#if it's sincere or in bad faith

[northern-passage]

Genuine thought as a fellow trans dude, I’ve seen a lot of (obviously non-serious) questions on other blogs about characters’ genitals such as “how does it look like?” and similar, and I think we all know & understand that such questions are extremely inappropriate to ask and (I hope) no one would actually go around asking these questions irl. Idk, I think we should treat trans characters just like cis ones, without any special “precautions”, so to normalise them and not make cis people treat them like fragile boxes, a thing which happens to a lot of us irl. Hope this doesn’t come off as an attack or anything lol.

no worries, i didn't take this as an attack at all. i actually agree with you, that's why i mentioned feeling conflicted about it and also mentioned that i've changed my stance on how i felt about handling Noel and Clementine in game and in explicit intimate scenes.

however, for me the problem comes from the fact that people... don't ask these kinds of questions about cis characters? i suppose people do get cheeky "who is the biggest 🤪" asks but i would hardly compare the two. to be a bit crude, no one is going to be asking if a cis character has a dick or not, or "what does it look like". of course it's natural for people to be curious, and i honestly encourage the open discussion and am happy to see trans bodies being talked about more in a positive way, but not everyone is going to be comfortable with it due to the inescapable transphobia online and in the community. sending me that kind of ask is like sending out an invitation for a debate or a discussion that i don't necessarily want to have. i also just don't think people should default to asking a random IF author on tumblr dot com to describe what bottom growth looks like.

and with most of these asks typically coming from someone who is anonymous, i have no way of truly knowing what the tone is, what their intentions are or why this is being asked - is it another trans person? or maybe someone who is just genuinely curious? or, more likely in my experience, is it someone who is going to immediately follow up this message with something transphobic after i answer? do i want to roll the dice and find out?

so while i agree with what you're saying, it's important to consider the context and the reality we live in. the IF community is not kind to trans people or trans characters. and as a trans person, my first priority is protecting myself and my mental health. so what i mean when i say "precautions," is that those precautions are for me, because i've had to deal with transphobic harassment here for years now, and i try to mitigate it as much as i can. it's also for my personal comfort - again, to be blunt, i'm simply just not comfortable discussing a trans character's genitals with anonymous strangers on the internet. it makes me feel vulnerable.

also i do want to say i didn't mean for any of that to come across as a dig at other authors - if you're comfortable answering those kinds of questions, that's really only something you can decide for yourself. like i said, this is just coming from my own experiences in IF and for my own personal comfort - i have previously talked a lot about trans stuff and gender and sexuality here, when i'm feeling up to it, but it is something that is very draining for me and can also be very upsetting.

basically: i do agree that it's important not to other trans characters or treat them any differently than cis characters, but i also think there are ways to do it that don't require me answering invasive questions or questions that i don't feel comfortable with as a real life trans person, you know what i mean?

[feluka]

[Autistic] I actually appreciate it when people let me know that someone is deliberately being malicious rather than ignorant or confused.

[raayllum]

cannot fucking imagine applying a “the customer is always right” capitalist hellscape mindset to “the audience is always right” when audiences are as varied as anything else. just say you’re a boot licker to your own sense of edgy superiority amplified by your lack of media literacy and the fact your ‘hot takes’ don’t get traction and go. 

[fernsnouveau]

Anyway maybe people should be allowed to be upset that this show, which spent the first 4+ seasons setting itself up as a narrative where a controlling child abuser is the main villain, and lack of agency as a victim of parental abuse was a major problem to overcome for one of the title characters, did a jarring thematic 180° near the end of the first major story arc (that was originally supposed to be the whole show), and turned into blatant victim-blaming and abuse victim grooming propaganda material.

And the showrunner is also engaging in this victim-blaming and abuse apologism rhetoric and insulting people on Twitter if they question it. Which is... kind of really damning, at this point.

People who are upset about this aren't just "hating on the show" for the heck of it. This is, in fact, reasonable basis to be upset. People are allowed to voice their disappointment after the show wasted their sincere emotional attachment (yes, you should be allowed to have sincere emotional attachments even if it's something silly like a mediocre magical girl cartoon) and spat in the face of its own story and themes and characters.

Also a worrisomely significant segment of the fanbase has gone very mask off in starting to regurgigate and agree with this abuse apologia rhetoric, encouraged by the canon validating it.

[demigodofhoolemere]

Watching the Behind the Sofa features for the season 2 Hartnell episodes (surprisingly they’re on YouTube but who knows when that could get taken down) is a weird experience because a lot of the time it’s really enjoyable seeing the various reactions and they’re often very complimentary towards things that you don’t see people appreciate enough, which makes me quite happy, and then other times out of nowhere you’ll get odd comments of a few of the actresses perceiving certain lines as sexist or something. Specifically in The Time Meddler, which was otherwise a crowd favorite among them, Steven complimenting Vicki on being clever was apparently patronizing, and they acted as if the Doctor telling Vicki to keep her nose away when he was messing with the Monk’s TARDIS was him brushing off her questions as if she needs to stay in her place or something, when in context he’s dealing with precarious electrical wires and was telling her not to get her face so close because it could give her a shock — he says as much, but they talk over it. I enjoy very much that they were often appreciating things that people look over and really getting into a lot of it, but every now and again something like that would take me out of it. Don’t like when people attribute their own assumptions or biases as the meaning of something that was totally innocent.

[zevranunderstander]

i love watching youtube analyses of movies and shows and i love when the person explaining something is totally wrong about the thing theyre talking about

[thepurplecardinal]

my mind's persistence

all the times i check nutrition labels and serving sizes

the times i look at added sugars on my flabby thighs

all the times i pray for calories to burn off my body

the times i wait for the scale to not reflect reality

all the times i step with my right and not with my left

the times my world feels lopsided, i wish for it to be perfect

all the times my mind plays tricks to even out my soul

the times i feel invisible stains on everything i hold

all the times i mind my tongue and force it into silence

the times where, against my better judgement, i commit to nonviolence

all the times i worry my voice will somehow betray me

the times i’m scared the bridges i’ve built will become debris

all the times i’m scared that i’ve done everything wrong

the times i fear i’ll never belong

all the times i doubt myself into self-isolation

the times my brain hands me nightmares of my own creation

all the times i used to pray to a god who didn’t hear me

the times i gave myself hope and cried myself to sleep

all the times i believed i was followed by an angel

the times i feel guilty for not being grateful

all the times i beg for my brain to survive the nights

the times i will my sanity to afford life’s price

all the times i hope that i secure a spot in the afterlife

the times i worry about what heaven’s like

[monkeebratz]

i have no idea why I'm suddenly overcome to write the "actually maribat" au in good faith all of a sudden. but BOY am I overcome by the urge.

Would anybody still be interested in that?

[obstinatecondolement]

Try though I may not to get invested in people who are Perfect Strangers to me just because they have an affable online persona, I do find myself very endeared to Brandon Sanderson. I have read none of his books, but I think his YouTube videos are very enjoyable and I am much relieved that he has both vocally affirmed his support of LGBTQ+ people in general, and trans people specifically, and has apologised (in a way that seems very sincere and earnest to me) for clumsy and unintentionally homophobic things he has said in the past. Which is, like, more than can be said of some fantasy authors.

[strixhaven]

You know, if there’s one thing I do miss about early 2010s tumblr and is something that I wish the broader site could have a wider, much more nuanced conversation about, it’s the openness with which people used to discuss self-harm. Early 2010s tumblr was by no means a very healthy outlet or place to talk about issues like mental health, how it manifests, how to cope with it—especially with regards to self-harm—but the shift from a deeply problematic openness and semi-romanticization to quietly adopting the predominant cultural attitude of outright silence, denial, and shame when it comes to self-harm is… more of a lateral move than anything else. For as much absolutely terrible shit that era of tumblr came with, the loss of open discussion about recovery, alternative coping mechanisms, celebrations about stopping, and encouragements that life still goes on even with self-harm as a presence in it is something that I do genuinely wish the site and people more broadly would embrace again.

I completely understand people not wanting to talk about their own experiences, though. Self-harm is often deeply tied to some of the darkest times in a person’s life, and how people navigate and feel about those times and how they relate to it is something that should be completely up to them. But in the few times I’ve seen people on the site actually broach the subject of self-harm, of living with it, of quitting, and of having it as a part of your past, it’s just an immediate barrage of people accusing them of romanticization for merely mentioning self-harm, people asking that they hide their bodies and experiences as something inherently traumatizing for everyone else to acknowledge, and overall making it very clear that this is not a struggle or a part of your life you can ever discuss openly. The readiness with which so many people will make you try to feel shame and disgust about your own body and mental health as a way to vent their own shame, denial, and disgust at themselves is unreal. It’s a whole-hearted embrace of the broader cultural narrative surrounding self-harm and mental health that seeks to keep its most ugly aspects hidden in order to pretend it’s not a problem that has to be dealt with.

Again, I do not begrudge anybody for not wanting to talk about their own experiences with self-harm, but I genuinely think this wide-scale sidelining and refusal to discuss self-harm and tumblr’s relationship with it is just as much of a problem. It is a deeply isolating and incredibly disheartening thing to have gone through, to know others have gone through, and to know that it’s something you’re likely never going to be able to bring up to other people. The greatest comfort I’ve found and the ability to make peace with my history of self-harm and scars has come from hearing other people just acknowledging their relationship to it and refusing to be shamed for what they endured, how they coped, and what they felt like they had to do to stay alive.

With the more nuanced, open discussions of the “uglier” and less-acknowledged aspects of mental health slowly becoming more common and more mainstream, the absence of self-harm from these conversations only becomes more and more noticeable, and I sincerely hope that the void it’s left is filled with the care and attention this topic deserves. With how on the rise self-harm and suicidality are amongst teens and young adults, as people who’ve lived through and with self-harm as a presence in our lives, I feel like it’s incumbent upon us to be more open and available to discuss these things so nobody else has to deal with the pain that comes from silence and shame about it.

[kimikaami]

“Look this might be a controversial post but-“ [insert blandest most obvious opinion here]

[dennisboobs]

i went to sleep and woke up to sunnytwt in my twitter mentions again so that's fun. i'm going to work on an edit lol

[canmom]

It's set in a Germanic-based country ran by an authoritarian military that actively corrals and abuses a Jewish-coded minority group because they're viewed as monstrous threats to society. And that is JUSTIFIED in the author's opinion and in the eyes of the narrative. It is DIRECTLY antisemitic and specifically based in the kind of genocidal antisemitism the nazis embodied. You don't get to "I don't think it's nazis though:/" that.

presumably in relation to my comments on Attack on Titan in this post.

I admit I’ve had a hard time knowing how best to respond to this message. let’s say, I guess, that I had a similar impression of Attack on Titan prior to watching it. I changed my mind after seeing it. but I realise ‘not actually Nazi propaganda’ may be a tough sell for something with this much suspicion on it.

your tone seems like you think I’m some kind of diehard Attack on Titan fan who wishes to resolve cognitive dissonance by denying the fact that it is very obviously drawing on the history of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and global antisemitism in general in both its imagery and many elements of its narrative. so if it wasn’t clear enough from the previous post, I don’t give a shit about fandom. I don’t care if you love or hate it. I think Attack on Titan is fascinating and worthy of critical analysis, but that’s as much for its flaws as its successes. and for that reason I am trying to understand what makes it tick.

all the same, my reaction would be quite different if I believed the narrative really did try to justify the genocide and other atrocities it portrays.

so if you’re willing, let me present my reading of Attack on Titan; what I think it’s trying to do. I’m not trying to persuade you to enjoy it, but I would like to explain why I think ‘Nazi propaganda’ is not a justified reading, and - whatever the flaws in execution - I believe Isayama’s intentions must have been something else. in short, it’s very much about fascism, but I believe can very reasonably be read as an - forgive me - attack on fascism: an illustration of why people may fall to fascism, the horrific consequences, and perhaps how one might turn away from it.

so. just to clarify the premise a bit: the thrust of Attack on Titan’s later arcs is about how the “Eldians” (the ‘Jewish-coded minority group’ who comprise nearly every named character) try to deal with living in a world where nearly everyone hates and wants to kill them.

the majority of them live (at first, unknowingly) on an autarkic island-state where the whole population is Eldian, but later we learn how other Eldians, including the antagonists of the earlier parts of the story, live in ghettos within the neighbouring “Marleyan” empire and fight on its behalf in return for conditional privileges.

as far as justification, to address this at the start: we learn the Marleyan narrative backing the oppression of Eldians is to claim that all of this is a form of punishment for the abuses of the defeated Eldian empire. now, I think it is a misstep for there to be a concrete reason why people hate the Eldians (history shows that people have never needed a reason) - but as far as whether the narrative bears this out, it’s unequivocal that the alleged sins of this past Eldian empire are just a flimsy and irrelevant excuse for what the Marleyans are doing to them in the present.

nevertheless, this recent empire which is accused specifically of ‘eugenics and ethnic cleansing’ is part of why I think Japanese nationalism, and the concept of guilt over the atrocities of your country, is part of the pot here. I would argue that Isayama’s “Eldians” are not just an allegory for Jews, nor just an allegory for the Japanese. they are constructed out of elements of all of these - and even the Germans as well! it is Eldians who wear those iconic brown cropped uniforms that appear in all the marketing for the show, and it is only quite late in the story that we learn the main characters are ‘Eldians’ and not just the only surviving humans.

still, this does mean Isayama’s story approaches the history and imagery of Nazism, which is already dangerous enough, and also takes a run at the history of Japanese imperialism (hence the first major controversy being with Korean readers). ‘reckless’ would be an understatement, and it’s not really a surprise that it got such a bad reputation.

so, watching Attack on Titan, @mogsk and I were constantly asking each other what is this about?? what is it trying to say? often it’s hard to tell! but I think as we watched a picture emerged.

the major thrust of the final section of Attack on Titan, the part covered in Mappa’s anime rather than Wit Studio’s, revolves around the conflict between two brothers who both represent cartoonishly extreme possible responses for the Eldians. Zeke represents a sort of negative-utilitarian ‘lie down and die’ attitude: he believes that the lot of the Eldians is so irrevocably hopeless that it’s better not to exist at all than just to suffer. his plan for a sort of ethnic suicide calls to mind Gandhi’s infamous remark that the Jews should have willingly gone to the ovens rather than fight the Nazis. (in reality, if it needs saying, Jews resisted extermination fiercely in many different ways, even when the fight was absolutely futile).

meanwhile, Eren, who was previously the protagonist, develops his shōnen protagonist attitude - “if you don’t fight, you cannot win” - into such an extreme ‘us or them’ stance that “the whole world is his enemy”. he comes to believe everyone outside his home island must be destroyed in what we could call this story’s equivalent of a nuclear war: sending a bunch of huge guys to crush everything flat. (despite the dedicated efforts of the animators, in practice this can’t help but come across as very silly, especially when it’s given the hilarious name of ‘the Rumbling’, but whatever, it’s a fantasy story.)

as argued in this article (an article which points at a lot of things but doesn’t really develop them very far, though broadly seems to agree with me that the thrust of Attack on Titan‘s approach to far right ideology is a critical one), Eren’s worldview calls to mind the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s idea of enmity - two incompatible existences where one must eventually be annihilated, and politics as the field of this conflict. in this framing, if you accept Eren’s belief that fighting to the death is inevitable, his conclusion - get them before they get you - follows.

so after the timeskip, Eren goes from being a hot-headed shōnen protagonist to a sort of Yukio Mishima-like figure, a quiet man at odds with the world due to an extreme nationalist ideology, who carries out an act of terrorism in attempt to provoke others to follow his lead. (there’s more to the Mishima link I want to develop, like I think the obsession with sacrifice can also be read in relation to him, but I’ll leave that for the more full treatment.) unlike Mishima, Eren largely succeeds and gets what he wants. (perhaps, rather than Mishima, we might think of the Nazis and the Beer Hall Putsch - like Hitler, Eren turns his imprisonment to his advantage.)

over the course of the season, Eren defeats Zeke and starts putting his plan into motion, becoming the primary antagonist who the other main characters now work to oppose. (their reasons vary: for some their family will be destroyed by Eren, while for island Eldians like Hange, it is explicitly that ‘there is no excuse for genocide’). Eren is supported by the Jaeger-ha faction led by the fanatical Floch, who are unequivocally presented as full-on fascists: a bunch of violent young men throwing their weight around with summary executions and torture in the conviction they’re going to make a new order under Eren. even though many of the Jaeger-ha are former comrades, the sympathetic surviving members of the Survey Corps such as Armin and Mikasa reluctantly commit to fighting and ultimately killing them in order to try to pursue Eren.

the alternative presented to these ridiculous grand schemes is perhaps a familiar set of anti-war story beats you might recognise from works like Gundam: characters from opposing sides spend time among their enemies, realise they are not so different from the Other, and talk to each other to put an end to the cyclic conflict and work towards a common cause (namely, stopping Eren). there are some really juicy dramatic scenes when the former enemies have it out and confront each other with all of their crimes - and try to understand what brought them about.

to set this arc up, we spend a lot of time not so much with Marleyans themselves, but with the Eldians who live in ghettos as hypersurveilled second-class citizens to the Marleyans, showing how their actions arose from their oppressive circumstances. these characters signify a number of possible responses, from eager complicity with the oppressor to conspiring against them according to various ideological lines, but most just trying to live out their lives in a deeply unfair scenario, upholding the few personal relationships they have.

by the point they’re all actually fighting, it’s become very ambiguous who we’re expected to root for. I think this is the point. this story is not about a heroic struggle for survival, it was all along about a stupid and needless bloodbath that grows to consume more and more and more.

a key moment, to me, comes in the final episode to date, which is mostly an extended flashback to the first time the island Eldians - our main characters, the Survey Corps - set foot in the wider world. they bear witness to acts of anti-Eldian prejudice, and later end up spending joyful evening drinking with a group of heavily Turkish-coded characters on the outskirts of the city. in the context, this happy moment is presented in a rather forlorn way: a peaceful ‘what could have been’ if everyone hadn’t been fucked up by empire, complicity, trauma etc. at the end of this episode, we return to the present and see Eren’s plan going into motion.

moments like this to me signify what Attack on Titan ultimately considers valuable: a positive encounter of different cultures. the times things go well for the characters are when they approach the Other honestly and openly; the times it goes poorly are when they close themselves off and refuse to let go of prejudice, and what tends to rescue this sort of situation is a character responding to this with forgiveness. (the arc of the two children from the ghetto, Gabi and Falco, and their meeting with Sasha’s family may be the most direct example of this.)

the same observation goes for the role of characters like Onyankopon (the story’s one Black character, a soldier recruited from a country annexed by the Marleyans, who defects to support the Eldians and is portrayed very sympathetically, at worst a little naive) and the characters from Hizuru (the setting’s Japan analogue, who arrive to make diplomatic overtures and propose an awful plan for how, with their technology, the Eldians can defend themselves in their new geopolitical context). although these are minor characters, the show puts a lot of work into building up their relationships with the island Eldians as part of a broader arc of being forced out of their ignorant, parochial worldview.

I am waiting for the anime to cover it to see the ending. it would surprise me a lot if Eren was not stopped (it would be quite a shaggy dog story otherwise), but I don’t ultimately know what the thematic answer is going to be. ultimately the challenge that Attack on Titan has set for itself is in showing not just the defeat of Eren as an individual, but showing that his entire belief system is wrong. having called it into question, it must provide a convincing account that coexistence between Eldians and everyone else is possible, and conflicts as entrenched as this one can be resolved peacefully rather than by annihilation.

in other words, the story has provided many convincing illustrations of why someone might fall prey to a fascist ideology, and many examples of that going badly for them, but ultimately it hinges on showing the limits of “if you don’t fight, you cannot win”.

so, let’s return to the question of whether it’s antisemitic.

intentionally? i don’t think so at all; the sympathies are overwhelmingly for the Eldians. I don’t think you could possibly read or watch this and come away thinking the author sees the Holocaust with anything other than absolute horror and revulsion.

unwittingly, through carelessness towards historical trauma? honestly, god that’s a hard one. were a Jewish author writing this story, many of the moves it makes would make plenty of sense to me; I’d have plenty of praise for it. but Hajime Isayama is not Jewish; this is not ‘his’ history and the context where he chose to tell his story is a popular shōnen manga that’s mostly about action - the nuances he’s trying to get at are unlikely to be appreciated by a lot of his audience, and it’s easy for people to latch on to the militaristic imagery and sympathise with what he seems to be trying to attack. (I am reminded of when The Man in the High Castle was adapted for television and the marketers decided to plaster every advertising surface in Nazi symbols. at that point it doesn’t matter how well the work in question criticises the Nazis, the damage has been done. Attack on Titan isn’t nearly that bad, but, yeah...)

certainly if I write a story about war and genocide, I try to avoid directly invoking the images of a specific genocide, but instead attempt to construct more of a layer of abstraction. (it is a difficult line to walk, since fiction should address the most horrible aspects of the world. too much timidity strips you of the ability to say anything at all.)

yet at the same time, it is precisely that reckless charge into the worst episodes of history that makes Attack on Titan so fascinating to drill into. it is not content to just be another action/horror shōnen with a series of escalating fights, but trying for something - to me that something seems to be some kind of grand story about the nature of conflict and the world and the forces behind fascism and nationalism. there is some sort of animating force at work here - Hajime Isayama was wrestling with something in the pages of this manga.

now, I don’t think Attack on Titan has any insight to offer on the Holocaust, if it is read as a historical allegory. the fact that the Eldians can turn into Titans and nobody else can - a fundamental difference between Eldians and everyone else - means we’re already far into the realm of fantasy with no real historical analogue.

in real genocides, it is vital to recognise that the first task of the perpetrator has always been to construct the difference between the two groups and make some minor difference salient: to convince some subset of the population who had been living alongside another to see themselves as an ‘us’ and the latter group as a ‘them’. and while Attack on Titan does show examples of anti-Eldian prejudice falling at random on people who are not Eldian but merely suspected by an angry crowd, the existence of that ‘real’ difference does change the scenario. all the other fantastical elements, like shared memories and even time travel, go even further to take it away from a historical model.

one particular case where it’s hard to figure out what Attack on Titan is doing is the matter of conspiracy theories. we learn at one point that the Eldian empire actually orchestrated their own downfall as a way to end the war, after which point a specific Eldian family actually secretly manipulated the Marleyan empire for the ensuing hundred years! yet this is no unified Eldian conspiracy; it all comes as news to all the other Eldian characters too, and very soon after revealing this, the manipulator character is killed off by Eren, the hardcore Eldian nationalist.

so like, god, what? this makes absolutely no sense as some sort of narrative about historical antisemitism. like, it’s not anything: it’s neither saying ‘look, antisemitic conspiracy theories are true’ because it’s not like the conspirators are secretly orchestrating things to Eldian benefit; rather it’s as if the ruling class threw their entire people away to the ghettos. yet nor is it ‘the conspiracy theories are a paranoid fantasy’: there actually is an Eldian pulling at least some of the strings. so the only frame it even sort-of makes sense is part of the show’s larger discourse on violence, pacifism and relating to the Other. yet it’s incredibly fraught to bring into a story that’s in part about the Holocaust!

why do that? I can’t even explain it.

and that’s definitely one of the most strained episodes in the whole story - not that things are ever especially grounded, but the idea of a guy putting on a stage show in a ghetto to reveal that he’s been pulling the strings only to ask for assistance in the genocide of his own people is just... bwuh? what is that? it is, throughout, very much manga storytelling: the characters are larger-than-life, and its image of war, however full of futility, is still one with room for considerable sentimentality.

all this is why ultimately I read Attack on Titan as being not so much a direct analogy, but a kind of attempt to drill into the emotional/ideological underpinning of fascism. the Titans are at first presented in a way that reflects the Nazis’ construction of their enemies as monstrous: distended proportions, mindless cannibals, natural features of the human body exaggerated to become a source of disgust, yet all curiously desexualised. at the outset of the story it is a case of heroic humans against monstrous enemy in a war of total annihilation.

gradually this story is revealed to be a complete delusion: the humans are not the last survivors at all but an ignorant bubble in a much wider world, and these Titans are of the same category as the ‘humans’, victims of a sadistic punishment by another human society. ultimately the villain is perhaps imperialism itself, whether under the hands of the warlord who created the Eldian people through enslavement and forced his enslaved wife to become the first Titan, or the rule of the Marleyans who one day came to replace them. the common people of both sides such as Sasha’s family, when they get to speak directly, figure out they are much the same as each other. they do not, in general, want to fight.

but despite everyone around him rapidly maturing, Eren is unable to let go of the proto-fascist worldview of his childhood, and he grows his category of ‘enemy’ larger and larger. for everyone else, despite their best efforts, more and more atrocities get added to the ledger as realpolitik takes hold and they act to defend whoever they define as their friends.

so the story unfolds as a tragedy: on a very simple level it could be read as saying, “this is why nationalism/fascism can seem appealing, but look, this is what happens if you don’t let go of it.” and alongside that it is perhaps trying to paint a path away, a story of characters unlearning nationalism. but at the same time often it seems to be merely observing the tragedy of such a world, taking after Schopenhauer, as that article from earlier argues.

so.

is that sort of project worth invoking the imagery of the Holocaust - a sudden flashback to children in what is evidently a close analogue to the Warsaw Ghetto? it’s not that it’s irrelevant, and indeed it may be better to directly confront that subject than to engage in Nazi military imagery without it ever coming up (c.f. many other shows that use it like Girl und Panzer etc.) yet even after all this, I don’t know! I feel like I could make a case for either stance.

ultimately, I don’t think there has to be a party line on Attack on Titan. if you find it hard to stomach regardless, I don’t blame you. people respond to works of fiction in many different ways.

at some point - probably when it’s actually ended in anime form - I still plan to write a more thorough analysis of Attack on Titan‘s thematic development. I don’t think I’ll be able to provide a definitive ‘yay or nay’ answer. it will always be a ‘challenging’ work and not one I’d recommend lightly. but I do at least think it’s worth the time I’ve spent engaging with it so far, and I hope you can see why, whatever the fuck it is, I at least don’t think it’s a work of Nazi propaganda.

[jessiescock]

Ppl really need to understand what the word 'adaption' means. Like if you're translating a story from one medium to another, you're gonna have to make some changes. A movie adaption of a book that includes every single scene and sentence of dialogue from the book would probably be a very bad movie. Different forms of media all have their unique limitations and opportunities, and a good adaption will take those into account. Also many adaptions were never meant to be exact copies of the original work, but a different artist's new take on the source material it draws from. Basically what im trying to say is that staying as faithful as possible to the source material is not inherently what makes an adaptive work good, nor does changing the source material inherently make for a bad adaption jfc

[urfavisacompulsiveliar]

Vriska Serket from Homestuck is a compulsive liar 🧡

[Image ID: screenshot of Vriska from Homestuck, with grey skin, long black hair, orange horns, and fangs. One eye is yellow, the other is covered by an eye patch. Her lips and the cuts on her face and neck are blue.]

[citizen-zero]

absolute cosmic irony that I was such a shithead about ace and NB people a decade ago when those are 2 things I now consider myself to be in some capacity. the gods rlly were like they think they’re so funny well we’re about to be hilarious