.

used the concept of "whoa they were clay puppets with silly names but the show was serious and dark" as a justification for the vice quote/thesis "moral orel walked so shows like bojack horseman and rick & morty could fly"

which is a stupid way of saying it opened the doors not only for adult animation reaching darker topics but taking those topics seriously (as opposed to stuff like robot chicken) and executing them artistically anyway

but that isnt even a compelling justification, i wish he had gone more into the fact that the show was cancelled BECAUSE of that episode and that there was a followup episode called "Raped" that contributed to that. like if you're going to make your thesis imply the presence of meta-analysis FOLLOW UP ON THAT! not just that you personally drawing the conclusion of "the show is about dark things and everyone is sad" the show is about REAL things the show is about americana!

and bitch i could say more too. 2/5 stars. pedestrian. and so ends my catechism.

[foolilazuli]

I wouldnt say the first episode was bad, it was honestly mid. I dont if it was about cancel culture, in fact it kinda makes sense. Twenty years passed when they were frozen, of course theyre going to say something offensive that was seen as okay back then

I dont agree on them using abe tho. It would have been better if they used cleo, give her something to do other than be mad she isnt the popular girl anymore. Cause i dont find it believable for abe to say slurs.

Maybe cleo would say thing like “how is frida so popular when she looks like a dyke?” And with abe, they accidentally make it worse with an apology video but cleo sounds so condescending and ungenuine, she becomes even more of a pariah. Then cleo has a breakdown, saying she worked so hard to get to the top and fulfill peoples expectations of her. She apologizes for real this time and she learns not to be so shallow and the new clones learn they were also shallow in a way too. And maybe cleo has a character arc about figuring out who she is as a person outside of the popular/it girl box she put herself in

[rthko]

So, you said Lady Gaga was maybe the last diva ... but what about Billie Eilish, Carly Rae, Lana del Rey, Florence and the Machine, Marina, and Mitski? I know I listed a bunch of artists, but I specifically choose these ones for their large queer/gay fanbases and (w/ the exception of Eilish) their lack of mainstream popularity. (I feel like Carly isnt mainstream anymore .... maybe Im wrong, though.)

There's no real formula, but here are qualities associate with diva worship as far as I see it:

-Larger than life. This might be the biggest one. Do they stand out? Are they bold? Funny? Glamorous? Would a drag queen want to impersonate them?

-Theatrical/proximity to theater. Everyone hates theater kids these days but you can't deny that traditionally this was a big deal. Not everything has to be a club banger. Ballads can be gay.

-Sexy/horny. This one is controversial, so I want to say that none of these points are "required" and certainly not this one. No one is questioning Liza Minnelli's gay icon status because she doesn't sex it up. But it's also no secret that gay men like horny women. When the Cock Destroyers duo didn't reach their possible target audience of straight men, gay men had their back. Kind of.

-Strength. If gay boys aren't crying to her that her strength inspired him to move out of Ohio, she's not a gay icon.

-Niche. A gay icon can be popular, sure, but not a crowd pleaser to just any crowd. I had a swiftie yell at me, "at least Taylor makes music for everyone and not just gays like your [presumed] fav Lady Gaga!" This irked me but I didn't take offense to it. Universality is impossible. The closest any artists came to universality is the abstract expressionists, and the average person thinks they're full of shit. But if you know your audience and intimately connect with them, that's better than any broad brush.

-Support for gay rights. This one is kind of obsolete. It's not a big deal anymore for a singer to come out in support of gay rights (the closest recent examples I can think of are The Chicks, which stood out more because they were standing against the country music establishment, and Carly Rae Jepsen cancelling that Boy Scouts concert). But if a singer was pro gay before it was cool, that stands out.

The glaring blind spot in my analysis is, hello, gay women? Lesbian/bi women music really is a blind spot for me, in part because they don't quite do the same "diva worship" treatment. But from the queer women I know, they're more loyal about listening to actual queer artists (most gay icons are straight, after all), more acoustic, more cathartic, less tethered to dance and bar culture. The main overlaps I see here are niche-ness and camp.

A lot of the singers you listed cultivate some sort of character. That's campy. Marina did this very explicitly with Elektra Heart, Lana with her whole "blue jeans fat cock" Americana thing, Florence with her acoustic witch thing. Mitski to me marks a transition where lesbian fan culture is getting more visibility in the public eye. Genuinely love that for my lesbians. But despite it all I really don't know if any are "divas" in the old guard sense. Gay is more mainstream now, the internet changed the face of diva worship (now called stan culture I suppose), and a lot of new music strives too hard for "relatability." Any true icon would feel dizzyingly out of place on TikTok. So, I'll leave that to other gays to figure out.

[bonecouch]

"cancel culture" isnt real but "anti cancel culture culture" is. if i criticize anything people are like "what we're cancelling star trek now?" and i say no nbc already did that like 50 years ago

[unidentifiedfuckingthing]

given my longstanding & probably deeply annoying stance that BITE is horseshit i feel like if i tried to give my own framework for when to consider something a harmful cult/high control group it would be

"is there a formal or informal hierarchy of community members who can tell you [or someone else] what to do, and who you feel uncomfortable or are explicitly not allowed to refuse or tell them what to do"; and "are you [or they] often pressured, coerced, or forced to do things that you don't want to do or that you believe are harmful"

and thats it. BITE lists behaviors that often indicate the presence of a hierarchy that exerts control to force people to live a certain way but it dances around the point. the real problem to me is that the exact phenomenon it describes isn't actually a high control group, it's an insular community that has significantly different views from the majority/from the greater environment. this often does describe cults but it also describes A LOT of other things including leaving from the viewpoint of an established high control group (mormonism, scientology, the amish...). disavowing your entire lifestyle could easily be called extremist, requires breaking ties with all of your family and all of your community, believing things that none of the people in your family or community believe in, forming support groups that are painstakingly separate from your entire family and community..... because this doesn't take into account the beliefs of that community, why you would want to leave, or the dynamics between this "normal" community and the otherized "cult" community, which is actually pretty significant in categorizing whether it's a harmful coercive community or not. and for this same reason BITE can describe any group with views or lifestyles that are opposed or shunned by the greater community and who form internal communities and support structures because of the shared difficulty of doing so outside as a shunned person. this is what makes it easy to call "the trans community" (one example of many) a cult, which is a useful piece of leverage for people who want to reify the cultural taboo and underclassing of trans people, but not a useful or accurate understanding of the characteristics that actually make a high control group a high control group, and what makes high control groups bad.

what makes it hard to specifically and exclusively describe harmful high control groups is that, firstly, it's necessarily in the eye of the beholder, because what makes something harmful, or extremist, or a rejection of the larger community, what speech is allowed and disallowed, why, and what "consequences" exist for certain kinds of speech (see: "can't take a joke", "cancel culture", "just asking questions"), whether there is or appears to be a hierarchy and whether a hierarchy is just or unjust, all depend on the views of the larger community and the specific things that make a group different from everyone else.

and secondly... high control is a normal and accepted part of life at every level in most communities. not only are things like major, accepted, or highly populous religions still capable of being high control groups, but the nuclear family and schools also exercise hierarchies with overwhelming and sometimes unjust power over lower classed individuals with no equivalence and little recourse. but our society relies on the existence of these things, and people dont consider them cults (and usually dont consider them harmful at all)...

because the thing that distinguishes the idea of cults from normal society to most people is having insular, eccentric or unacceptable views or lifestyles regardless of whether the normative views or lifestyles are justifiable or do harm, and this is the core of the framework the BITE model uses to determine what is and isnt a cult. but that means that the goal isn't actually identifying views or lifestyles that rely on coercion and cause harm, even though this is the stated goal of the BITE model and the reason people usually care about having a framework to identify cults, and why it's bad that the BITE model just does not do this. (see: the purpose of a system is what it does.)

one thing is that i think people usually consider the presence or absence of force as a given and a useless metric of harm and whats more important is whether its justified or not. but i think considering force and coercion to be an inevitable potential source of harm is necessary to have useful conversations about the role of force in a community and when/if force actually is good/necessary/better than any other option. i think it's useless to pretend that a parent having the right and ability to revoke human contact or food and water, or physically or psychologically punish or torture, or medically neglect children (including adult children) for the purpose of behavioral modification is meaningfully different than an independent group doing the same thing, and it's a good thing to have to honestly discuss what amount of force and control is righteous or necessary in creating a peaceful community without the misdirection of using society as it currently exists as an uncritical benchmark of what's good and bad. being able to align the characteristics of extreme cults with less extreme control systems and with ordinary control systems also makes it easier to compare and identify harm when you do actually fall into high control groups. defining cults as a totally different thing from everything else makes it intimidating and high stakes to call something a cult which makes it harder to avoid or leave.

[dyketubbo]

everything thats been going down regarding ezra/toonimal is why i hate the way people talk about callout posts and "cancel culture" these days. i promise you that theres a difference between someone splitting hairs and someone speaking up about something actually harmful and if you convince yourself that any time someone brings up bigotry or possible predation that someone else has engaged in its just discourse and drama youre going to get people hurt.

yes there are people who make false claims. yes theres cases where people shouldnt be held to the shitty things they said when they were a teenager just because its on the internet forever. but many times actual harm is being done and if you teach yourself that you should never hold someone to taking responsibility and that acknowledging horrible things said/done by others is just cancel culture then youre going to have a really tough time taking anything seriously and actually doing something when it becomes more than just a few offkey comments

proship labels, asexy jokes, "she was asking for it", holocaust "jokes", acting "ghetto" and using aave to seem more aggressive, encouraging parasocial relationships with a young audience, making fun of accents, calling people delulu and psycho, diet culture, making fun of feminine men and masculine women, thats how all of this shit Starts and its dismissed as just jokes or too small or too online to matter. and then it gets worse.

they use language that they know will get them under the radar (ezra/toonimal's infamous post about nuance actually being about defending pro-contact pedophiles), they start pushing the line of what they can get away with whether by outright keeping things secret or even worse making it a part of their Brand that theyre offensive or constantly subject to "drama", and then they start ignoring the line and with people who already defended all the "small" stuff behind them, they start doing actually harmful things.

and people either continue to defend them to the end because they went down the pipeline with them or they act shocked and wonder how this ever could have happened as if they werent looking at the signs right in front of them while attacking anyone who pointed them out.

speak up. say shit. nuance isnt just accepting everything blindly, its learning the actual difference between right and wrong and having real principles that you actually hold yourself to so that when you find the actual gray areas youre able to navigate them without completely rejecting or completely accepting all of the terms and conditions. bigotry isnt drama. pedophilia isnt drama. zoophilia isnt drama. its not just internet discourse when actual people are getting hurt