#i did not engage in any discourse about this whole thing then cause I was too terrified of this happening in the first place

[jascurka]

Please tell me you didn't get cancelled over seritoi over on Twitter good god the internet needs to burn

Ah....well :'D

I said semi-cancelled cause I didn't personally see anyone write an actual post about it calling me out or something. No one sent me any hate messages, I've only seen this whole shitshow unfold beside me. One account quoted my tweet about seritoi saying something like "some of you follow" with some stupid gif attached, there were comments to it. I got blocked and unfollowed as expected. I got called "that one artist" in some other posts. I kept seeing people throwing online tantrums over this whole discourse that started out of nowhere.

To be honest it wasn't maybe that horrible, I just got massive trust issues as I never experienced anything that felt so pointed at me before and I've seen some of my moots kinda take one side in this whole thing. I went private for a week, tried not to open the app cause I was getting a weird shaky hands / heart racing response from my body any time I did.

I got over it though XD It took some time and I recall this week badly but I don't give a fuck anymore though I try to stay away from people who put "proship kys/explode/die" in their twitter bio cuz who knows what they might do next time.

[felixora]

Anders discource

I forgot to post this here as well, lol

This kinda turned into a small essay…. Which is to be expected, it is Anders’ discourse after all.

This text is a personal view of the DA discourse, that is often summarized in fandom circles as “Was Anders right?”.

So let's start with this question: which is better, a peaceful or violent revolution? The answer is: both, depending on the severity of the situation.

I'm sorry to break your sweet dreams about “peace and love”, and “only peaceful revolution are justified” — but that's just delusional.

While I do believe that peaceful revolutions are the best outcome for both sides of conflict, more often than not they are impossible specifically due to unwillingness of the oppressors to seek true compromise. Because where the marginalized might achieve something slightly better for themselves, the oppressors lose the most important thing for them — they lose control.

And then the only thing that's left is a violent revolution. Or, well, death.

The rule of “turning the other cheek” does nothing but perpetuates further violence, when you're dealing with an oppressive regime. Because while the marginalized side often considers the middle ground with their oppressors (just for the sake of “making things better than before, while not risking the full annihilation by a stronger force”) the oppressors have only one in mind: “We want you fully gone, because you oppose our rule. You are a danger to us”.

The thing that I learned in past 10 years is that — ”Pacifism is a privilege”. And those who are oppressed don't have said privilege. They either fight or they die. Sometimes slowly (for ex. by assimilation), sometimes rapidly (in a massacre).

The thing that genuinely baffles me in the whole Anders' discourse, is the fact, that people forget or ignore that he for years tried to do the peaceful revolution. The Mage Underground was a way to get the mages from the dangerous environment, without engaging in the direct confrontation with the Templars. The manifestos on why mages should be free and letters to the Divine herself regarding the same issues that Circles pose — all of these are methods of peaceful resistance. 

Now, remind me again, did these actions have any effect on how Templars or the Chantry treated mages? Maybe they revaluated their stances, did a thorough investigation of the possible mistreatment of their charges?

Oh, yeah — IT DID NOTHING.

No, not even that — the things started to get worse and worse, actually. 

Any time the Grand Cleric “calmed things down” — the status quo remained. They didn't try to investigate the concerning situation in the Kirkwall Circle or any sort of rumours of abuses by the Templars. No, the Chantry for the most part closed their eyes to these rumours, and when the number of rebellious mages went up, the only thing they considered — was to organise a crusade (an Exalted March) against the Kirkwall. Nevermind, that most of the mages from the Circle and as fugitives were a faithful Andrastians, despite the conditions they were put through by the Chantry.

But of course, “the Chantry is just a religious organisation, it shouldn’t be targeted in such situations”...

So, back to the Templars — they didn't get their wish of cutting down all the mages under their care right there and then. But they sure as hell were allowed to continue to physically and psychologically torture, push mages to their breaking point, and commit any abuses they felt like doing to their charges.

In all of this, the Chantry poses as an enabler and the cause of the laws against mages in the first place. Not to mention that Chantry was responsible for the creation of the Templar Order, and they are subservient to the Divine.

By the 3rd act of the game we have a conformation, almost right away, that Meredith send a letter to the Divine requesting a Right of Annulment.

It's not anymore a question of “if the Divine will approve of this” — she might have said no, it's true. But our characters don't know that. They see the situation, where every peaceful attempt to reach a resolution was met with silence or threats of violence. With all due respect — only a fool hopes for the better and does nothing in such a situation.

This becomes a question of “when will it happen”.

When the oppressors say “I will murder you” you don't go “How about we talk”.

When you propose a dialogue and the opposing side says "No" over and over again, while continuing to tighten up the leash around your neck, the only right action is to fight back. If you fight — at least you have a chance of surviving. Otherwise, — it's death. Slow or quick, depends on the choice of the oppressors.

Another important thing, is that revolution doesn't happen on the shoulders of one person. It needs people. And those people need to believe that the idea has at least some chance to come true, they need to be inspired.

Inspiration not always comes through well-put speeches preaching kindness and unity.

It also can come through acts of violence, if said violence is turned against the oppressors. It shows, that they CAN BE BEATEN.

And Anders’ actions inspired people.

Anders tried his voice, he tried to reach the society in general with his arguments. That didn't work.

He tried to bring change with the Mage Underground, to recruit his friends (Hawke and the party) to join his active efforts of fundamentally changing things — that didn’t work as well. (while the friend group acts uninterested and uninvested in Anders’ righteous cause, Hawke might constantly and only suggest diplomatic solutions, which at the time were already useless and only maintained the status quo)

So the next closest thing is an act of violence against the Chantry — to show all those mages, who are still doubtful, who are scared, who think there is no hope — you can fight back and make it hurt.

What was called “compromise” from the Grand Cleric was maintaining the status quo, where mages in the Circle were still suffering the abuses, while the Templars simply weren't allowed to make them all Tranquil. 

How the fck is that a compromise?

If you didn’t get it already — I am a big supporter of action, when it comes to revolutions and fight against oppression. 

While acting is always a wild card (you have no idea, what reaction you might get from your oppressors, if you'll receive any support from “external forces”, if the luck will be on your side) — it always brings change. 

On the contrary, inaction — leaves your fate in the hands of the oppressor. They might be merciful, they might be cruel — what happens to you and your people in such situation depends solely on their wimps. In many cases — the status quo remains, nothing changes.

The Chantry personnel was part of the problem. For years, they did nothing to investigate possible misuse of power within the Circle, that obviously perpetuated further and further rise of temper among mages. 

They stayed silent on the issues of Ferelden refugees, leaving them to fend for themselves in the slums (while obviously holding significant part of the influence in the city). 

They obviously took part in less than peaceful instalment and fight against neighbouring religions (see Mother Petrice and the Qun). 

And, returning to the topic of mages, they perpetuated as part of their official teachings demonisation of mages as a whole, purposely ostracizing them from society and creating an impossible conditions to fight against. Their word was the law. And even if the mage had a compelling argument for their case — without even a bit of approval from the Chantry, they wouldn't have a chance of bending the society to their side.

So, the Chantry is just as guilty.

Another thing that needs to be considered in this topic are the casualties among civilians as a result of Anders’ violent protest. Because in the aftermath of the explosion there was 100% injured or dead among civilians. One might argue that they are just as gullible, turning a blind eye to the obvious misdeeds by the Templars and apathetic response by the Chantry (all it takes for evil to fester, is for good man to stay silent, after all) — but that still doesn't make their deaths rightful or expendable. 

Anders had to make a choice — either them, or the mages. 

They are the collateral damage of this conflict. One, that could have been prevented, if the oppressive side agreed to at least a compromise with the oppressed. But they didn’t.

And as a result, Anders had to take actions to unsure at least some fighting chance for his people, for the mages. The sad thing for me, personally, is that he will be the one to live with the burden of this choice, and not the personnel of the Chantry or the Templars, as they didn’t consider themselves guilty. 

The other side of this story could have ended with Anders staying silent, Meredith putting into motion the Right of Annulment and then the Chantry sweeping what happened under the rug (which had a high chance of turning the story to the path, where revolution among mages happened decades later or even didn’t happen at all). 

And that would have been the consequences of his choice as well, though a much worse option if we're considering that Anders made it the purpose of his life to bring change to the system and protect his fellow mages.

Another thing that is often brought in discussion is that Anders should have chose the Gallows as his target. In this scenario, there would have still been casualties among the civilians (consider the debris falling from the sky), as well as guaranteed deaths among the mages and tranquil (all were located in the Gallows). Anders wanted to give them a fighting chance, not kill them right away.

So selecting the Chantry as his target to shift the general power balance in the conflict and send a message to both the institution and mages across Thedas — is absolutely logical.

Other thing that makes no sense — is the lack of mages who actively sided with Anders' actions while remaining on the defence against Templars (not that weird shit about creating 2nd Tevinter in the Hinterlands)

Because that's how it went with revolution in my country. We have some people who regret the revolution (even now), we have those who are apathetic to it, and we have those who believe in it wholeheartedly.

People died for their beliefs in this revolution, and both them and those who advocated for a more proactive approach and survived were idolised by numerous people afterwards. 

Some rightfully so, some less. But it still happened. 

They are considered heroes, EVEN THOUGH we also had an invasion of part of our country from our neighbour as a result of this revolution. And in latter years, we are now defending ourselves from a full-scale invasion from the same oppressive force that was largely responsible for the reasons we had a revolution all those years ago.

The majority of people in my country would still, without a doubt tell you, that the revolution and the subsequent violent fight for our future was the right course of action. Even now, knowing how things turned out for us.

Because it brought change. It gave us hope that we can be that force of change.

So when the DA tells us, that there were barely any mages, or relatives of mages who were taken from their families, who considered Anders' actions justified and idolised him into this heroic persona — I call bullshit on that. 

That's simply not how things turn out in these sorts of situations.

Many held grudges not only against Templars, but the Chantry as a whole. Many spend their lives in hiding or locked away from their loved ones. The voices of many were never heard, no matter who they appealed to — and then comes this mage, who dealt an irreparable blow against the authority of the Chantry, who challenged their rule and told everyone “the time for compromise has passed, it is time to fight”.

Are you telling me people won't idolise that?  Span a ton of rumours and legends around his figure? 

I highly doubt that.

I have genuine criticism of Anders as a character — his racist towards elves views are hard to miss. The occasional misogyny (if we're taking Awakening into consideration as well) is also present. All of that can be explained by the upbringing in the Circle and under the Chantry, but it is NOT an excuse, and these are genuine flaws of his personality.

That being said, you don't have to be a perfect victim for your suffering to be acknowledged, related to and your fight against oppression to be supported.

“Oppression” is not an achievement, that you unlock only after reaching certain standards. 

It simply exists.And not only you can fight it, but you must.

[communistkenobi]

i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)

i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds

ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense

What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.

Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  

As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.

So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 

This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 

[less-than-three-3]

(spoilers) On Miquella, Shadow of the Erdtree's ending and, well, everything

Having just finished my first playthrough, I wanted to write about my whole experience and review of the content, but there is just so much to unpack and, frankly, a whole spectrum of discourse about the story content of this DLC that I wanted to get all of my thoughts on the lore written down first. Plainly, I think people just have it wrong and those who are confused about the choices made just haven't been paying attention. Yes, there is a lot of big lore dropping in the DLC, but a lot of background characterization from main game is kind of being ignored even if it doesn't explicitly foreshadow the choices the characters made. Of course major spoilers for both parts of the game below, play and make your own opinions first before reading. Also this will be a lot so please bear with me.

I won't beat around the bush, the biggest sticking point to, like, pretty much everyone is "why the fuck is Radahn here?" Or, maybe more broadly, what was Miquella cooking, and how did things end up like this when we didn't have any clue about it in the main game?

And this is something you can't really answer in a vacuum, you need to zoom out and look at not just the framing of the whole DLC but of the entire game as whole - Fromsoft's DLC's are always about expanding on and deepening the characterization of the entire game as opposed to being a self-contained narrative, my favorite example of this being the DS2 dlc. So first, let's talk about Marika and Messmer.

Some people have pointed out amidst the noise that this DLC is not just about Miquella but about expanding on Marika and her motivations. This sounds obvious and like yeah it is, but the point is that these two stories are very intentionally woven together. And, without going to deep into the weeds, the big picture of what SotE says about Marika is more or less explaining her traumas that lead to her genocides and oppression. (shoutouts to _7albi on twitter, not sure if they're on tumblr, for a lot of marika and jar lore/deconvolution)

Of course we know about her hatred of Those Who Live In Death, not just a blasphemy to the rebirth cycle of the Erdtree but a cruel reminder of the murder of her Golden Child Godwyn. But now we learn that the hornsents, of the Crucible, tortured and laid waste to Marika's people, imprisoning the condemned in the DLC jars, leading to her hatred of the Misbegottens and Omens and to her son Messmer leading the crucade against the Hornsent. Additionally Messmer (her first son? or at least first child who was cursed by an Outer God?) was likely tainted by the Fell God, which led to her felling of the Fell God and genocide of the Fire Giants. (I think the current theory is that the war against the Fire Giants was also to protect the Erdtree, but I think having a deep personal hatred explains how far she went with it). Check out albi's twitter I linked above for a lot of really insightful posts about all of this!

Of course, this isn't to excuse her actions, and to be clear I don't even think she is a grey character, these are terrible things to have done. It's precisely for these reasons that we, the player, aim to either change or displace the current Golden Order of Marika in almost every ending, and precisely for these reasons Miquella was so intriguing in the first place, as one of the most powerful Empyreans and thus most likely successor to Marika. Deepening Marika's motivations in the DLC keeps her at the forefront of your mind as you engage with the drips of information we get about Miquella throughout the shadow realm. This is incredibly important because it can change how you view Miquella's attempted godhood. He is Miquella the Kind, who has put so much effort into essentially righting the wrongs he saw in the world. He views Marika's rule as injust and oppressive, and I think he recognizes that Marika's intense emotional trauma is the root cause of most of this, which is why he abandoned not just his flesh but his love, his fear, his doubt, and his heart. He seeks to become, essentially, fully unbiased and accepting of all, and compel everyone to do the same. But the major flaw behind this is that compulsion and forced peace without free will is a bland, sterile way to live. Additionally, there is St. Trina who Miquella has split off from, who claims that godhood would also be bad for Miquella, perpetuating the theme in the game of "power corrupts all". Essentially Marika and Miquella's rule would be two flavors of typical SMT Law/Order endings lol. And these parallels are important for the theme that Miyazaki loves of perpetuated cycles.

In other words, Marika's backstory isn't meant to be fully sympathized with per se, but also to showcase the reasonings and flaws in Miquella's judgement. But at the same time, I totally understand the reading of the text that Miquella could be completely right and Marika's backstory proves it - I think this is one of the biggest flaws of the DLC, that you can't get "The Miquella Ending/Mending Rune". I don't think you necessarily need to, like, parlay with Miquella about his plans like some people suggest, I think him being hostile to you makes sense because you are, at face value, Marika's champion and thus Radahn will flatten you at any chance he gets, but not having a ring or mending rune or something to be like "hold on he's got a point" after fighting them off I think is a missed opportunity.

Now I've already mentioned that he is Miquella the Kind, but I think it's also important to note very crucially that while he has a big heart and good intentions he is a major fuck up. This is explicitly clear in the text of the base game, and I think many people don't recognize this. He tried multiple times and failed to cure his sister's curse of rot. After the Night of the Black Knives he tried to call the eclipse to revive Godwyn and also failed to do so (this is also why his consort could not be Godwyn! I don't know why so many people are suggesting this it's literally impossible based on the timeline! and even if we go by the theory that Radahn was holding back the eclipse at that time and after his death Miq could call it, I think it's reasonable to believe that Miquella just gave up on Godwyn because nothing he does works, plus I don't necessarily think this timeline works either). And the Haligtree became a safe haven for the outcasts and oppressed of TLB, his original intent was to have it be another Erdtree and to ascend to godhood that way, and it didn't.

So in this state, after literally accomplishing almost nothing his entire life, it makes sense why his final push is to essentially full send, abandoning everything and using his compulsion powers at any cost to achieve something positive. So I don't think his actions at all ruin his characterization as Miquella the Kind, he's a well-intentioned character whose attempts to fix everything have been completely ruined at every possible step. I would hope that anyone that recognizes this understands how infuriating that must feel. St. Trina, who he has abandoned, begs you to kill him as he is too far gone, but to also grant him forgiveness.

But none of this answers "why make a vow with Radahn, and why did he agree?"

And to be honest, I really think the answer to the former is just that he's fucking strong, and more or less the best available option. I mean, he's held the stars together, he stalemated a literal goddess (and she probably would have died if not for Finlay!), and is essentially the poster child of power amongst the demigods. Having someone of that strength means your rule is untouchable. Remember, Godwyn is soul-dead and Miquella failed to recover him (he was definitely the first choice), Ranni is body-dead and fucking off somewhere else, Rykard is, uh, having a moment, Malenia would be a huge no-no, and Morgott (and Godrick and I guess Godefroy et al.) is a Golden Order loyalist. We'll put a pin in Mohg obviously, though I think we really don't know much about what he does until his involvement with Miquella? I think it's safe to assume that the Omen twins are more or less unknowns to the other demigods due to their confinement, though I don't know when in the timeline Mohg appeared on Miquella's radar.

But hey isn't Radahn also a simp for the Golden Order, Godfrey, and Radagon? He would never agree to be Miquella's consort, right?

Well, here's the thing. Radahn is very much a warrior's warrior, he lives by the blade and lives for the fight. The reason he loves the Golden Order and all of them is because they're awesome strong war heroes, he wanted to be just like them and more. He's essentially a military bro lol. He's not ideologically tied to the Golden Order, and to be honest I don't know how much he even really knows about or cares about the ideology; he's tied to the Golden Order because they're large and in charge.

From Radahn's Armor: "The golden lion is said to symbolize Godfrey, the Elden Lord, and his beast regent, Serosh. From his youngest years, Radahn was naturally captivated by the Lord of the Battlefield."

From Radahn's Helm: "Radahn inherited the furious, flaming red hair of his father Radagon, and is fond of its heroic implications. "I was born a champion's cub. Now I am the Lord of the Battlefield's lion.""

So if Miquella can prove that his rule can be even mightier, Radahn will agree to be his consort. And what military prowess does Miquella have? The Blade of Miquella, Malenia, and her Cleanrot Knights. Malenia's march on Caelid was part of the plan, part of the vow she and Miquella made with Radahn ("If we honour our part of the vow" = the twins). And thus they went to war.

I think people are misinterpreting "vow" to mean everyone is buddy buddy and on the same side. That's not the case. To cite every Souls fan's favorite external media, this is literally a direct parallel to Griffith and Guts: "You are mine". Guts is first inducted into the Band of the Hawk because Griffith bests him in combat, and leaves when he wins. This was their vow.

But what wasn't part of their plan was Radahn surviving. By finishing the conflict in a stalemate, the conditions for the vow weren't met. Only after we defeat Radahn does the plan move forwards. This is why Miquella essentially thanks us for killing his lord brother.

So why is Mohg involved? The vow was handled and conditions met, it's a done deal right? Well yeah, but Radahn's body is literally a rotted mess that made him go insane, and resurrection probably isn't fixing that.

Remember that in this game, there is a good amount of emphasis about the duality, separation, and linkage of body and soul, from of course Ranni/Godwyn and Marika/Radagon but also the twinned knights. It's also apparent, through Ranni, that the soul is the source of supernatural abilities, with Ranni being able to do her witch stuff even with a literal inanimate doll as a body.

So what I'm saying is that if they can stuff Radahn's soul into a healthy body, we can say welcome back Radahn. I don't think the strength of the body matters much, probably as long as it meets some threshold, because Radahn's insane gravity magic can bolster even the weakest of beings, like Leonard! So Miquella just needs like a warm demigod body to compel and essentially die for the cause. Process of elimination alone pretty much leaves Mohg as the prime candidate, but also keep in mind the Omen Twins' arcs, where they have essentially been shunned their whole lives and channel that trauma through different avenues. Morgott is the devout one, believing that he was truly born inferior and needs to work harder and devote and prove himself to the Golden Order to be accepted. Mohg, on the other hand, is lost, and though he eventually finds himself devoting himself to the Formless Mother, Miquella being his beacon of hope and relevancy as a consort gives him direction. And I'm sure he harbors resentment towards the Golden Order which helps. I guess Miquella didn't lie to him about that.

Maybe the timeline is a bit of a stretch but it would make sense that Miquella learns of the stalemate, that's when he gets fed up and just decides to abuse his compulsion to target the mentally weak Mohg, and while Miquella slumbers Mohg steals him away.

This definitely gets muddy when we consider the process by which we stuff Radahn into Mohg, or how we turn Mohg's body into Radahn's. I don't think Miquella has access to the Rune of Death... This is the most handwavey part of this story, and to be honest is my other biggest issue with it. I don't think he needed to look like Radahn if this is the case. Or if there is some process by which this happens, I don't think they've made it clear at all how. Leaving this kind of huge detail as speculation feels like a misstep. Maybe we're missing something, I mean it's only been a week, but to have no leads at all is questionable. Maybe it has something to do with Godwyn's presence in the DLC (that seemingly goes mostly untouched)?

Also, as an aside, I really don't think Mohg is "uncancelled". He was compelled but he still did all that freak shit with Miquella's cocoon. I think we still really don't know what the point of all of that was (though I can stand to be corrected), but much like real life, "he seduced me" isn't exactly an excuse. Apparently this is a hot take. If his compulsion doesn't work on, for example, Golden Order loyalists (which clearly it doesn't, otherwise Miquella's story would be a lot lot different) due to their convictions, that means it is possible to stave it off. But Mohg can't. He is tantalized by some inner desire that I wish not to unpack, and while maybe we can reduce some of the blame, he still has a good amount of it.

But anyways I guess that's my answer to "what the fuck just happened?" There's definitely holes in what we know and probably holes in my theory (though I have tried to steer away from speculation and more towards textual evidence where we have it), but this is what makes the most sense to me based on my reading of the text. And frankly, the things I see most often in the discourse I think a lot of people just missed in the details of the main game (which is fine, to be clear), so I hope if you're in that boat this got your cogs turning more and enabled you to look at these characters from a different lens. Or if you think I'm just spouting nonsense, that's cool too! For better or worse they leave a lot up to interpretation and heavy analysis, so if you have a different reading I'd love to hear it!

[proship-anti-discussion]

Ex anti here (although it's really more like I went pro->anti->pro) and just thought I'd give some of my thoughts and experience for the data collection :^) I've liked dark stuff a ton like a LOT for my whole childhood. Not really any trauma I can think of attached to it until later on. My first memory was playing pretend where I got kidnapped by a villain lol

I would roleplay "bad endings" to my favorite disney movies with other kids and idk, mayybe that was my first fandom experience?? I was having fun and we were geeking out!! We barely knew what we were talking about and somehow noncon still got involved and we were giggling like idiots about it, it was a blast

I don't remember much from when I for real got into online fandoms bc that's where I did start experiencing some traumas irl but I feel like fandom space was mostly proship, just without that label. Incest is wincest and don't like don't read were easy slogans that even a super young fan could read and be like okay cool that's what's allowed here that's the rules. And I feel like it was also expected that minors told nobody their age and kept quiet and didn't bother the adults making the content they were engaging with? That's how my friends and I always operated anyway. We were horny teenagers and out of all the possible outlets there were, I think privately reading fanfic or looking at fanart was the safest one we had

So anyway yea. Many years of finding a place I could enjoy my evil little dark AUs until I joined a new fandom and got blindsided by just how antiship everyone was all of a sudden. I was like mid-teens at that point? I don't feel like saying what the specific fandom was but half the cast was related to each other and one character was a kid so those were the Off Limits Ships. It was kind of fine for me because I was squicked out by the idea of shipping that kid so when people were like "shipping this child character is wrong" I was like okay well it disgusts me so this must be true ig (it was more than that LOL but that's definitely why I went along with everything)

Most of the fanartists and writers I liked there were antis, and I liked their content and went along with the mentality despite all the fic I personally enjoyed in the past, so I got exposed to a lot more of the mindset. Looking back on it, it was a lot of just taking people's gut reaction to be disgusted at gross things, validating that reaction, and then validating whatever harm they wanted to cause to other people because of that disgust. Again, it was more than that, but that was the most harmful loop to it

The whole idea is that if something is happening in a story that's really harmful, like csa or incest or noncon, and that thing is sexualized, then people will think it's okay in real life after being exposed to it for a long time. I'd see a lot of people back this up by talking about how they were sexually assaulted and went along with it because fic they read a lot online confirmed to them that what they were experiencing was normal and okay. And of course there was the idea that not only were you more likely to let yourself be abused, you were more likely to abuse others too

It's an exhausting mentality to have, because there is no perfect line dividing what's okay with what isn't, and what isn't okay is dangerous, so you spend all your time trying to find the danger. Most antis you'll see are really, really critical and big on discourse because of that. Immediately after reading or watching any sort of story, my first thought was basically "how can I prove that every part of that was problematic in some way" and it was exhausting. If I liked something, then I had to prove why I liked it and why it was the paramount of goodness. It sucked trying to enjoy anything

The hardest part about trying to remove myself from the antiship mindset was that most of my friends at the time held the same kind of belief, and most artists and fanartists I enjoyed did too. I also just didn't have the tools to combat antiship logic for a while. "It's just fiction" isn't enough because "fiction effects reality" and so on

BUT at some point I started reading from @/fiction-is-not-reality3 and even if I didn't agree with everything everything, the way they worded their arguments was objective and clearcut. It was the kind of logic I needed. I highly recommended reading through their dreamwidth account (https://fiction-is-not-reality.dreamwidth.org/profile) to get what I mean

So I dunno, I was just suddenly able to put the pieces together that fiction doesn't cause abuse, abusers cause abuse. Kids who take lessons from fictional stories and apply them to real life shouldn't be protected from "bad stories" at all costs, they should be taught that fictional stories aren't reliable pieces of information to base their beliefs on. There's more to what I think now too, but those were the game changing mindsets for me

There's 100% a ton of bad eggs among proshippers, but I kind of think of it as the same as the "there's no good fandom, only good friends" saying. Mostly I'm really grateful I've had a chance to talk to a lot of them and get more perspectives on why different people like different fucked up stuff in fic

I realized at some point that honestly the taboo we have around talking about experiencing CSA and rape is really, really harmful in a lot of ways. Kink is such a freeing way to talk about those experiences and, instead of getting that horrified or pitying feedback from people, you can instead get appreciation and enjoyment. It's nice I like it and I love weirdos on the internet 😌

I think it’s really interesting that you had a slide from one direction and back. It definitely gives another perspective, which is really nice to read about and include in the dialogue.

You bring up the point about minors not disclosing their age. That’s exactly it, like you and your friends, I too spend my teenage years reading smutty lemons. I enjoyed the whole topic finding it interesting. Even now, knowing that some of my classmates were having legitimate sex, I don’t think my lemons were as bad for my age. It’s why I don’t actually have a “minors dni” rule stated on my main blog. Sure, I’m not comfortable if a minor follows for all my smut and interacts constantly. But I know from personal experience that we all become Arthur’s little sister with our inability to read the sign, lol.

You mention that people respond to their gut reaction and then validate that. If I remember my books correctly, my books on stoicism have made mention to people reacting before they process their actions. We are in no ways in control over other people and we are not in control over their actions, but we are in control over ourselves. Even if something upsets us or makes us angry, it is OUR decision to lash out at another person. It is OUR responsibility to make things right. Except, in your case people were trying to shift the blame and responsibility to the people/thing that caused them the upset in the first place. Unfortunately, that is something that only they are in control over. If we want fan spaces to be more fun again, it is going to need to start with people calming down and managing their emotions. Y’all had 2020 to do this, it’s been four years, why are you acting worse?

I’m actually concerned that victims gaslit themselves into believing that the fiction was right. Unfortunately, the more likely to abuse others is a known statistic, one source even saying the rate is six times higher than the average rate. By no means does this mean that victims of abuse and rape are automatically going to be the next perpetrators. But it is rather sad to think.

Honestly, it sounds draining to even think about spending all your time finding the negative in the world. Stoicism again, but it preaches really hard about letting go of things not in your control. You cannot control the movie or other people’s thoughts or behaviors, so control what you can, which is yourself. You can’t control yourself from getting sick, but you can control what you wear on a cold day before then. Honestly, I hope those antis just find peace. Because living like that is unhealthy and painful, dangerous too.

Breaking away and consuming viewpoints different from your own is honestly the most important step of anything. Agreeing or disagreeing isn’t important, you can always come to terms with one another or agree to disagree on points. But in the end, discussions are vital.

I thought we did teach kids that not everything you read, especially on the internet, is true. T-T I remember the tree octopus, it was the way that my school taught us all to be mindful about what we consume online.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences, I don’t have as many questions this time, but you brought up so many interesting topics and I will absolutely look more into the one blog you mentioned.

[mermaidsirennikita]

I also read the Maiden Lane series (I finished the last book last week) and I actually think book 2 was my favorite, I devoured it, I think all the negative reviews there are on Goodreads made me lower my expectations and I was so pleasantly surprised. It was such a different “ballroom romance” and never afraid of going to more difficult and “immoral” places. I think generally speaking there is too much purity discourse around historical romance and I was just surprised by how unapologetically messy all the characters are in her books. Do you have other books with that vibe? Also thank you a lot for the rec cause I think my perception of what makes a good historical series totally changed after reading her books

I'm so glad you liked it! That book gets a bad rep because it is "cheating", which I think is so unfair tbh. I don't feel like historical romance cheating is often the same thing as contemporary cheating, lol. Was Hero engaged? Sure. Did she have any feelings for that man or vice versa? No. Her brother was forcing her into the relationship. She had no true power. Her giving her virginity to a man who was not her intended was truly one of the only acts of agency available to her, and it was risky as hell.

But yeah, a lot of historical readers, unfortunately, are there to basically act out their purity fantasies. Like, it's fine if the characters fuck outside of wedlock, but only if it's monumental and viewed with shame. Non-virgins must be widows. Sex should result in pregnancy, etc. There's not a lot of consideration given to the fact that a) these books are inherently inaccurate and b) even if they were true to life, people had casual (by the standards of the time) back then, many marriages occurred because sex was had out of wedlock, people anticipated the wedding often, women took lovers. Not everyone felt this huge amount of guilt over it. Hoyt is so good at that.

For a similar vibe, I would absolutely recommend Joanna Shupe, who wrote a few Regencies, a few Victorians, and mostly Gilded Age books. Her characters love sex and are immensely messy (so much drama, so many revenge plots, so many heroines defying their fathers, so much excess) aaand often make bad decisions at first. I would recommend basically anything by her, but standouts include:

The Uptown Girls Trilogy: About three daughters of a rich New York man--the oldest one, who fucks daddy's lawyer/fixer; the rebellious middle child, who asks a casino owner to mentor her but dun dun DUN he really wants to ruin her dad; the baby angel, who gets tangled up with a gangster.

Fifth Avenue Rebels: Four friends get into some bullshit after a messy Newport party--the first is childhood friends to lovers with a heroine engaged to another man; sex lessons by a himbo rake to a shy wallflower type; former fiancees who hate each other hooking up at a masked sex party; and two assholes who've been circling each other the whole series finally becoming fuckbuddies, except he wants LOVE.

My Dirty Duke: a novella about a heroine who wants her father's BFF

Wicked Deceptions: her Regency books about: a duchess who disguises herself as a courtesan to get pregnant by the husband that abandoned her; a former scandal of a woman tangling with an uptight earl; a woman who cross dresses in order to do some good in the world getting found out by her dude friend who thinks he's going insane.

Nicola Davidson writes some fun books about people who walk on the wild side--she especially focuses on sex and queer issues. Start with her novellas, like Seven Sinful Nights (heroine agrees to be bad man's mistress for a week to avoid. her horrid in-laws) or Duke for Hire (the heroine pays a down on his luck duke to deflower her). Davidson does a lot of research and is super knowledgeable about things like sex toys, sex work, etc, in the past.

Eva Leigh writes really frank, honest books with morally complex characters. Lady Viper and The Bastard is her Georgian novella about a pair of rivals (both in their 40s) who fall in love as they scheme to tear two lovers apart; her Last Chance Scoundrels trilogy is a really good series about three friends (two of whom are brothers) who have to find wives within a year after ruining a much-vaunted wedding. Does a good job of exploring a more diverse (in several ways) England with artistic circles and parties and hedonism. Offers characters from both aristocratic and working class backgrounds.

Adriana Herrera's Las Leonas series focuses on a group of friends who leave the modern Dominican Republic and go to Paris to find love. The first book is m/f, the second f/f. They explore a world you rarely see in historicals, with sex (not all straight) and politics and art and subversive thinking.

You might also like Sierra Simone's historicals--she writes great erotic romance. Try The Chasing of Eleanor Vane (m/f, heroine is engaged to a loser but is seduced by his older uncle) and The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind (m/m, one hero abducts the other for revenge, BDSM ensues), and The Conquering of Tate the Pious (f/f medieval, abbess falls in love with a lady conqueror who also conquers ladies).

Stacy Reid writes some deliciously messy books that sometimes feel like send-ups to old school historicals. Try her Wedded by Scandal series, which I love, featuring absolutely nobody who isn't messy, and tons of public sex.

Grace Callaway writes some really hot, fun, messy, mystery-solving historicals. Give her Lady Charlotte's Society of Angels series a try. It's Charlie's Angels, but historical, and these girls are constantly getting into trouble and falling for men who go "I must spank yhou for this, 10% as punishment and 90% because I'm hard". They're delightful.

Of course, you should definitely try Sarah MacLean as well. Her Rules of Scoundrels series (my favorite) focuses on four casino owners; Bareknuckle Bastards centers three outcasts who run Covent Garden; and her current Hell's Belles series focuses on a girl gang of friends who fuck shit up, basically.

Alexis Hall's Something Fabulous is a m/m historical romcom about a pair of heroes who go on a wild goose chase for the uptight one's fiancee after she runs away. The next book, Something Spectacular, focuses on the queer world even further with a genderfluid lead falling for a castrato soprano (fun fact: entirely accurate that castrati GOT THE FUCK LAID EVERYWHERE). If you want less whimsy and more drama, his A Lady for a Duke focuses on a trans heroine falling for a duke and having to deal with telling him about her past. Also something historicals often avoid--queer people have always existed!

[bawbio]

My Media Thread

Ok so before i get started i just want to say that i'm gonna be doing recommendations vs giving things an x/10 score like on my twitter media thread since the scores i gave were honestly arbitrary and a recommendation would give a much more clear view on how i feel about a game. Down below are the categories this thread will be using Don't recommend/Don't play it (Whichever one my brain remembers in this category at the time of writing) - I personally think no one should be subjected to playing this game and i would highly recommend not engaging with it at all costs like not even as a joke

Play at your own risk - I personally wouldn't seriously recommend this game to someone but if you want to give it a try go for it it could be really funny who knows

Maybe - This one will mainly be used for if i recommend the game but i think it's definitely not for everyone whether it be for difficulty or for potentially triggers in the game or even just some really weird shit

Recommend - I recommend this game wholeheartedly and would gladly suggest it to pretty much anyone

MUST PLAY - PLAY THIS GAME IMMEDAITELY RIGHT NOW

Oh and one final thing i'll be using the tag #beeb's media thread for this whole thread idk if you can mute tags or anything but if you can you can use it to mute this whole thread

So i guess without further ado i'll be starting my media thread here with danganronpa trigger happy havoc, So the first danganronpa game sure is an experience that's for sure and my opinion on the series has changed a LOT since i first played through the series and wrote my original media thread posts so i guess i'll just say this now. I don't like danganronpa as much as i did back then since my recency bias for the series went away ages ago and i've had plenty of time to look over the series retrospectively but the first game still has some pretty fun stuff. The whole mystery of why they're all in hope's peak i'd still say is pretty cool and hope's peak itself is a fantastic killing game setting and gives off a perfect atmosphere for the whole thing. The characters in one are kind of a mixed bag, on one hand you have characters who i think are genuinely pretty solid like sakura (She's probably my favorite character from 1 it's either her chihiro or mondo and maybe hina) and on the other you have whatever the fuck toko (in this game at least UDG helps her out a fair amount) and hifumi are where they honestly really suck just kind of being really annoying/weird most of the time. The chapters in this game are also mostly ok aside from like chapter 3 which is probably the game's lowest point trialwise and chapter 2 for how it handles chihiro (I refuse to get into any chihiro related drama so i won't go really in depth on that here) and just that really chapter 2 is mostly ok otherwise. Chapter 4 was especially nice and is my personal pick for my favorite chapter in the game and chapter 1 while it starts out slow imo has one of the absolute best executions in the trilogy. Thankfully this game also sticks the landing fairly well with its ending and it didn't completely fall flat on its face and seriously fuck up the rest of the game by ending on a sour note (Don't worry danganronpa 2 you're next) Personally i'd give danganronpa trigger happy havoc a...

Maybe - While danganronpa's concept of the killing game is something i unironically think is one of my favorite mechanisms for telling a story with how much cool character shit it can cause the execution the games do with the concept can be uh, less than stellar at times. Also aside from the obvious (violence, blood, and a whole lot of murder) stuff that would lead to me seriously consider giving a game a maybe. The game (and the series in general tbh) has some really weird shit in them like both toko and hifumi are really big offenders in this game and i don't even want to get into the chihiro discourse not to mention the gross shower peeping bonus scene in chapter 3 although that one is completely missable (thankfully) if you didn't get a certain item from the monokuma machine but still regardless all of that is enough for me to give this game a maybe, if you think you can handle the blood, gore, everything else and more in danganronpa i'd honestly say it would be worth picking up and trying the series out.

[snowddeong]

sorry im new to itzy. whats the mitm discoursce?

Got to this a bit late cause I was on a shitty road trip but in case you still wanna know what goes on from my perspective and my opinions then lemme try and just lay out facts first before being annoyed about the situation hadh

mitm released and a lot of kpopies hated it, not surprising tbh mfs will hate itzy for everything. Italian kpopies got mad about the song for "glorifying the mafia" (it doesn't 🙄) and made all these posts and shit but everyone kinda didn't gaf and memed tf out of the whole drama which pissed these italian kpopies off real bad

And also gave us this meme

Then Yeji did this 🤌 and they got pissed off even more about how she was "mocking italian culture" (she wasn't 🙄). Since then it's been an off and off discourse where these mfs compare mitm to cultural appropriation and racism then refuse to engage in good faith discussions because they know they're being offensive in drawing those comparisons but want excuses to throw around slurs. The most annoying part is a lot of other italians, even white ones, see this for what it is and call that shit out then mfs go "well yeah but still!"

It shouldn't be surprising how I feel about this but I find the whole thing to just be another case of white people trying to feel oppressed about something that realistically is not worth all this discourse. Anti-italian hate is a thing that actually exists and loads of italians have gone through awful dehumanisation cause of it but like... this is not that...

Mafia is a colloquial term. Every country has a mafia 😭 it has evolved to mean "crime organisation" despite there being a lot of baggage around the word cause of western culture. Mitm is a song about the mafia game with a twist to make it cool. That is all 😭😭😭 mitm is not glamourising anything it's literally about a fucking game that every fucking soul in SK has played at least once including a lot of the faves of the mfs pretending to be mad about this situation.

Ofc there's a discussion to be had about how the media potrays the italians and the mafia, but MITM is not at fault for any of that nor is it even an example of the glorification or perpetuation of this shit.

And EVEN IF IT WAS, white people going around telling poc and other marginalised folk that if they're not allowed to be mad about this then why are we mad about cultural appropriation and people that make jokes about racist violence and shootings in the us is so many levels of fucked up. You're allowed to be offended by mitm ig even if the justification is shit like be mad if you want, but someone doing a hand gesture does not cause the same harm as those other things and it's vile that people wanna be oppressed so bad they'll oppress others to get there and not see why that is wrong lmao.

ALSO last thing Yeji did that in reference to Vincenzo, not to mock anyone. Idk if the show is inappropriate it's very possible that it was cause iirc it's a mafia drama modeled after that caricature of "the italian mafia" but in that case the issue is not really Yeji trying to mock italians it's the fact that there's no education about what's appropriate and what's not lmao. Iirc Vincenzo didn't see any outrage (though I'm open to being fact checked on that Irdk) so it's wild to me that itzy got all this blow back but no one said a fucking thing about that show. Wild, not surprising, cause people will hate itzy for everything lmao

[1moremilgram-enjoyer]

Damn now other people are starting to send asks...I need to up my annoyingness ante more /joke /lh Kazui and Amane will be the last two I ask about since you already did posts on them, and Es and Jackalope will be the next one, so as I see it the next one on the list isss...Yuno! She's currently fighting in my mind to turn my favorite quintet into a senary because one of my friends really likes her and it kinda got me to analyze her more, so I'm interested to see what you think !

Yeah I don’t why why everyone suddenly started sending asks I wonder who gave them that idea Õ_o /j /lh

CW: Abortion, sex work, suicide.

Uh… so you know when I said Shidou was the character I thought about the least? I… may have deadass forgotten Yuno existed when I said that ngl. I’m sure I’ll go insane over her when I get to analyzing her videos more in depth, but for now she’s kinda flown right under my radar. I’m sorry, I just weirdly can’t find it in me to care much about her. Obviously it's perfectly fine for others to enjoy her, and I don't think there's any major issues in her writing, it's just I can't get too invested.

I mean, it’s sorta similar to the Mahiru situation for me. It’s implied by the fact she really doesn’t seem to care about money that she was engaging in compensated dating just for fun, which… I just can’t relate to, I don’t like sex or dating. But sure, stay safe and slay or whatever.

(T1) Q20: The most expensive thing you've ever bought?

Y: What did I buy? I think a stuffed animal.

(T2) Q7: What would you do if you receive One Million Yen and you must spend right now?

Y: I'd have a nice meal with my family, then give them to my friends.

Now, I actually could sorta relate to her whole deal about always seeking “warmth” because she always gets bored of things easily (I think that’s what’s going on anyways).

(T1) Q24: Do you have a future dream?

Y: I wish I can find something I can really get absorbed into.

Me before DRDT and Milgram.

However, I just feel like it’s not explored in a very interesting way? She's not exactly Veronika Grebenshchikova you feel. Maybe I’m missing something, but “bored girl finds a hobby” is not the most compelling storyline in Milgram. Am I supposed to be scandalized by her compensated dating? Cause I’m not. I’m not gonna tell her how to live her life.

You could argue there's maybe safer and possibly better things for her to get into, but any actual discourse which could exist around that part of her story comes from the subject matter more than Yuno, if that makes sense. And I'm just personally not very informed in the whole subject of compensated dating, plus I find it a bit uncomfortable to research too much for personal reasons, so I feel like I can't fully immerse myself in it.

Which gets us to her “murder”, and I’m gonna be honest, I feel there’s some kinda culture shock thing going here. Because a big part (read: the main damn point) of her second VD is that it’s stupid we try to justify her actions for her, that we pity her without knowing the full story, that she doesn’t want to hear our excuses for being forgiven, etc…

Tear Drop: Feeling magnanimous? INNOCENT? I'm so not that

(2nd VD) Y: Even if I was scorned by you, I would have been okay with being told I'm not forgiven. I don't believe I'm not in the wrong. I'd accept it.

So she doesn’t think she’s innocent necessarily. She speaks vague on purpose, but that’s what’s she’s getting at. She thinks if we vote her innocent it must be because we’re looking down at her or assuming things about her life which aren’t true, it’s the main point of Tear Drop.

But… We don’t need excuses, Yuno. You did nothing wrong.

I usually say that as a joke, but here it’s just true. And any kind of moral ambiguity which may have existed is completely thrown out the window by the fact we’re comparing it to actual first degree murder. Girl we forgave the fucking organ harvester three numbers away from you why do you think we need excuses to forgive you? Innoing her is the easiest decision in all of Milgram imo.

Like I said, possibly a cultural issue? It’s not like I live in a particularly progressive country, but in the online circles I run in its very much accepted abortion isn’t murder. Yet, that’s not what she believes.

(2nd VD) Y: I have no intent to say abortion isn't murder. I'm a respectable murderer.

Or… does she?

(2nd VD) Y: To the extent of understanding the feeling of actually taking a life... I couldn't feel that that was a life. A discomfort and…the sensation of a foreign body….

Girlboss make up your mind.

The point is that she even regrets what she did, and wishes she could have prevented it.

(T2) Q10: If you could turn back time, would you commit the same murder once again?

Y: I'd make sure that I won't have to commit it. That's it.

In any case, I hope I'm making some amount of sense, and I can get across why I struggle to really get invested in analysis of her. Sorry.

Of course, voting isn't the only aspect of Milgram, but I also just don't find her personality and character arc all that interesting. Personal opinion, I don't think it's badly written or anything, but I just find it significantly less interesting than other characters.

That said, the most interesting thing to me is that she might be dead?

Y: Oh! Also, that reminds me, there was one thing I'm curious about. Es: What? Go ahead and say it. Yuno: Am I…really alive? Es: That's…what do you…. Yuno: Hm…if you don't know, then it's fine. Es: Yuno…. Yuno: Hey, it's time, right? Es: Y-yes. Prisoner number 2, Yuno. Sing your sins.

That's peculiar. Given the Haruka suicide theory I brought up in my post about him, it's definitely a possibility she's dead. It's possible she went through an unsafe abortion, given this question:

(T2) Q20: Did you hate the person you killed?

Y: It was too much of a pain to for me to think about anything.

So there's potential death one. Potential death two is her Undercover silhouette shot.

Given I have no idea what the deal with this scene is, it's possible she jumped from here? I guess she does fall from stairs at the end of Umbilical, although she lands upright, though maybe that's her landing in Milgram? The issue with this suicide idea is this answer:

(T2) Q17: How many years do you want to live?

Y: About 40 years would be just right, I think.

... Okay, well, that's a concerning answer, kinda wish we got a bit more insight into what the deal is with that, but the point is she's currently not forty, so.

Anyways, that aside, I don't know what else to say. Yuno really hasn't rotted my brain as much as the other prisoners, so, uh, sorry I can't go any deeper atm. I feel kinda bad I can't say anything more positive since you clearly like her (_ _). Hope it's alright! Take care!

[princeyarthur]

Traitor's Lament of Innocence

did you ever think of me the way you thought about yourself?

It's here, it's real: the most self indulgent, niche playlist ever conceived - a Castlevania: Lament of Innocence playlist, using ONLY songs by the hit Blaseball inspired band, The Garages. Except instead of being all of Lament of Innocence it ended up being just about Leon and Mathias, but you know how it is.

I. Talking to the Parasite || II. outfield || III. And I Mean, All Gods || IV. Lang Gang || V. Precognition/Magmatic || VI. traitor's lament || VII. Estimation || VIII. Blessings (Shove 'Em) || IX. Eclipse || X. CONSUMERIST - live @ UNDERGROUND || XI. Pathetic/Spineless || XII. Get Normal (Neon Ver.) || XIII. dickerson's remorse || XIV. Ashes || XV. Ruby Tuesday || XVI. feedbacked feelings || XVII. past mistakes || XVIII. we've got history

some general thoughts and choice lyrics that made me add these songs to the playlist under cut:

Originally this playlist was genuinely going to cover all of Lament of Innocence!! unfortunately I was not good at bridging the gap between Mathias deciding "fuck god" and Leon finding out that Mathias went "fuck god". in the end I decided that that was what I was most invested in anyways, and there were enough good Garages songs to fit that alone, so... rip to the Leon/Sara In the Feedback, which was the only in-between song I really had.

I wanted to lean into the blaseball theming here, so I decided I was going to assign them teams and everything. I actually did not assign based on team colors!! Just team vibes. I simply lucked out. Hades Tigers Mathias was such an obvious choice that I kept doubting myself on to the point that his uniform was one of the very last things finished... I think him going on the team whose fanlore notes them as anti-necromancy is great irony. Yeah Mathias YOU might not ever try to raise your wife from the dead. But Watch Out.

I thought Leon would be much harder to assign, or that no team would really fit, but then it was noted that the Lovers have a whole Knight/Arthurian theme going on, due in part to their founder. And that sealed the deal.

Anyways. Choice lyrics. Whose pov it is. And some track commentary where I think it needs it.

I. Talking to the Parasite | Mathias I know what it is I have to do/A truth I think I always knew/A sacrifice must be made before we're through/And I'll do whatever it takes just to see You

(while I don't think Mathias is personally inclined to necromancy, the vibes on this song? impeccable)

II. outfield | Mathias Like They Burned you/Like They stole you/like They Took You away/hate the damn gods/They’re abusing their power/Nearly every single hour/They took you too soon

III. And I Mean, All Gods | Mathias and i'm going to engage in rational discourse/but god will not listen to my rational discourse/so now i'm punching god, and i'm punching him with force/cause he will not listen to my rational discourse/no gods/yeah, we're killing all gods/and don't tell me the odds/cause we're killing all gods

(this one is a little silly and by this point you probably Get It. however I think it's worth it for this bit alone)

IV. Lang Gang | About Mathias and then the Blood Drain gurgled (yeah)/and he took his little sippy (yeah)/but it tastes so dirty (yeah)/yeah the Blood Drain killed his vibe

(This one was perhaps the silliest one to include, and the abrupt tone shift between this and the next songs is jaw dropping. However. how could I not include Mathias' little sippy? yeah, becoming a vampire really did kill his vibe.)

V. Precognition/Magmatic | Leon "Please tell me how I can trust again/with no one left?/Please tell me how I can bat again/how can I not break?"

VI. traitor's lament | Mathias i've made a grave mistake, i knew that from the onset/but petty traitors like me have no room for any regret/with me and you there, singing what will be our last duet

VII. Estimation | Leon You thought you did the math/Balanced things with care/You’d filled the sky with all your debts/But everything was square

VIII. Blessings (Shove 'Em) | Leon i don't want your blessings/i want you to shove them, shove them, yeah/it's a pathetic gesture/a spineless kind of nod/you're just a wooden idol/a counterfeited god

(The Pathetic/Spineless reference? [chef's kiss]. also calling Mathias a counterfeited god would probably sting given his obvious complexes)

IX. Eclipse | Leon Why so quiet now?/Go ahead, we’re waiting/Have you forgotten how?/Or is your courage fading?/I paint my stripes on/I name each scar/'Cause now I see you for the coward that you are/Go on and take a swing/I’ll be right here, ready/You’ve taken everything/So why not take just one more swing

(the one problem with Hades Tigers!Mathias is that this Hades Tigers song is very much a Leon one. Sorry for any confusion.)

X. CONSUMERIST - live @ UNDERGROUND | Leon So take a pound of flesh/If you think it would help/I can promise you this:/nothing else will/Yeah, you sharpen your teeth/Come on and take a bite/I can promise you this:/I will survive.

XI. Pathetic/Spineless | Leon when i look you in the eyes/i will start to realise/you're pathetic, in the worst ways/you're spineless, like on most days/when i look you in the eyes/i will start to realise/you're not going anywhere, going anywhere/when you go to fight gods/but none of them live up to it/and all of them give up, does that/make you feel better?/when you go to fight gods/but none of them meet your eyeline/does that make you feel fine,/or are you disappointed?

XII. Get Normal (Neon Ver.) | Leon can we get back to normal?/can we get normal after this?/it feels like my world is crumbling/it feels like the world is crumbling down

XIII. dickerson's remorse | Leon The time has come to bury my love, future, present and past/This time I’ve got nothing left, this time I’ve loved my last

XIV. Ashes | Leon I thought it would be us forever/Together against the world/But here I am standing alone/As the sun sets on the dream we shared/Memories is all I have left/And all our regrets, all we left unsaid/Now Ashes is all that remains

XV. Ruby Tuesday | Leon Are you listening?/Is this to a broken address?/I’ve been wondering/Did you ever think of me/Like you thought about yourself/I never asked, and you never asked/And now I’m living/With no benefit of the doubt/I wonder if this’ll ever let me go/When will it let me go?

(this song is the reason this playlist exists.)

XVI. feedbacked feelings | Leon I like you but you don't like me/I try to move on eventually/Then you like me when I don't like you/Tell me what are we to do

(this song nearly got cut, as it's the only one (other than we've got history, which fits too well to cut) with... pretty much explicitly romantic connotations. but I wanted a nice even number and didn't really have anything else I wanted to cut, so it stayed. I also love the ending of this song in a post LOI context; I love it when Leon has complicated feelings about Mathias after everything and still like... likes him. feels fondly about him, despite everything and despite being very hurt. This is a lot of analysis for a silly little song .)

XVII. past mistakes | Mathias I'm a profit I'm non-profit and I always end up down/I made others riches way back when/I'm a coward I'm a bastard I'm a murderer/I'd give anything to do it all again

XVIII. we've got history | Leon & Mathias It’s funny the stories we tell ourselves/between the numbers./We’re always running around/running after each other.

No matter the words we tell ourselves/We’re just repeating an endless cycle./Trading my heart for a force field./Never asking how I feel.

[rosysugarr]

alright getting more into depth about my feelings right now here we go, yall can feel free to skip this, I just wanna think out loud and organize my thoughts

So, basically... the past two, almost three years of my life have been really, really fucking hard for me. Like. "I spent a month crying literally at least once a day" tier hard. And I'm still struggling with it. Adding to that has been the incredible fucking loneliness I've been experiencing.

And then I found dsmp fandom and just... dove headlong into it because of all of the above, and made it my Whole World, and I ended up getting into the place of it being just. everything I did. Which was fine back when things were lighthearted and fun! But over time, starting with the exile arc and getting worse and worse as things went on, the fandom became a more and more hostile and divided place to be, and because early on I'd let it become so much of my daily life and identity, I ended up in a place where any amount of negativity in the fandom, even if it was a point I agreed with, made me feel incredibly sick to my stomach. I ended up spending all day every day feeling anxious constantly and couldn't even enjoy talking about the content anymore because I felt this overwhelming amount of guilt and anxiety about doing so.

Which is why I left for a while. I realized I'd let this thing that should be something I enjoy for fun take up way too much of me, and looking back, it was REALLY UNHEALTHY. I haven't been taking care of my body or my mind, I haven't been a functional HUMAN in years. I totally forgot I had a body to even take care of in the first place half the time.

SO. I forced myself to avoid it for a while, to create distance. And it sucked for the first little while because I was constantly worrying that I was missing something... but I just reminded myself that even if I were, it would probably just make me feel worse if I hadn't missed it.

I'm finally in a more healthy space now, where I can enjoy the content without feeling intense anxiety and shame, and I'm gonna be working hard to maintain that-- keeping myself out of discourse or heated debates over the content or creators, using my blocked tags liberally or whatever, y'know. Doing what I need to do to care for myself, because I've realized that I cannot currently engage the way I was with this fandom previously because it's just... really unhealthy and damaged me really badly.

Hyperfixation can be a dangerous fucking thing. I know it's scary to even think about forcing yourself to step back from something you're fixated on, but believe me when I say that it is so important for you to assess your relationship with whatever you're fixated on and, if it isn't making you happy, if it's causing damage to your mind and body, you NEED to force yourself to take a step back if at all possible. Even if it's just for a couple of days.

Take care of yourselves, yall.

[themoonwheniamlost]

Last post I ever want to make about this @/lgbtmazight situation

Please do not harass anyone, no matter what their stance on this is. Please be kind to each other and to yourselves.

Here is a link to the original Post, Here is a link to a great focus/framing statement.

In this post, I’m gonna talk about a few things that I think need context, and then I never want to talk about this again. Okay? Ok.

1. Anyone who is using this situation to try and gain clout/respectability points needs to sit down and shut up. No one should be aiming for recognition. Saying “This needs to go viral/I was right all along,” is very unhelpful. If you were hurt by Len you definitely deserve an apology. But please stop trying to accrue brownie points over this discourse.

2. To the people defending Len. Please stop framing that post as a doxxing attempt. The content from that post is all things that Len made publicly available on the internet. Instead of saying “They pulled up tweets from ten years ago.” What should concern us is that for over ten years, Len has shown a documented history of holding dangerous and hateful political views and has constantly lied about different aspects of their identity.

What we should be focused on is the people that Len has hurt and the ways Len has misled our community. The only person who should be defending Len is Len. Speaking of,

3. Re- the subject of the silence of big blogs/ A new Discord server.

A few days ago, I was invited to be a part of a small discord group that was dedicated to “nuanced discussions and recreating the inviting spirit of the TOG fandom” from last summer. I accepted and was surprised to see some of the biggest names in fandom.

Four days ago the mods put out an announcement that a post had been made about one of their mods and that ALL of the accusations were false. And they then asked everyone in the server not to engage with the post at all. I didn’t even see the post until someone sent it to me directly.

The mods framed this call for silence as a way to keep Len and her family safe. As if anyone engaging with the post was directly putting Len in danger, rather than to face the fact Len was the person who put that much personal information online.

The mods in this discord did not allow for any discussion about this situation in the general server. So anyone who was concerned or had questions had to go directly and separately to the mods. How then do we know who has the same concerns as us? You don’t. In this server, a culture of silence has allowed Lens Closest Mutuals (a group of mostly white women) to act as a PR team that fields any and all concerns from people in the server.

The mods assured me that Len had done video calls with them and showed proper “documentation of their family,” to prove that Len is who she says she is. Which version of Len, is who she says she is? No one answered this question.

When I expressed my concerns to the mods, I got a stock response filled with defections, straw man arguments, red herrings as well as various statements that appealed to moral superiority and conflated separate identity terms all at once. I argued against all of their points and the response that I got was that if I was going to continue “not seeing eye to eye about the need for Len’s safety,” then I would be removed from the group.

I removed myself. I won’t ever stay in a group where one person's mental health is put on a pedestal above all the ways they have hurt and wronged others.

3.A - Please be wary of these White and White-passing women talking about what is and isn't racist. The people who claim that these accusations against Len will drive PoC out of fandom. As a whole ass Black and Indigenous woman, NO. What pushes PoC out of fandom is allowing people w/o racialized lived experiences to be the arbitrators of whether or not something is racist.

4. If an argument is made in bad faith but turns out to be true, it doesn’t mean that the accused should get away with everything just because someone accused them with ill intent. In this case, intent means nothing. Len has lied and holds terrible views. The end.

5. Race, Ethnicity, nationality, familial origin, religious background, class, and cultural upbringing are all different aspects of identity. Over the last ten years, Len has a documented history of lying about ALL OF THESE ASPECTS.

6. No one hates Len for being White-passing. However, you cannot be White-passing and “constantly racialized” at the same time. That's not possible because Race is what is read onto your body. If you are Read as White, and if you are allowed to exist in White spaces, you are not racialized. So which narrative is true?

7. I think that the aspect of race is one of the least important things in this to focus on. Len is a genocide denier, steals aspects of different religions, cultures, and lived experiences as their own. On top of this Len has made themselves a pillar/authority in TOG fandom while constantly lying to all of us, causing harm and posing as the authority on all things Maghrebi.

8. This news has already upset the fandom's past and present in ways we can't go back from. I know I personally feel really guilty for having ever followed this person. But again, the only person responsible for Len’s actions is Len. I'm simply dedicated to being more discerning in the future.

I know that a lot of us are angry. But I think there are ways for us to be angry and still kind. We have learned that someone close to us holds hateful views, but we don't have to act in hatred.

It goes back to the source material that brought us together right? In a terrible situation, we can still do some good. Still build bonds in honesty and nuance. Maybe I’m being naive, but I want to believe that our fandom can grow from this.

We're about to get a sequel! Let's get rid of the bad and move forward as a community. "Shit, Let's start a band."

[liquidstar]

I feel as if many people, myself included, have been having problems with the way “critical thinking” is conducted in fandom circles more and more. Which I’d say is a good thing, because it means we’re thinking critically. But still the issues with the faux-critical mentality and with the way we consume media through that fandom group mentality are incredibly widespread at this point, despite being very flawed, and there are still plenty of people who follow it blindly, ironically.

I sort of felt like I had to examine my personal feelings on it and I ended up writing a whole novel, which I’ll put under the cut, and I do welcome other people’s voices in the matter, because while I’m being as nuanced as I can here I obviously am still writing from personal experience and may overlook some things from my limited perspective. But by and large I think I’ve dissected the phenomena as best I can from what I’ve been seeing going on in fandom circles from a safe but observable distance.

Right off the bat I want to say, I think it's incredibly good and necessary to be critical of media and understand when you should stop consuming it, but that line can be a bit circumstantial sometimes for different people. There are a lot of anime that I used to watch as a teenager that I can’t enjoy anymore, because I got more and more uncomfortable overtime with the sexualization of young characters, partly because as I was getting older I was really starting to realize how big of an issue it was, and I certainly think more critically now than I did when I was 14. Of course I don’t assume everyone who still watches certain series is a pedophile, and I do think there are plenty of fans that understand this. However I still stay away from those circles and that’s a personal choice.

I don’t think a person is morally superior based on where they draw the line and their own boundaries with this type of stuff, what’s more important is your understanding of the problem and response to it. There are series I watch that have a lot of the same issues around sexualization of the young characters in the cast, but they’re relatively toned down and I can still enjoy the aspects of the series I actually like without it feeling as uncomfortable and extreme. Others will not be able to, and their issues with it are legitimate and ones that I still ultimately agree with, but they’re still free to dislike the series for it, after all our stance on the issue itself is the same so why would I resent them for it?

Different people are bound to have different lines they draw for how far certain things can go in media before they’re uncomfortable watching it and it doesn’t make it a moral failing of the person who can put up with more if they’re still capable of understanding why it’s bad to begin with and able to not let it effect them. But I don’t think that sentiment necessarily contradicts the idea that some things really are too far gone for this to apply, the above examples aren’t the same thing as a series centered solely around lolicon ecchi and it doesn’t take a lot of deep analysis to understand why. It’s not about a personal line anymore when it comes to things that are outright propaganda or predatory with harmful ideals woven into the message of the story itself. Critical thinking means knowing the difference between these, and no one can hold your hand through it. And simply slapping “I’m critical of my interests” on your bio isn’t a get out of jail free card, it’s always evident when someone isn’t truly thinking about the impact of the media they consume through the way they consume it.

I think the issue is that when people apply “Critical thinking” they don’t actually analyze the story and its intent, messages, themes, morals, and all that. Instead they approach it completely diegetically, it’s basically the thermian argument, the issue stems from thinking about the story and characters as if they’re real people and judging their actions through that perspective, rather than something from a writer trying to deliver a narrative by using the story and characters as tools. Like how people get upset about characters behaving “problematically” without realizing that it’s an intentional aspect of the story, that the character needs to cause problems for there to be conflict. What they should be looking at instead is what their behavior represents in the real world.

You do not need to apply real-world morals to fictional characters, you need to apply them to the narrative. The story exists in the real world, the characters and events within it do not. Fictional murderers themselves do not hurt anyone, no one is actually dying at their hands, but their actions hold weight in the narrative which itself can harm real people. If the character only murders gay people then it reflects on whatever the themes and messages of the story are, and it’s a major issue if it's framed as if they’re morally justified, or as if this is a noble action. And it’s a huge red flag if people stan this character, even if the story itself actually presents their actions as reprehensible. Or cases where the murderers themselves are some kind of awful stereotype, like Buffalo Bill who presents a violent and dangerous stereotype of trans women, making the character a transmisogynistic caricature (Intentional or otherwise) that has caused a lot of harm to the perception of trans women. When people say “Fiction affects reality” this is what they mean. They do not mean “People will see a pretend bad guy and become bad” they mean “Ideals represented in fiction will be pulled from the real world and reflected back onto it.”

However, stories shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you the lesson as if you’re watching a children’s cartoon, stories often have nuances and you have to actively analyze the themes of it all to understand it’s core messages. Oftentimes it can be intentionally murky and hard to parse especially if the subject matter itself is complicated. But you can’t simply read things on the surface and think you understand everything about them, without understanding the symbolism or subtext you can leave a series like Revolutionary Girl Utena thinking the titular Utena is heterosexual and was only ever in love with her prince. Things won’t always be face-value or clear-cut and you will be forced to come to your own conclusions sometimes too.

That’s why the whole fandom-based groupthink mentality about “critical thinking” doesn’t work, because it’s not critical. It’s simply looking into the crowd, seeing people say a show is problematic, and then dropping it without truly understanding why. It’s performative, consuming the best media isn’t activism and it doesn’t make you a better person. Listening to the voices of people whom the issues directly concerns will help you form an opinion, and to understand the issues from a more knowledgeable perspective beyond your own. All that means nothing if you just sweep it under the rug because you want to look infallible in your morality. That’s not being critical, it’s just being scared to analyze yourself, as well as what you engage with. You just don’t want to think about those things and you’re afraid of being less than perfect so you pretend it never happened.

And though I’m making this post, it’s not mine or anyone else’s job to hold your hand through all this and tell you “Oh this show is okay, but this show isn't, and this book is bad etc etc etc”. Because you actually have to think for yourself, you know, critically. Examples I’ve listed aren’t rules of thumb, they’re just examples and things will vary depending on the story and circumstance. You have to look at shit on a case-by-case basis instead of relying on spotting tropes without thinking about how they’re implemented and what they mean. That’s why it’s analysis, you have to use it to understand what the narrative is communicating to its audience, explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or incidentally, and understand how this reflects the real world and what kind of impact it can have on it. 

A big problem with fandom is it has made interests synonymous with personality traits, as if every series we consume is a core part of our being, and everything we see in it reflects our viewpoints as well. So when people are told that a show they watched is problematic, they react very extremely, because they see it as basically the same thing as saying they themselves are problematic (It’s not). Everyone sees themselves as good people, they don’t want to be bad people, so this scares them and they either start hiding any evidence that they ever liked it, or they double down and start defending it despite all its flaws, often providing those aforementioned thermian arguments (“She dresses that way because of her powers!”).

That’s how you get people who call children’s cartoons “irredeemable media” and people who plaster “fiction=/= reality!” all over their blogs, both are basically trying to save face either by denying that they could ever consume anything problematic or denying that the problematic aspects exist all together. And absolutely no one is actually addressing the core issues anymore, save for those affected by them who pointed them out to begin with, only for their original point to become muffled in the discourse. No one is thinking critically because they’re more concerned with us-vs-them group mentality, both sides try to out-perform the other while the actual issue gets ignored or is used as nothing more than a gacha with no true understanding or sympathy behind it.

One of the other issues that comes from this is the fact that pretty much everyone thinks they’re the only person capable of being critical of their interests. That’s how you get those interactions where one person goes “OK [Media] fan” and another person replies “Bro you literally like [Other Media]”, because both parties think they’re the only ones capable of consuming a problematic piece of media and not becoming problematic themselves, anyone else who enjoys it is clearly incapable of being as big brained as them. It’s understandable because we know ourselves and trust ourselves more than strangers, and I’m not saying there can’t be certain fandoms who’s fans you don’t wanna interact with, but when we presume that we know better than everyone else we stop listening to other people all together. It’s good to trust your own judgement, it’s bad to assume no one else has the capacity to think for themselves either though.

The insistence that all media that you personally like is without moral failing and completely pure comes with the belief that all media that you personally dislike has to be morally bad in some way. As if you can’t just dislike a series because you find it annoying or it just doesn’t appeal to you, it has to be problematic, and you have to justify your dislike of it through that perspective. You have to believe that your view on whatever media it is is the objectively correct one, so you’ll likely pick apart all it’s flaws to prove you’re on the right side, but there’s no analysis of context or intent. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily mean those critiques are unfounded or invalid, but in cases like this they’re often skewed in one direction based on personal opinion. It’s just as flawed as ignoring all the faults in the stuff you like, it’s biased and subjective analysis that misses a lot of context in both cases, it’s not a good mindset to have about consuming media. It’s just another result of tying media consumption with identity and personal morals. The faux-critical mentality is an attempt to separate the two in a way that implies they’re a packaged deal to begin with, making it sort of impossible to truly do so in any meaningful way.

As far as I know this whole phenomena started with “Steven Universe Critical” in, like, 2016, and that’s where this mentality around “critical thinking” originated. It started out with just a few people correctly pointing out very legitimate issues with the series, but over time it grew into just a trend where people would make cutesy kin blogs with urls like critical-[character] or [character]crit to go with the fad as it divulged into Nostalgia Critic level critique. Of course there was backlash to this and criticism of the criticism, but no actual conversation to be had. Just people trying to out-do each other by acting as the most virtuous one in the room, and soon enough the fad became a huge echo-chamber that encouraged more and more outrageous takes for every little thing. The series itself was a children’s cartoon so it stands to reason that a lot of the fans were young teens, so this behavior isn’t too surprising and I do believe a lot of them did think they were doing the right thing, especially since it was encouraged. But that doesn’t erase the fact that there were actual real issues and concerns brought up about the series that got treated with very little sympathy and were instead drowning out people’s voices. Though those from a few years back may have grown up since and know better (Hopefully), the mentality stuck around and influenced the norm for how fandoms and fandom people conduct any sort of critique on media. 

That’s a shame to me, because the pedestal people place fandom onto has completely disrupted our perception on how to engage with media in a normal way. Not everything should be consumed with fandom in mind, not everything is a coffee-shop au with no conflict, not everything is a children’s cartoon with the morals spoon-fed to you. Fandom has grown past the years of uncritical praise of a series, it’s much more mainstream now with a lot more voices in it beyond your small community on some forum, and people are allowed to use those voices. Just because it may not be as pleasant for you now because you don’t get to just turn your brain off and ignore all the flaws doesn’t mean you can put on your rose-tinted nostalgia goggles and pretend that fandom is actually all that is good in the world, to the point where you place it above the comfort and safety of others (Oftentimes children). Being uncritical of fandom itself is just as bad as being uncritical of what you consume to begin with. 

At the end of the day it all just boils down to the ability to truly think for yourself but with sympathy and compassion for other people in mind, while also understanding that not everyone will come to the same conclusion as you and people are allowed to resent your interests. That doesn’t necessarily mean they hate you personally, you should be acknowledging the same issues after all. You can’t ignore aspects of it that aren’t convenient to your conclusion, you have to actually be critical and understand the issues to be able to form it. 

I think that all we need is to not rely on fandom to tell us what to do, but still listen to the voices of others, take them into account to form our opinion too, boost their voices instead of drowning them out in the minutiae of internet discourse about which character is too much of an asshole to like. Think about what the characters and story represent non-diegetically instead of treating them like real people and events, rather a story with an intent and message to share through its story and characters, and whatever those reflect from the real world. That’s how fiction affects reality, because it exists in reality and reflects reality through its own lens. The story itself is real, with a real impact on you and many others, so think about the impact and why it all matters. Just… Think. Listen to others but think for yourself, that’s all.

[anarmorofwords]

Hi! You're probably not going to like this ask, but before getting into it I'd just like to say that this isn't meant as Kamala hate or anything, and I don't really want to offend.

Having said that, wouldn't it make sense that we get to see how Kamala treated Anna after she came out? It's in all likelihood one of the things that's weighing on Anna the most.

Obviously Kamala had her valid reasons: her parents aren't as liberal as the Lightwoods, she believes (knows?) their love is conditional as she's adopted, she's not white and not being heterosexual could further any treatment she's suffered from being different... Her reasons have already been listed multiple times by multiple people. Kamala has the right to stay in the closet and fear coming out. And while that shouldn't be villianised, we can't forget that closeted people can harm those around them.

If Kamala had kept treating Anna like a good friend, rumour would've sparked, and even if it was denied, she'd have been harmed by merely associating with Anna. Especially with the life Anna began leading; she could have been labelled as one of Anna's 'conquests' by the Clave. That, as we've established, is detrimental for her safety.

But at the same time, it would create a breach between Anna and Kamala. And Anna had the right to be hurt by it and weary of it when Kamala said she wanted a relationship.

If we look at it from that perspective, Anna's actions (though inexcusable in how they treated Kamala --who was also at fault for not accepting a negative for four months) make sense. Kamala wasn't only a fling of a week*, but also the girl she lost her virginity with, who asked her to be her secret (until she married Charles, after which Anna's affections would be discarded), who hid her sexuality for two years and sat back while Anna suffered from homophobic commentary, and who now wants a relationship hidden from most of the people that know her.

Kamala shouldn't be forced to come out; but the harm that can do to the women she may engage with is reflective of what happens nowadays. I can mostly think of examples with gay men, so my apologies in advance. But how many women have seen their marriages ruined by their husband having affairs with men?

Creating characters that reflect a toxic part of the 'hidden' LGBT community shouldn't be seen as hating or villinifying. Thomas isn't out and he isn't labelled a villain by the narrative --because his actions don't harm anyone. The hate Alastair gets in-universe is because of his past as a bully, not because he's gay. Matthew's not fully out and he isn't villianised --like Thomas, because the decisions he makes to keep his sexuality hidden don't impact anyone negatively.

I'll even go as far as saying that not even the narrative villianises characters like Kamala and Charles. If it were, they'd be seen more like Grace in Chain of Gold. We'd see how Kamala's actions are affecting Anna's in more ways than anger (that in itself put the fandom against Anna), and the characters would note so. We wouldn't see scenes were Cordelia empathised with Charles, nor Matthew said he loved him.

Be it as it may, Kamala and Charles represent ugly parts of being closeted that can naturally occur when someone is in their position. LGBT people are human. Humans, when put into very difficult situations (and Charles risks his career; Kamala her safety), can make decisions that harm those around them. Consequently, the people they're harming have a right to feel, well, harmed in whatever range of ways --this goes mostly for Alastair, and very partly for Anna, whose treatment of Kamala was horrible.

Readers need to understand what is pushing these 'villianised' characters to harm (again, mostly for Alastair) the more prominent characters and go beyond how they are instantly depicted. Because these are complex characters based on complex real people influenced by very ugly realities we will move on from someday, but sadly not yet.

By the way, Charles and Kamala's situations aren't that similar beyond the closeted thing, but I crammed them together because of a post I saw you reblog.

Please understand I'm not justifying Charles's actions; that I understand the pain he's put Alastair through, and know that he shouldn't ever be near Alastair. Nor am I trying to justify Anna's actions nor hate on Kamala.

I'll just finish my pointless rant by adding that I do think cc has sensitivity readers. I think she asked a gay man to go through tec (I don't know if he still revised her other books, though), and know she asked POC's input when writing someone for their culture. I don't know much beyond that, but I doubt who revises her stuff is up to her. Wouldn't that be something the publisher is responsible for (honest question)?

*I've also noticed people using the argument that they didn't know each other long enough for Anna to harbour such ugly emotions towards Kamala, but Kamala also remembered Anna pretty deeply and is 'in love' with her. I just wanted to say that considering cc writes (fantastical) romance where someone can ask a woman they met two months ago marriage, stressing over time spaces doesn't make much sense. Just my take.

hi!!

alright, where do I start? probably would be best with stating that while I can analyse Kamala's situation with what I know/see/read about racism and discrimination and reasonably apply things I've read/heard from PoC to the discussion, as well as try to be as sensitive about it as possible, I'm still a white woman, so not a person that's best qualified to talk about this.

that being said - if someone wants to add something to this conversation, you're obviously more than welcome to, and if there's something in my answer that you don't agree with or find in some way insensitive or offensive - please don't hesitate to call me out on that.

back to your points though: (this turned into a whole ass essay, so under the cut)

I don't think Anna shouldn't be able to reminiscent on Kamala's behaviour/reaction to her coming out, or be hurt by it. what bothers me is the way CC talks about it - I can't remember the exact phrasing, but the post where she mentioned this suggested something along the lines of "you'll see how Kamala sided with the Clave and didn't defend Anna after her coming out", therefore putting the blame on Kamala and completely disregarding the fact that Kamala wasn't in position to do much at all. It suggest that their situation was "poor Anna being mistreated by Kamala". therefore I'm afraid Kamanna's main problem/conflict will remain to be portrayed as "Anna having to allow themselves to love again and forgive Kamala", while Anna's shortcomings - and Kamala's vulnerable position - are never discussed. I think it would be possible to acknowledge both Kamala's difficult situation and the possible hurt her behaviour caused Anna without being insensitive towards Kamala's character, but it would take a really skilled - and caring - author to do both of the perspectives justice. CC would have to find a balance between being aware of the racism/prejudice Kamala faced/ writing her with lots of awareness and empathy, and still allowing her to make mistakes and acknowledging them. As it is however, I'm under impression that she's just treating it as a plot device, a relationship drama.

I'd say no one expects characters of color to be written as flawless or never making mistakes, it's mostly the way these mistakes are written and what things these characters are judged/shamed/

And that's - at least in my understanding and opinion - where the problem is. it's that the narrative never even addresses Anna's faults, and portrays Kamala as the one that caused all - or most of - the pain, without ever even acknowledging her problems and background.

White characters in TLH make mistakes and fuck up - because they're human and they're absolutely allowed to - but the thing is, non-white characters aren't afforded that privilege. Anna's behaviour is never questioned - none of it, shaming Kamala for not being able to come out, dismissing her desire to be a mother, or any of the questionable things she did in ChoI. Same with Matthew, James, Thomas. Alastair and Kamala however? they're constantly viewed through their past mistakes, and forced to apologize for them over and over, forced to almost beg for forgiveness. Moreover, those past mistakes are used as a justification of all and any shitty behaviour the other characters exhibit towards them now, which is simply unfair and cruel. They're held to a much higher standard.

So I'd like to say that yes, Kamala was in the wrong to keep nagging Anna after numerous rejections, and she was in the wrong to not inform Anna about Charles prior to them having sex - but that doesn't give Anna a free pass to constantly mistreat Kamala. And let's be real, Anna isn't stupid - while at 17 she could be naive and uninformed, I can't imagine how after years of hanging out with the Downworlders and numerous affairs and being out and judged by the Clave she's still so ignorant about Kamala's situation. I definitely think she's allowed to be hurt, but to still not understand why Kamala did what she did? Anna isn't blaming her for not telling her about Charles earlier - which would be fair - but instead for refusing to engage in an outright romance with her. She's being ignorant - and consciously so, I think.

Overall, I think you're definitely right about how coming out - or staying closeted - can be messy and hurt people in the process, especially in unaccepting environments/time periods, and I've seen enough discourse online to know there will never be a verdict/stance on this that will satisfy everyone. I, for one, would really like to refrain from putting all the blame on a single person - but, at least the way I see it, CC is pointing fingers. maybe not directly, but she is. Kamala, Alastair and Charles have no friends or support systems, and the only people in the narrative that defend them are themselves (ok, Cordelia does defend Alastair from Charles, but not from shitty takes about him and his "sins"). Also, sorry, but I don't like how you say "hid her sexuality for two years and sat back while Anna experienced homophobic comments" - it sounds very much judgemental. Kamala had every right to do that? The fact that she slept with Anna doesn't means she owed her something, and certainly not coming out and most probably destroying her life, or even defending her at the - again - expense of her own reputation, or more possibly safety.

As for Charles - it's a different issue here, at least imo - I fear that it'll be implied that his refusing to come out will is his main "sin", and therefore not something he can be judged for, which ironically, will be villainizing, but mostly will mean his actual sins are dismissed. This is where the scene with Cordelia feeling a pang of sympathy for him comes into play, and it worries me. I've never hated Charles for not wanting to come out, but rather for, let's see - grooming Alastair, disregarding Alastair's needs and feelings, disrespecting his mother, being a sexist prick, being low-key far-right coded "make Shadowhunters great again" etc.

As for sensitivity readers - I'm no expert, so I don't think my input is worth much. From what I've gathered from multiple threads/discussions on twitter, tho it is probably consulted/approved by the publisher, many authors push for that - and authors less famous and "powerful" than her. I'm not a hater, but seeing fandoms' opinions on much of her rep, I think she could do better. Because if she does have sensitivity readers, then they don't seem to be doing a great job - maybe they're friends who don't wanna hurt her feelings? Or maybe she thinks a gay guy's feedback will be enough for any queer content - which, judging by the opinions I've seen from the fans, doesn't seem to be true.

Again, these are mostly my thoughts and I'm more than open to reading other opinions, because *sigh* I really don't know how to handle this.

Bottom line - I really really don't want to be hating on the characters in general, playing God in regards to judging the struggles of minorities, or even criticising the characters too harshly for being human, flawed etc. What my main issue is is how CC handles those complex and heavy topics.

I hope I make sense and this answer satisfies you somehow - I also hope someone better equipped to answer might wanna join this conversation.

* I desperately need a reread of TLH before I engage in any more conversations like this, but I didn't wanna leave you hanging. So yeah, I might be remembering things wrong. Again, let me know, I'm very much open to being corrected as well as to further discussion.

* I use she/her pronouns for Anna because that's what she uses in canon

[jonesyjonesyjonesy]

heyyy, this is my first ask ever on this page so I'm not exactly sure how to start this, so ill just get right to it from one jonesy/zeppelin stan to another.

Robert apparently wrote Carouselambra about him being frustrated with Jonesy and Jimmy not being there for him after his son karac passed away,,, the song itself is great inho, it's my favorite off of ittod besides in the evening. The situation was tragic enough on it own, but it also put a huge strain on the relationships between the band members, it seems like. I can't pretend I know a whole lot about that part of their history in particular, just wanted to hear your take on it.

Hello my dear!! Welcome to my asks! I hope it is a cozy and pleasant experience. You are always welcome, no matter how inane, as I myself am the queen of inanity (I'm claiming it here and now folks).

^^ look at these boys in their 30s (36, 34, and almost 32 respectively, dear god)

In Through the Out Door is generally pretty fascinating. 'Carouselambra' in and of itself I think is one of those tracks that if it had been deeper into the canon (as if Zep had been able to make more albums), it would have been openly considered a masterpiece. That's actually how I feel about the whole album, but...instead, it causes consternation.

The track itself is one of my favorites as well. It's like Space Jam but everyone's on drugs and having a midlife crisis and WOW it's good. The actual inspiration for the track, as you say, I think was a combination of the highs and lows of Zeppelin and this includes Karac's death and the aftermath. 'Carouselambra' was originally called 'The Epic' -- I like to imagine the epic poetry it was being likened too and if epic poetry was still written and consumed the way we consume Homer and Virgil, that Zeppelin would be a perfect candidate. 'Tales of Brave Ulysses' could never.

The general consensus is that 'The Epic' was renamed 'Carouselambra' because that's what being in Zeppelin was like. Around and around on this gaudy mechanical and in the process these tragic things were happening and you only got fast glances at them or missed out on important things. And in the case of Karac, I'm sure Robert was grappling with the fact he just wasn't around (and I believe he's said as much).

This culminating with Jonesy and Jimmle not being at the funeral, which at the time, Robert had apparently said to Richard Cole, “Maybe they don’t have as much respect for me as I do for them. Maybe they’re not the friends I thought they were.”

Which is understandable! I mean, anyone that close to you dying, let alone a child. You would want your friends there (...if Robert considered Jonesy a "friend" to me is debatable considering his supposed tongue-in-cheek offer to Lita Ford to be the bassist for Zep in '77, but I'm just a bitter Jonesy stan (and I have plenty of theories and ideas about the Jones/Plant dynamic)). From what I've read, Jonesy was on family holiday, I imagine continuing with Maureen and the girls in the RV they rented for the second leg of the '77 tour -- he stole away after the Oakland debacle and drove it up to Seattle (this is from a glancing in Mick Wall's When Giants Walked the Earth, which I'm currently reading). Can that man get any more precious? And Jimmy was...Jimmy, heroin and all, although he's been quoted saying "We were all mates. We had to give the man some space.”

Potentially illustrating this, Robert commented on this in 2005: “The other guys were [from] the South [of England] and didn’t have the same type of social etiquette that we have up here in the North that could actually bridge that uncomfortable chasm with all the sensitivities required … to console.”

By ITTOD, though, we have our "relatively clean" camp friends Jones and Robert leading the charge and, I hope, having some good heart to hearts and enjoying each others' company. I really do wish we had more from that time, of that dynamic because I think it's a really interesting blip on the timeline given their distance mostly (I believe Robert said in 1971 that he had just started becoming friends with Jonesy, which I don't find hard to believe considering their opposite natures).

And then you get 'Carouselambra', all the nonsense and the mayhem boiled down into "why the fuck are we doing this"-edness. The kids are getting older, the tour is now a slog, and now you've got back pain. Kind of a sad carousel at the end of the day. “The whole story of Led Zeppelin in its latter years is in that song, and I can’t hear the words," Plant said, regarding how his voice is mixed lower than the keyboard in the first half. And there they were, in their 30s, and punk was on the rise and let's be honest, rock n' roll has never been a "middle years" kind of game.

But TO ME, that adds to the theatricality, to the idea that everything WAS getting lost and muddled. It's a brilliant, most likely unanticipated homage in my mind and Led Zeppelin WAS theatrical for as much as it was about the music, it was about the mythos and fable as well.

As a side note, I really hate how ITTOD is talked about for the most part as this like "lame keyboard album" when in fact, if Zeppelin had continued, it would serve as an LZ III/HotH vibe to me in that they could do whatever they want so they did and wow it was great. That's just my opinion, though, and I can definitely chalk it up to bias and also my love for Jonesy's post-Zeppelin work that really showcased just how fucking marvelous he is.

oh my god this got so long how did this get so long

This is just my take...I'm sure many people would be ready to contest what I have to say and that's just fine. 'Southbound Saurez' is one of my favorite Zep tracks and I stand by it.

I hope this was worth the time, lovely. Thank you for appearing in the asks and I hope you return someday. It was really lovely to take a journey into the more "academic" side of Zep...turns out I know quite a bit and I'm pretty good at rustling through the interwebs to find all the quotes I wanted to locate!

Feel free to correct me or engage in discourse kindly. I don't have time for negativity, I just turned 26 after all.

let it be known this is literally 950 words

[cryptovalid]

A rant about ‘cancel culture’

‘Cancel culture‘ is a convenient way to conflate all criticism. I hate the way this term is weaponized by reactionaries to dismiss any and all pushback against their ideas.

But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a rise in toxic, bad faith drama in the last couple of decades, and I think it’s worth parsing out what, exactly, is happening.

Legitimate Criticism and the transparancy of public discourse

It used to be, if you were a famous person with a shitty opinion, that information spread very slowly, and probably wouldn’t even be widely known if you didn’t want it to be. 

And any backlash to that shitty opinion would also spread slowly if people made no concerted effort to organize and secure a platform for their opposition.

As a result, public discourse seemed less contentious. It was more mediated by journalists. Not to say journalists couldn’t be toxic, but this still slowed the whole process down, allowed for more interference, less direct interaction. Part of why people talk of ‘cancel culture’ is the fact that social media has made sharing shitty opinions and criticism of them easy and even deliberately addictive.

Possibly the only good thing to come of this change is the fact that bigots and abusers have been showing their asses and public outcry has caused their sponsors, employers and potentially enablers to wash their hands of them. Sometimes. The #MeToo movement is a good example of this. 

This kind of public outcry for justice, this shaming of toxicity has abusers and bigots running scared, and they have taken to dismissing ‘Social Justice’ as a kind of mob rule that they call ‘cancel culture’. They do this by lumping in legitimate criticism with several real social issues, in the hopes to avoid any accountability.

It would be a mistake to ignore those other social issues though, because this only helps the branding reactionaries are leaning into. 

The Attention Economy and Controversy

Turning attention into money and power is as old as money and power, but social media has created a set of incentives that have amplified the demand for attention. The most popular platforms and creators do not charge money for their content, instead relying on ad revenue. This comes from the amount of views they get. This has resulted in an algorithm that favors engagement, regardless of the reason for it. Controversy is the most profitable, low-effort content, which has created a whole ecosystem of outrage that is too complicated to unpack completely. 

The fact that people’s lives are much more public now from much earlier on in their lives, means that people can find evidence that someone said or did something bigoted or abusive decades ago. Sometimes, this establishes a pattern of fucked up or even illegal behavior, and sometimes it is a snapshot of an earlier, less morally mature phase of their lives. The difference is not always obvious. Regardless of how each of us feels, there are people trying to make careers out of ginning up controversy about these situations. Sometimes, this results in harassment campaigns. Even people without a financial stake may feel empowered by joining in a popular dogpile of a celebrity. Likes don’t have to be monetized to create a perverse incentive. 

Figuring out whether people are morally trustworthy in the here and now is hard, and public discourse on social media has a habit of seeing this as a pass/fail: you either are trustworthy or you’re not. This is a result of framing these questions as a conflict. All people have moral flaws, and the attention economy encourages us to make a judgment and argue about it. The option of witholding judgment or avoiding the conflict is seen as cowardly, even though it’s perfectly valid not to have an opinion about a stranger that has allegedly done a controversial thing.

Toxicity as a reaction to trauma  

The internet is a refuge for marginalized and traumatized people that may have experienced bigotry and callous disregard for their boundaries in the past. Lashing out over earlier trauma is a perfectly normal coping mechanism, even if it’s not a healthy one. Lashing out to a stranger on the internet is unlikely to have the negative consequences it has in real life. It’s not hard to see social media as an outlet for the anger people could not safely express in meatspace. Frustration is a totally relatable response to being excluded, or not being respected as you are. It can be difficult to voice this frustration and assert yourself to people who could actually hurt you. At the same time, it’s very natural to hold people who make an effort to be sensitive to your needs to a higher standard. Together, these dynamics result in parasocial relationships with content creators (even though you don’t know a Youtuber personally, you may feel like they are a personal friend because they appear genuine and you spend a lot of time with them), which lead to bitter disappointment and possibly harassment when that person fails to meet expectations. The more invested people may be in a public figure’s ‘goodness’, the more painful this feeling of betrayal gets. Marginalized creators often get the short end of the stick in this regard. In much the same way that an abused child will lash out to people perceived as more vulnerable or safer, public figures who try to be more inclusive can experience more backlash than openly toxic figures. 

In Conclusion

None of this means that anyone is above criticism, or that anyone should become ‘less sensitive’ or lower their moral standards. But I do think that sometimes the backlash against creators is amplified by previous trauma looking for an outlet, as well as incentives and algorithms that encourage everyone to take sides.

I believe nuance and context are important in these situations. There is also a difference between refusing to support or listen to a public figure, taking steps to deplatform them or have them fired, and harassing them. Depending on the details of the case, we have to decide how we want to respond. Calling all of these different issues ‘cancel culture’ is nothing but a shield for bad faith actors trying to avoid consequences and ironically, silence criticism. Sometimes someone gets away with a lifetime of abuse or discrimination and sometimes someone made an ignorant comment ten years ago. Those are not the same. There’s also room to disagree on how serious and forgivable these issues are. 

I hope that we can discuss each case based on the context, as mature adults, rather than saying it’s ‘cancel culture’ and therefore bad or or that all callouts are good, non-toxic and made in good faith.