#feyranting

[frostiifae]

they're two largely incompatible autistic people. marcille isn't a psychopath who would turn up her nose at a coworker (let alone brother in law) being in danger.

at best, laios (spell his name right) exhibits a lot of traits that marcille manages to find attractive in Falin, but without the context that makes Falin attractive, which further amplifies the awkwardness and frustration of being around him.

there. unpacked it. what's my prize.

[frostiifae]

Could you elaborate on the Dragon Maiden thing? :o

the basic premise of dragon maid, as a story about allegorically exploring "alternative" relationships, is very cute, and i like it very much in theory.

you may be wondering why i use the term "alternative" as opposed to, you know, gay relationships. the show's very good when it's about gay adults. kobayashi, tohru, fafnir and takiya are all cute and fun and their relationships are very sweet. it could have also shown some other, even more socially-unusual relationships, like, idk, polyamory. that would've been neat, but no need to do that. it's fine as a show about gay adults.

the problem is that it chose to veer instead into a couple of different sorts of "alternative" relationships.

kanna is fine. she's great, even! i really like her stand-in role as a "child" that tohru and kobayashi have to take care of as "parents", further binding them as a family unit. and, as a child character, she's adorable and very engaging.

the idea of saikawa, a girl who is experiencing adolescent attraction to kanna, is fine in theory. the execution kinda sucks, because she doesn't really come across like a primary-school age kid experiencing feelings she doesn't know how to handle, she comes across more like an upper teenager in a porn doujin that just doesn't know the porn words to describe her feelings, so it's definitely family friendly and that's definitely how it works 👌. would have much preferred, y'know, a version of her that is normal and innocent and immature and confused about her crush? it would've been funny to see her pass kanna the "get out of my school" note.

i don't feel the need to really get into the other, much BIGGER problem with dragonmaid, which is the extremely dubious decision to make an obscenely sexualized mature dragon-woman *obsessively* horny over like, a seven year old boy, that is kind of clearly uncomfortable with what's going on? like, we can all agree that that sucked on its face, no matter your feelings on age gap relationships (which this isn't), even besides the implication that gay relationships are somehow on a similar level to really transparent and unapologetic pedophilia, which i would argue is the actual problem that ruins the show moreso than the relationship merely existing? OK, I got into it a little bit, sorry.

the point of my side post was more that like. identifying kanna specifically ("the episode kanna was introduced") as the problem gives me the impression that the commenter had a very different idea of the problems with dragon maid than i did, which is a troubling observation on a post about how tragic it is that dragonmaid could be so good and somehow still be almost totally ruined by one specific element of the story. you know?

admittedly, the comment's wording wasn't very specific about it, but i'm still very confused that the commenter chose that wording, as opposed to like. any other wording.

[frostiifae]

kinda outta nowhere but i'm never fully over antishipping. it's just so baffling and sad and wild.

like OK. Crux of the argument is supposed to be that when you write something, the ideas you put into that work say something about you (true!), and you should be careful about what they say (kiiiiinda?) because they affect reality by informing people about what is right and normal; as a reader you can then reinforce this when you consume irresponsible or problematic works. Therefore you should only over write or read things that are wholesome, or at least unproblematic, an entirely undefinable goal whose standards change wildly depending on who you ask.

This is obviously reductive of writers' and readers' ability to separate reality from fiction, but i think that's kinda the point - i think antishippers don't want to separate those things, because I think it's silently assumed that it's supposed to work in the other direction. Maybe it sounds obvious, but I think these people really believe that if they make fiction "better" - erasing racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, both overt and subtle, from all media - then they make society better. It's activism! And therefore they're excused from looking at real life and trying to examine their own impact and opportunity to improve or change things. They're already doing their part, right?

like listen. arguing that people are going to be lured into normalizing incest and questionable childbearing relationships with minors because of how they're portrayed in Fire Emblem Fates is very much the same argument as claiming that the dudes that invented Decentraland and the Metaverse would have been fine if they hadn't read Snow Crash. No, sorry, Snow Crash is not problematic because a bunch of morons failed to understand its dystopian overtones and claimed it as their inspiration - those guys were already idiots long before they read Snow Crash, and their bad ideas are not Neal Stephenson's fault.

Such accusations just go to show that you're desperate to assign fault to something that you think you can control, and i'm sorry, but you're not going to Fandom Police the world into a better place. The Revolution isn't going to magically spring forth all of a sudden from collective imagination. The people out there actually creating and perpetuating harmful social structures in the real world are not listening to you, okay? You need to do real activism, in the real world, revolving around real people and their real actual problems. Start with local elections. You have a lot more power there than you might think.

[frostiifae]

yknow something to think about re: transphobic moderation staff (@staff), with that transgirl comic that got passed around and then flagged -- and this is purely a guess, i am under no delusions here, just some instincts informed by my limited experience as a web developer --

but, y'know, we should all know better than to assume that a bad system is SOLELY caused by, explicitly, bigotry on behalf of the people running it. right? like the whole point of systemic oppression is that it is coming from the system. is it possible that tumblr's explicit content moderation is systemically transphobic in a way that has nothing to do with the attitudes of the moderators themselves?

so embark with me on a thought experiment for a sec; i know this is a stretch, especially with certain types of posts, but hear me out: suppose staff actually has a pretty hardline policy on what they want to assign community labels to, as a Better Safe Than Sorry kinda deal, but since AI moderation went so poorly, suppose they're now relying very heavily on user reports. i'm making a few assumptions but it'd all make sense together, right?

and here's the thing; if i stumble on porn blogs i generally don't report them. that's a moral thing, i don't believe in censorship of sexual content as long as it's appropriately self-selecting. so i enact my politics through the report system, specifically by not reporting something that is clearly in explicit violation of the rules.

so suppose you've got terfy users just doing the same thing in reverse. transphobe tumblrites see transgender joy, get their jimmies rustled about it, and use the report tool to enact their politics. for us everyday users, sexually suggestive content gets shown around all the time and it's seen as very normal, and so nobody reports it, but to the moderation staff suggestive content would fall under their Better Safe Than Sorry standards, so - maybe we should flag these selfies if they could be construed as thirst traps or otherwise sexually suggestive? maybe we should flag this comic if it could be construed as fetishistic, or might lead in a sexual direction in the future?

to be absolutely clear; in this hypothetical the people who make these decisions are enacting transphobia, and could be less transphobic by like... Not Flagging The Posts, but to assign blame solely to them I think is maybe a bit of a red herring. Like, hey, maybe we shouldn't spiteful individual users the power to report anything that offends them if we're going to adopt a Flag First, Ask Questions Later policy? That might turn out pretty badly for the site, you know?

[frostiifae]

it just kind of baffles me the way people can prop themselves up as being so caring and self-aware and thoughtful and yet be so blindly entitled. If I had for a nickel for every time somebody I wanted to be friends with turned out to be obsessed with other people's perception of them, fixated on having absolute control over their role in other peoples' lives, i would have ten whole cents, and that feels so weird to me.

Like, it's just not that deep, okay? You don't need to go inventing this complex narrative where if only you could have explained yourself Perfectly, if only you were Understood, then everything would have turned out fine. Nobody cares that much about you, and that's freedom, baby. Maybe you should stop assembling some dramatic timeline of the decisions other people make about their own lives as though they revolve around specifically, exclusively you, and instead put that energy into, idk, discovering how insignificant your fears are compared against the richness of the lives and emotions of other people around you and actually participating in the beautiful tapestry of life? Just an idea?

[frostiifae]

people claiming the reason dragonmaid was bad was because of kanna. like. mm. mmmm. almost. you're almost there.

[frostiifae]

it's so funny how i've circled all the way back around. i used to hate the idea of being associated with anything popular because having feelings on things other people like makes me vulnerable to being criticized by them. and then it turned out that things other people like are good! and now i'm back around to hating being a jalter fan because people don't like jalter the right way

[frostiifae]

the initial impulse that made me want to post something was "there's a shocking lack of nuance in online discourse these days"

but, no, it's not shocking at all. this is the consequence of mainstream awareness of issues that have, for decades, evaded the mainstream.

of course most people's only frame of reference for "violence" is literal and direct, and not subtle, insidious, enabled by a system in which everyone follows unjust rules or social cues and the end result is the part that is finally "violent".

of course most people struggle to reconcile that obviously harmless, cutesy "sexual deviancy" (being LGBT, being trans, mild consensual BDSM, polyamory) are litigated and endangered with the same mechanisms that are used against ""actual"" sexual deviancy (dare i even list examples), regardless of the lack of harm or danger to anyone involved because we are adults capable of restraint and informed consent, and in fact you cannot make any compelling case for protecting one "type" and not the other, because it is all one battle against social pressures and expectations to hide and stifle all sexuality that isn't sanitized (except for its inherent hatred of and violence against women and especially marginalized women, of course)

like. the nuance isn't there because you need to be exposed to the problem at its root, for a long time, to see it. you need to actively study the problem to understand. it's still early. the internet and its ability to share these perspectives is still young. it's frustrating but the potential to grow as a movement, as a society, is still very much there

[frostiifae]

this is honestly stupid dude. i spent like 20 years of my life practicing writing and coming up with dumb fun character ideas and doing whatever i wanted in creative spaces and the one time i let myself make it other peoples’ problem it went really fucking well and they thought i was really creative and wanted to play pretend with me. how am i gonna 20 years later have imposter syndrome over this

[frostiifae]

me: look at my pretty au ra >:I

my sweet lovely mutuals: omg she’s so pretty🥺🥺🥺

me: w. wait. wait what. wait what do you mean by that. why are you saying that. how could this happen

[frostiifae]

i didn't want to add this in a reblog but I get a little bit more evil every time I see anyone praise eragon. Eragon was like, the first time I ever realized that a book COULD be bad.

[frostiifae]

re: my last post; i do feel compelled to clarify that i’ve known some incredibly sweet and charming men with genuine adoration towards women that is wholesome and beautiful and i would commit violence in their defense.

i more mean like, the cultural phenomenon that is Men Being Attracted To Women, is so totally uninteresting. Not only in its ubiquity but also in just like, no, those are caricatures of women, and not even attractive ones. Listen, I, too, sometimes like to indulge in a bit of objectification! A smidgeon of “what if she was hot and sexy and perfect Just Because”! But like, that’s still a person in there, you know? That’s still the whole point, right?

[frostiifae]

“Make sure you block me” is so choice. Like, I absolutely refuse to take ANY responsibility for this situation I created, it’s clearly ONLY your fault that you are unhappy with what I said, so therefore YOU have to block ME. Imagine the entitlement necessary.

[frostiifae]

“never let them forget the one thing keeping you alive. nobody disrespects tanks”

laughs uproariously in healer main. Oh, you’ve decided you don’t want to play today, mister blue dps? That’s okay. Miss Samurai, you’re the tank now. Sprint along now! ♥

[frostiifae]

i really hate whenever anyone brings up pedophilia on tumblr because like. OK, I have read your post and saw the word ‘pedophilia’ and when I say that word, what comes to mind to me is sexual material involving adults (~18+ but, from what i’m led to believe, usually much older) and children (~<16). What are my thoughts on that? It’s awful. Abhorrent. Extremely extremely bad. You could do your utmost to make something artistic and elegant and I would side-eye you to the end of the universe at a bare minimum.

But I don’t know that that’s what you mean. Distance yourself from the narrative of “modern purity culture” all you want; there exists a significant demographic of people that clutch their pearls at pretty normal expressions of human sexuality just because they themselves don’t share that perspective. The concept of pedophilia has been used very irresponsibly, even just in my immediate presence, to describe a pretty wide array of totally acceptable things.

Stories about characters who are canonically minors but portrayed as adults in the work? I would like to think this is a no-brainer but unfortunately some people do not think so. I’ve even heard this described as ‘grooming’.

Stories about characters who don’t have a single unambiguous age? This is especially egregious with characters who are clearly personal vessels. Sorry, my vision of Link(le) and Zelda is a little bit different now than it was when I was 12. Those characters have grown up alongside me in my heart. It’s a little foolish to project the idea of pedophilia onto narratives I create about adults because you think of them as children still.

Stories about two 16-year-olds engaging sexually? Sorry, some people are or were sexually active 16 year olds. That’s just a thing that exists. People write and read about that. You can write it irresponsibly, sure, in the same way you can write two 30 year olds fucking irresponsibly.

At some point, we have to acknowledge that the problem is not the content of the stories but the character of the person writing them, but that’s a scary idea because it means accepting the distinct possibility of people writing some abhorrent and problematic work... without actually being evil malicious people who want to inflict that evil on society. it means acknowledging that the danger of fiction is extremely secondary to the danger of people’s real actions, and that policing art is functionally useless.

I do believe there are a handful of ideas that are so fundamentally evil and horrific that a person can be judged sheerly just for having it, and I’d classify pedophilia as one of them. But I can’t take that term seriously when it’s used in a post on Tumblr, because what could you possibly be hoping to accomplish by doing so? A Tumblr post, no matter how sternly worded, isn’t going to protect children or put people in prison (/rehab/whatever you feel is appropriate). There are things you can do that might actually help, if you genuinely felt someone was in danger, but this isn’t it.

But, if you’re distraught over a big scary world full of people doing things you disagree with personally and you’re seeking validation from somebody that you’re not the crazy one, a vague but sharp-tongued tumblr post using inflammatory language that you feel is right, but without clarifying what you mean explicitly, would be a great way to do that, wouldn’t it?

[frostiifae]

How'd a super smart funny likeable girl like me convince herself that she's constantly in everybody's way all the time and nobody actually likes her. Like what the fuck even.