#i’m not the only person who got exploited right after facing CSA. and i’m not the only person who pretended to be ok & even happy and

[menalez]

(in the least creepy way possible) ive been following you on and off since around ~2015 and I just wanted to say that it's been a genuine honor to have been able to grow up with/alongside you. I was 14 in 2015, and some of the pictures you posted back then was the first time that I had ever seen another brown person with self harm scars (I'm Desi/Indian) and it meant so much to me at the time and made me feel a lot less alone. I've also been through some traumatic experiences with men and have since realized I am a lesbian not bi, and it really does break my heart that there are people out there that think that they can police another person's sexuality based off of their experiences, especially for those of us that did not grow up in the western world and felt like men were the "respectable" option. Sending you love<3

not creepy at all! ur actually not the first person to say this to me and there are actually several ppl who have followed me since then or even longer. and i appreciate the ppl who stuck around and saw me for me & my story for what it was, instead of the people who found me much later then dug around looking for things to misconstrue that suits their confirmation bias. i actually used to really love that there were people who saw my flaws and the things i wasn’t confident in (but was trying to be more confident and accepting of) and saw themselves in me, and gained some level of self-acceptance from it. so i’m really touched u felt that way & i appreciate u telling me that.

i hope u are free from the traumatic situations ur in & are healing & are free of self-harm as well. those are not easy things to go thru and it’s amazing you made it thru that and are around to tell ur story. thanks anon for ur sweet words ❤️ wish u well

[ziracona]

Thinkin about how the NOES 2010 movie is so good. Listen…listen. It has really unusual structure. Most of the time, a horror film follows either a single unit (one person, one family) through a whole plot (The Witch, The Babadook, Saw, Halloween) or a group of victims with one pretty obvious final girl in the mix (Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer), but NOES 2010 doesn’t do that. It takes you through several protagonists, one at a time, moving on from one teen to another when your initial protagonist is killed, starting with Dean, moving on to Kris, then Jesse, and then Nancy and Quentin when they’re the last two standing. It’s a fresh take, which makes everything so much less sure, and gives narrative weight to the characters who die instead of just making them bodycount. Everybody gets treated like the final girl, not canon fodder, which is extremely important to the story the film is telling. Nancy and Quentin don’t even become the film’s focus until almost halfway through the story.

Probably someone who is unfamiliar with the original film would assume Kris is the protagonist until she is killed thirty minutes in a little ala Psycho. It makes everything seem less certain, and makes the characters who you lose as important as the ones who make it, which is a really responsible way to tell something. A lot of the time, the characters in horror are kind of assholes (which is great and another rant for another day, because since the stakes are so low [literally you just have to care enough to not want the character to be brutally murdered], you can get an audience invested in an willing to explore the complexity of even a shitty  person—but like I said, that’s a wholeass other rant), but in NOES2010, they’re not, which I think is important. Never does the film want you to feel like the characters either suck and deserve something happening to them, or are stupid (look, when the publicist in Scream 4 got out of her car in an unlit parking garage in the middle of a Ghostface chase, I saw the wholeass theater stop cheering for her to live because she was so stupid we just couldn’t root for her anymore—it happens) and to care less about their outcome that way. Everyone fights hard and tries hard and it’s just not enough.

Obviously it’s a slasher, but NOES 2010 is really like a thesis work film on CSA and how it affects people, and the commentary is both responsible, and really, really well done. As someone who has had to write a character who has committed that kind of crime, and walk the fucking razor’s edge between making them duly awful, and not crossing the line into anything exploitative or gratuitous, I can say with certainty that is not an easy thing to do. Because you want to give weight to the suffering that has been inflicted and realistic portray of the depravity of your villain, but again, you really don’t want to show anything more than you have to. That’s not what it’s about, and honestly, you can talk about that kind of a serious issue without actually showing things on screen. A film about CSA would be kind of defeating its own purpose if anyone who had ever experienced that shit went to watch the movie and went away more traumatized. The film does a really responsible job of walking that line. Freddy is awful, and there’s a constant threat with him—especially in the film’s climax—but he never actually assaults anyone onscreen (or off, except in the referenced past. The worst thing he does onscreen is lick someone, which is still incredibly disgusting), and the film still manages to keep how awful he is very, very real.

CSA is a really shitty thing to go through, obvious, it feels incredibly of dumb to type that—any assault is. Obviously. One of the big things in dealing with it after is a lot of the time, victims can feel broken, or damaged, and even worse, be talked about like they’re some kind of ‘damaged goods’ by incredibly shitty people in their life, but the film doesn’t even give that enough weight to bring it up. There have always been two big ways in film to combat ideas, one of which is direct confrontation (IE a film specifically about something being wrong—Do The Right Thing talking very openly about racism for instance) and by just straight up not doing the thing (Star Trek dropping a woman of color in as both a major cast member, romantic interest for people of other races, and someone working in a position of power, and just being like Yup. This is just normal). Both of which are very necessary and useful approaches. In NOES 2010, all four of the protagonists are in romantic relationships at some point (and so is Dean, the mini-lead protag). It’s not played out voyeuristically, and you don’t get any hot makeout seshes, but they’re definitely in comfortable, functional, physical relationships. In a silent but fucking hardcore stance, while Kris and Jesse spend the night together early in the film, there is not a single on-screen kiss until Quentin and Nancy have found out the truth about what happened to them as kids, and a few minutes later, right before their final confrontation, they kiss. Not even a second thought about anything, except how much they really need and want to kill this piece of shit coming after them, as it should be. It’s a rockhard solidification that not only do the characters not see each other differently because of what happened, but it has done nothing to change who they are or what they can be.

The movie is only an hour and a half, which isn’t that long, but still manages to pack in not only multiple different realistic reactions, (Quentin goes through some hardcore withdrawl/denial after finding stuff out initially, Nancy gets fucking mad), but to cover some of what this is like for their parents. In one conversation with Alan, Quentin’s dad, he tries to explain the mob enacted justice on Krueger years ago by telling him that he hopes someday when he’s a parent, he never has to experience how it feels having utterly failed to protect your child. Even though they only have like thirty seconds of flashback to work with, the script gets in one of the parents in dismay asking what other choice they have about hunting Krueger down, because the alternative is making their three-four year olds get on a stand and tell a room full of strangers what happened to them. It’s a horrible, awful situation to be in. Although it would be really easy to make some drama between characters and their families, even the characters who die have good relationships with their families, and neither the dead teens or their parents are ever narratively ‘punished’ for anything that happens. Kris’ last words to her mom before she leaves on a flight, about eight hours before Kris is murdered, are, realistically, “Love you.” The last thing Nancy says to her own mother is, “I know you were just trying to protect us. Thank you,” and her mother’s last words to her are, “I’m just glad you’re safe.” Characters still die, but they at least get the peace of deserved last words to each other. The film also not only definitely does not vilify the parents for burning Freddy to death for assaulting their preschool aged kids, but comes down in its finale openly supporting that vigilante justice decision, with Nancy’s last words in the film being thanking her mother for protecting them.

Even the whole nightmare theme fits in well with the story being told, because nightmares are a very common side-effect of past trauma, symbolically, there’s a lot people have to fight through in their lives when that kind of shit happens to them, even years later, and it genuinely isn’t given enough weight by most people. As kind of icing on the cake in the film, not only does Nancy get to kill Freddy, he dies in a very ugly, undignified way, with a slit throat and gross expression on his face, after getting his ass handed to him in a like a thirty second fight in reality with two very motivated teenagers.

Plus, Quentin Smith is canonically ADHD, and Nancy Holbrook is a really underrated protagonist who reads autistic and I love her.

Anyway. This movie does a great job about using horror as a medium to talk about a topic usually only people already interested in that specific topic would check out, plays out its narrative very responsibly, comes down hard with a big two thumbs up to murdering your local pedophile in a bonfire, and says fuck you to assault victim stigma. My only real beef with this film is that they were so dead set sure they would have a sequel that instead of ending with real resolution, it’s got a stinger at the end (on rewatches I always skip the last scene lol).

Not that it’s a flawless film—it’s got budget parents, which I think is both hilarious and fantastic (meaning everyone except I think Dean has only one parent, the same gender as them, and it’s hilarious and I adore it). They had rushed filming for some of the end. Etc. But it’s really solid, and doesn’t get enough credit as a film. It’s very different from the original—less campy, less funny. But it’s supposed to be. It’s telling a different story. And it’s telling a really good one.

[motherboxing]

I said I wasn’t going to write about this but after talking to my girlfriend I changed my mind

TW for mentions/acknowledgement of sexual abuse, including CSA and incest, as well as non-CSA/non-incestuous abuse/rape, gaslighting, property damage, stalking, and self-harm.

I want to talk about the Ailey O’Toole plagiarism thing but I am angry. I am worried that saying I am angry is derivative. I am worried that my trauma is derivative. I am worried that my trauma is original (too original, perhaps, one might say, unbelievable?) and people have and will plagiarize it for personal gain. I am worried about being accused of doing this, because I have cast around for ways of describing What Happened, ways of acknowledging, naming, coming to terms, trying to mend, and in my utter overwhelm about the abject terror of that, often looked to the writings of other survivors. I have talked to other survivors who told me that they did this with my own writing, for themselves. The networks of survivors that I know, sharing our language, offering up our sympathies for each other, relating, connecting, trying to heal, are beautiful, intricate, delicate things. When someone does something like this it smashes a wrecking ball through the house I am trying to build in my head for the knowledge of my own abuse.

She stole the words of other women - many of whom were women of colour - and presented them as her own. More than that, she stole the stories of their personal trauma. She took a description, written by Rachel McKibbens, of physical injuries relating to abuse, and presented it as pure metaphor, revealing through her own amateurish take on an expertly constructed work her lack of understanding. Her poems are worse than the poems of the people whose traumas she exploited. She’s a hack. I have tried to muster empathy for her and I have none. I only have the internal chaos of having been effectively gaslit for years.

Something that I think gets lost in the way that the term “gaslit” gets thrown around today is the long-term impact of gaslighting. I am not very good at describing it but I would say it is in part a constant self-doubt. Did this happen? Here is the proof I have collected. At night sometimes I do little drawings and leave them on my desk to prove that I was there, a real person. When someone lies to me, I become destabilized and angry, then direct that anger inward. I compartmentalize my memories into neat little boxes, separate and away from each other, and then when that no longer works I pick and pick and pick at them. I acknowledge the truth of my memory and then I unravel it, spool the thread, and light it on fire. If you go to therapy, he said, they’ll plant false memories. Therapists can do that. They’ll tell you you were abused to turn you against me. You know I would never hurt you, right? Don’t you love me?

A recollection of a specific assault can be hidden away, like the rug I bought that he ruined that he pretended wasn’t real. I bought it with my own money and he hid it and told me I never did, and I believed him until I found it when I was moving out and saw the big stain on it. I left the rug there. Did the rug exist? Now I believe - know - that it did, but when someone lies about shit like this, it worms its way under my skin and eats at me. There are people - former friends of someone I was formerly in love with; someone I was formerly in love with; someone I was never in love with but who took what he wanted anyway - who will still tell you the rug did not exist. Sometimes people who were not there tell me that the rug did not exist. I imagine there are people who will read this and say, see! She ADMITS she’s an unreliable narrator!! The rug is literal and also a metaphor. 

What if someone does to me what Ailey O’Toole did to McKibbens and others  - reads this piece I am writing and cribs it, claiming it as their own? Or, more horrifically: what if I’m doing that to someone else and I don’t realize, because all of my memories are fake?

My rational mind knows that there is a difference between me reading something on someone’s blog and then later, privately, telling my therapist about it, saying I appreciated the language that person used, saying I found their writing a relatable account of something similar to something that I remember in my own past - that their writing made me feel understood, made me understand something about myself; that I cannot speak about my own memories as mine just yet, but I can acknowledge the recognition that I felt reading this other person’s work - and publishing in a book that I got paid for and did interviews about and won awards for a story which is wholly someone else’s, and claiming it as mine. My rational mind even knows that there is a difference between someone picking up a phrase I used to describe my abusive former family (“mutual bullshit society”) and applying it within their own traumablogging on their non-monetized tumblr blog where they are just trying to process their own shit, and the careful, deliberate crafting of an autobiographical poem written for publication and considered for prestigious awards. 

Gaslighting, though, tells me there isn’t. Maybe, it tells me, you’re lying. Maybe you made it up, for sympathy, for attention, for prestige - to be seen as someone who has Survived, which is Admirable, because everyone loves a survivor as long as they aren’t a bummer! As long as they are inspiring. Isn’t that what you want? To be seen as strong? To not be afraid? Wouldn’t it be easier if none of this was real?

I wonder if Ailey O’Toole understands these feelings. I wonder if she understands what it’s like to have someone deliberately chip away at your ability to trust your thoughts, memories, feelings, instincts, and impressions until you genuinely think you don’t know what’s real anymore. I wonder if she understands what it’s like to wrestle that self-doubt to the ground, pin it down, and say, “THIS HAPPENED”, only to have it rear up and take a chunk out of your flesh in retaliation. I wonder if she understands what it’s like to do that and then see her, her smiling, perfectly made-up, straight-haired perfect white girl face with no damaged teeth, revealed as a fraud, and feel a fear worse than “what will happen if I stop acting like I made it up?” - what if I DID make it up after all?

I don’t know Ailey O’Toole’s life. I’m not saying she’s never been abused. And I do not subscribe to the school of thought that teaches that people (women) make up stories about sexual violence for twitter fame and book deals. I do think that in many (white) feminist circles online, there is a dangerous premium placed on vulnerability. That poses much more of a risk to people who are willing to be genuinely vulnerable than it does to people who crib other peoples’ writing about their abuse and pretend that that is vulnerability. 

And I don’t know what to do with my anger about this. I don’t know how to navigate the tangled knots of denial it tightens within me to see a story about someone who exploited other peoples’ trauma in this way. It is damaging, and it sucks, and if I’m honest, I do not think O’Toole understands the harm she has caused - primarily to the people who she ripped off, the victims of her fraud, but also, in a secondary way, to the people who are struggling to tell their own truths whose perception of that activity is easily cracked by shit like this. It’s just hard. I wish people wouldn’t do it.

[otomeshistarlight-blog]

Rant incoming

I was scrolling through the JoJo tag when I saw this post and I just ... I’m really tired y’all.

First of all, according to a google search it looks like the age of consent in Italy is 14 (if I’m wrong, please correct me) so Narancia is very legal, as is Giorno. America’s laws are not universal. The world is not so UScentric that whatever we as a country deem inappropriate is likewise considered to be inappropriate in other countries. There are varying standards throughout different societies and one is not necessarily more correct than the next. Whether or not I think real life fourteen year olds should be having sex is irrelevant- because even if I don’t agree with it, it’s gonna happen anyway - but Narancia is not a real fourteen year old so whatever the law dictates in America OR Italy is irrelevant.

What this boils down to is that there is no victim here. Narancia cannot be taken advantage of. Narancia cannot be sexually assaulted and face the physical/emotional consequences of such trauma. There is nothing inherently wrong with shipping him in ANY pairing, regardless of the ages involved. If I want to write about him getting wrecked by Bruno I will damn well do it because not a single person is being hurt by me doing so. If this is something that triggers you and causes you distress then don’t 👏🏻 fucking 👏🏻 look 👏🏻 at 👏🏻 it. 👏🏻

Fighting for the rights of fictional characters solves nothing. It helps no one. It doesn’t benefit real victims and it sure as hell does not stop real people from being victimized in the first place. This is a nonissue that people are taking up arms over for no reason other than a perceived moral superiority that makes them feel more in control of the world around them. It stems from feeling helpless and lost in a society that doesn’t bend to their every whim. Fandom space is the only place they feel like they have any power so they take on the role of morality police, try to dictate what people can and cannot like, and then accuse anyone who won’t do what they say of heinous crimes. It’s extremely toxic and harmful, not to mention it lessens the severity of sincere pedophile/abuse finger pointing so the chances of a real predator getting away with it are greatly heightened, and I’m just done with it at this point.

Let’s say I’m looking through the porn tags as I am won’t to do and I come across a post that features blatant child porn. Real child porn. The 3D kind that, yknow, actually features real children being exploited and assaulted for realsies. I’m understandably appalled so I file a report with tumblr and they don’t even look at it because they’ve been bombarded for the last year with false harm to minors reports and the user is never penalized for actually doing something inherently wrong and immoral. Y’all have heard about the girl who cried wolf right? Like, y’all know how that story ends don’t you?

But no. Instead of directing your efforts towards anything worthwhile, you’re going to keep going after shippers. And for what? Because oh no, the fictional seventeen year old who could just as likely be nineteen is being paired with a fictional twenty-five year old. The horror. What is the world coming to? Think of the children!

Except ... these supposed children don’t exist. How can you victimize a piece of paper? The same argument applies to loli/shotacon too mind you, and there is no crime in looking at drawings regardless of their perceived age, especially when the topic is anime where you can have a character who looks like a five year old girl and she is in fact a 400 year old vampire. Like?? There is absolutely no logic you can apply to this that has any internal consistency let alone actually makes sense.

Me: these fictional minors don’t even look like sixteen year olds, where have you seen a real teenager who looks like this?

Antis: they look like teens you pedo!! And ageing them up is still pedophilia because they are canonly sixteen so you’re still thinking about teenagers in a roundabout, highly contrived way

Me: *shows you a 300 year old loli vampire* okay so I can definitely fuck this one right? She’s unrealistically old!

Antis: no!!!! You’re just using her canon age as an excuse to be a freak who preys on children! She might be 300 years old but she still has the body of a child!!

Me: okay so I’ll just age myself down to self ship, no biggie.

Antis: absolutely not!! You’re still an adult and ageing yourself down doesn’t make it okay!! I’m reporting you to the authorities right now!

Me: but ... who am I supposed to imagine fucking then?

Antis: one of the few adults you find in anime, except this one because he’s an abuser, or this one because he tortured a little girl and not the serial killer either because wow problematic

Me: so what you’re telling me ... is that I’m only allowed to thirst after your preapproved, precious cinnamon roll faves even though my tastes or needs in a relationship might vary greatly from yours?

Antis: yes, exactly. I’m so glad you’re finally on my level of intelligence and moral superiority. : ^)

Me: oh, I see now. So what this boils down to is that you just don’t want people to enjoy something you don’t personally agree with. Got it.

Antis: absolutely not!! I’m thinking about the betterment of society by telling you what you can and cannot enjoy! You liking these questionable things is harmful against the greater good! Won’t you think of the children!?

Me: soooooo we’re just gonna ignore how much that sounds like a fascist/communist society or ...?

Antis: : ^)

Y’all should absolutely read 1984. It would do you some good. Because having an attraction to a fucking anime character is not a slippery slope, but this puritanical shit? It sure as hell is.

Let me pose this query: what is stopping an anti from going on a book burning campaign or fighting to get certain books banned? Lolita? Flowers in the Attic? All of the works by Marquis de Sade (a personal hero of mine)? Alternatively who are the only people who actually engage in book burning/banning?

Overzealous religious nuts. Everything about the anti movement is the same “our children shouldn’t be exposed to such filth” battle cry that religious sects - specifically the western ones - have screamed for decades now except with a cute little sjw hat on top. No rock n’ roll music. It’s Satan’s music. No porn. It’s tainting America’s youth. No alcohol. It’s leading our country down the path of sin. No violent video games or movies. They’re turning people into mass shooters. No problematic themes in fictional works because it’s turning people into pedophiles/abusers.

And that is just ... factually incorrect. There is absolutely no correlation between Lolita being published and an uptick in children being sexually assaulted. There is no correlation between lolicon or shotacon breeding more pedophiles. Because that’s literally not how it works. Period. I’m not going to accidentally stumble on a loli doujin and think “huh yknow what? This sounds fun!” I could even read loli doujins at length and that’s still not going to convince me that actually engaging in sexual situations with toddlers is okay. Like ... I don’t know why these people think we’re so stupid that we don’t know the difference between right and wrong but this is just insane. The only people who look at loli or shota and then go on to commit crimes against real children are the ones who were already having those kinds of thoughts in the first place. The only people who play Grand Theft Auto and then go shoot up a church are the ones who were already having violent thoughts to begin with. These thoughts are not magically implanted into our brains regardless of what media we consume and that’s just a goddamn fact.

Yes, media impacts reality but not the way you think it does. Even all those sources antis link to about the supposed correlation between the two are twisted to meet their own rhetoric. It’s called marketing and anyone with half a brain cell knows that it exists. It’s meant to encourage us into thinking we need some product so we spend money on junk and keep capitalism going strong. it works more often than not. However no amount of marketing is going to convince a mentally sound person that shooting up a mall is a valid life choice to make. It just doesn’t work like that and you could scream until your blue in the face that fucking kids is the bees knees and I still wouldn’t touch a real child because that’s gross. Period. And since I can’t touch Bakugou Katsuki or Narancia because they’re just figments of someone’s imagination and pen and paper ... then where lies the problem?? What is the issue with writing or drawing fictional characters, regardless of age or moral compass, in sexual situations?

I’m a CSA survivor that has been on the internet for a LONG time. I’ve seen some shit I sorely wish I could forget. Everything from real life gore, real life death, bestiality, necrophilia and yes even real life child porn. I don’t think there’s a single problematic thing I haven’t accidentally stumbled on and it’s horrific. It’s disgusting. I know all too well how awful these things are and I know even better how it feels to be a victim of rape and sexual assault and pedophilia and grooming. Like. That was my life growing up. I know what these things look like and I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that whatever is going on in fandom space isn’t even comparable. Please. Draw your OC fucking a dragon mascot character instead of fucking a real animal. Please write about a fictional father fucking his fictional son instead of fucking a real child or a real sibling. Do whatever you want with your imagination - and I do mean WHATEVER. If you want to think about eating your favorite characters shit then by all means. Enjoy. It doesn’t effect reality in any way besides maybe giving someone a cathartic coping outlet and there’s nothing wrong with it.

There’s nothing wrong with ANY topic being explored in fiction.

The only problem is when someone commits a crime in reality. When someone hurts another living being. And consuming this so called problematic fiction does not lead someone to real life crimes. Period.

Finding myself on that stupid gore site when I was 14, BestGore I think it’s called? Did not make me want to try killing someone. I’ve never even seriously contemplated doing it because death is awful in every regard, I wouldn’t seriously wish that on anyone let alone convince myself that it’s okay. But according to antis me being exposed to that sort of content means I’m more likely to go out and commit murder?

Literally what crack are you smoking?

Get the fuck out of here and do something worthwhile with your time if you honestly find these topics so disturbing. If not then shut up, sit down and let people enjoy their fandom experience however they see fit. Because this right here? This treating fictional characters like they matter, like they’re real people? It’s not fucking cute. And as someone who was raped from the time I was eleven until I was eighteen by a family member I can safely say that you aren’t doing shit to help anyone with this holier than thou, I know better than you crusade.

And that is the goddamn truth whether you like it or not.