#man i should work more on censoring words if i don't want my blog to be discovered by other pesky fans-

[dumbdomb]

I also feel maybe you should try and clarify a bit more what you mean on your pinned post

(Not hate)

can you suggest how i could better clarify the beginning portion of my pinned, in a way that would satisfy appropriately and accurately? i've rewritten my pinned many times... it feels unfair to be constantly held to such a higher standard than anyone else around here. people are always trying to make me responsible for their own ignorance or unwillingness to just ask for me to clarify. i cannot simply say "cis men dni" or "wlw dni" bc neither are applicable to me, as a queer androgynous person. i am followed by and mutuals with lesbians, tfems, and other wlw aligned or sapphic people. this has never been an issue, no one has ever inquired about this, even in a vague or general sense. this is also from my pinned...

i am ok with cis, trans, intersex, and nonbinary people interacting with my blog. i'm ok with straight, gay, and queer people. allo, aro, and ace people are welcome here. this is all over my blog and consistently how i've posted here. but i have to create boundaries when people only see me as a woman, or a man. i have to create these boundaries when straight men only interact with my original images. i have to take a stance on certain kinks when they are the only ones continuously disregarding my boundaries and forcing their kinks on me. i have talked about all of this many times and at great length.

i've been told not to, or how to, tag my posts. what labels to use or not use. telling me not to censor tags, when they don't understand how the tagging system on here works. telling me not to post at all. sending hate and ignoring any response i've given to it in the past. most people are looking to find fault with me for some reason that actually has nothing to do with me, and is really about what lies in their own heart. i don't send hate to anyone, i discourage people from ever sending hate of any kind to anyone for any reason whatsoever. yet some people still come and send me hate, try to control my blog...

whatever happened to sending a nicely worded message, if you wanted clarification, and if not- blocking and closing the page without making an issue and escalating how you speak with someone you've already decided to dislike? i don't appreciate people trying to start discourse or arguments with me, i'm here to be friendly and have a nice time with people who like similar things. if you don't like me or my blog, that's ok, then simply move on with your day.

all i did was reblog a rather tame post, using specifically sapphic tags... "stone top" and "pillow princess" and i didn't try to contact this person or anything else. she asked why i had reblogged her post, and i cleared up the confusion. but she was still upset with me, asking me to delete the post from my blog and to block her- which i have done.

[kaikama]

Today is a confusing day for my gender. I want to (genuinely) thank some people on Tumblr for that, but I don't know how. I know many people consider their blogs as being a sort of public diary, but I've never used mine like that before. I reblog art and memes, and sometimes ramble in the tags, but almost never make posts of my own, and certainly don't talk about anything important when I do.

However sometimes the best way to get ahold of something slippery that's swimming around in your head is to first get it out of your head. I may not even post this, though contrary to how I present myself on this blog, I do very much love talking about myself (especially when I can indulge my inner 12yo-fanfic-author and be a bit dramatic and poetic about it) so we'll see.

However, to the anxiety of making a long, eventually emotional post I will cede the small victory of a readmore:

I guess the place to begin is with the lovely @dduane. In particular with the recent post she reblogged talking about @redgoldsparks's book Gender Queer. I was reading through the comic therein when I remembered that I actually had the book e was talking about sitting on my "to-read" shelf... okay, one of my "to-read" shelves. No avid reader with disposable income should be surprised I have so many such books, nor that any book could get lost in such a pile, no matter how... personally relevant it is.

I picked it up one day, not at my usual book store, but actually at a local comic book/board game store. It caught my eye of course by presenting the words "GENDER QUEER" in big, bold letters, and and further enticed me when I flipped through it briefly and saw it didn't censor itself unnecessarily. In a graphic novel that's largely about gender, it was relieving, for example, to see bodies being addressed without fear that showing them was too obscene.

So I bought it but, as I mentioned, it sat on my shelf for at least months, probably a year or more, if the time dilation typical of the pandemic period can be assumed.

Then today, after seeing that post, I decided to finally take it out. It only took a short while to read, maybe an hour or so. Unless you include the time it will spend lingering in my mind, in which case I may never finish reading it.

I related to it in many ways. In ways that were the same, but upsidedown – since I was amab, but could still feel a connection to the ideas within. Technically a different wavelength, but... a harmonic of the original. But one point in particular is the whole reason for this post. Page 189.

If you don't have the book, well firstly I highly recommend you go get it now and simply read through it to see the page in question. But in case you can't, I'll describe it here:

In panel 1, the author laments about wanting to switch pronouns, but that "they/them" doesn't feel quite right. In panel 2, e asks eir conversational partner what e uses. In panel 3, as you have probably guessed, e tells the author that e uses "e/em/eir" and, important to my story, uses them in a sentence: "Ask em what e wants in eir tea." In panel 4, e reacts with a huge smile and starry eyes.

Here is where I'll pause and mention that reading that passage gave me a shiver down my spine. I love seeing people explore their identities – or in this case, eir identity – and that especially goes for things I could never wrap my head around, such as neopronouns. As much as I respect them, I never could understand. To me, gender has usually been a nuisance. Something that I have to perform. If I don't, people will assume some performance anyways, one which is usually wrong. I wish I could just work backstage. Or maybe it's more like I wish everyone had a program guide, so instead of having to constantly tell people I'm not a man, they can just see the description in the guide for themselves. I'm just so tired of it. So tired.

But! That's why I get shivers like this, since it warms my heart to see people like me, also pushing through. E shouldn't have to struggle to be known. E does. But that strength inspires my own, which I hope inspires others, in a cycle of propping eachother up!

Then in panel 5 e says "I love those pronouns! I just got the biggest tingle down my spine."

And I recall my spine tingle.

And I'm really confused.

Do I want those pronouns? I've been using "they/them" for a while now, and I've known about (and had friends who use) "e/em/eir" for some time now. Surely I would've realized they fit me sooner than this, right?

Then again, I think, I have been kinda growing dissatisfied with "they/them" for a bit now. But I always just felt tired of gender as a whole. I don't want pronouns that even fewer people will understand, I said. At least with "they/them" I can point at the neutral usage everyone uses them for. Anything more obscure would just be all the more effort. All the more tiring.

...but does that make it untrue? Or simply unfair? Everything to do with being queer is unfair, sorta' by definition. If I wanted it to be easy, I could stick to "he/him", but that would only really be "easy" for other people, I realized. Neither "he/him" nor "they/them" are easy for me. Neither "male" nor "female" nor "non-binary" are easy for me. Neither the old gender binary nor the new gender trinary are easy for me. I'm just so tired.

I wish I had an answer to finish with. Not for your sake, but for mine. I have a sort of modus operandi I like to use: "prepare for the worst, but hope for the best, and expect something in-between." It's a bit of a compromise between the phrase"high hopes, low expectations" and my optimism. Well, I forgot to do that here. I had hoped that I would've found my answer by the end of this post, but I forgot to "prepare for the worst," and as such had no middle ground to set my expectations.

Maybe the answer is to stop caring so much? But that seems like it would be a disservice to myself and my wants and needs. Also it seems impossible. Or at least like clinical depression, which shouldn't be anyone's goal.

Maybe I should try using different pronouns? None of my friend would care. But they would make mistakes. It's extremely rare for one of my friends to slip up now, but it does still happen. And using something new would give me those small rock-in-the-shoe, scratchy-shirt-tag irritations that @redgoldsparks mentioned in eir book all over again.

...or maybe "they/them" is dorta' doing that now, and I've just gotten used to it? I remember when I switched I hadn't realized that "he/him" wasn't great until then. Not because I felt bad hearing it, but because I suddenly felt good hearing "they/them." I still think I don't feel especially disphoric over "he/him," but now that I know the euphoria I could have, it feels worse in comparison. Maybe the same would happen if I switched again?

My how many thoughts I have about this. I want an answer. There is no simple answer. Life is work. I love life. I hate work. I'm so tired. But it's worth it.

I think that's most of my metaphorical brain-fish on the topic disgorged for now. If you listened, thanks for listening. If you're confused, imagine how I feel. And if you think you felt like you resonate at some harmonic of this, please go read @redgoldsparks's book Gender Queer. It probably won't have clear answers, and the feelings it evokes probably won't be exclusively positive ones, but if you've read this far into my ramblings, then I can promise you it will be a valuable read.

Thanks for your time! -Kai

[hergan416]

Fucking making Dorian Gray about Yugioh because why the fuck not. It's my blog I do what I want. Welcome to tumblr dot com.

This is long as hell and kind of convoluted. Click read more if you want to hear my rambling thoughts about about queer coding, language, and censorship, within the context of comparing the classic work of late 1800s literature The Picture of Dorian Gray, a work credited with loosening the grip of the pervasive and stifling Victorian morals, written by Oscar Wilde, who was famously tried for gross indecency because he was gay and this was considered a threat to society, and the 4kids dub version of Yugioh, first aired on children's television networks in the early 00s over a century later, and famously censored to make regular facts of life, such as death, more terrifying in order to make the show "suitable for children" and "suitable for network TV."

Ok. So. It's chapter two. Dorian Gray has just objected to being called "boy," to which Lord Henry says something like "you know you want it."

Specifically on p. 104-105

"And I don't allow anyone to call me a silly boy." [...] "And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you don't really mind being called a boy." "I should have minded very much this morning, Lord Henry." "Ah! this morning! You have lived since then."

The significance of this objection, according to the annotations, is that to call another man a "boy" "was frequently understood as a veiled announcement of homosexual or homosocial desire." (p 105) The annotations provide Lord Alfred Douglas' nickname "Bosie" as evidence. (Lord Alfred Douglas was Oscar Wilde's lover, and his father is the one who's charges eventually put Oscar Wilde in jail.)

Lord Henry is, quite frankly, being quite creepy here. "I don't want this." "Oh but you do." 🤮 [If I had a quarter for every time I had a conversation that went like that...]

Even before the 1891 book version, Lord Henry can't really be seen as a good influence on Dorian Gray. At best he is an amoral influence, as he's said himself, but it's quite clear from his own thoughts that he doesn't really believe that. (Earlier: "Lord Henry watched him[Dorian Gray], with his sad smile. He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing." p. 97) He's been screwing with Dorian the whole time. And sure, there is language to assert that the ideas that Lord Henry espouses (which are many, and quite contradictory) merely awaken something already within Dorian Gray, it is still clear that Lord Henry is meaning to be manipulative.

This is further evidenced by annotation number 22 on page 97.

Lord Henry brings a combination of intellectual detachment and pleasure to the task of influencing Dorian that is positively Mephistophelian in its connotations. Later, he will refer to Dorian as his "own creation." Lord Henry knows that there are moral consequences to the advice he gives Dorian, but he finds "an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism." There has been much critical speculation about what motivates the combination of pleasure and detachment -- about whether it is a sublimated expression of erotic desire, whether it has a purely philosophic or pedagogic basis, or whether it is a sign of Lord Henry's own moral corruption.

It is clear, however, from all the context of the annotations and the words on the page themselves, at least, that Lord Henry makes Dorian Gray uncomfortable, and likely made the audience uncomfortable as well.

Especially when the rationality for the discussion above harkens back to the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, which was still very much in the public consciousness. (Wilde's manuscript was published in Lippencott's magazine in July of 1890.) The link is to wikipedia, because I'm only going to allude to the social impact of the scandal here. Go ahead and read it if you want more information.

Anyway, this brings me to Yugioh, and the (Dub portrayal) of this man:

I'm going to have to take a few steps back because I want to talk about Pegasus as queer coded villain, because I think that flipping from the Cleveland Street Scandal to the character of Maximilian Pegasus is not super obvious.

Disclaimer, this is obviously all opinion. While I'm relying heavily on scholarly annotations regarding Dorian Gray, with Yugioh I can't even claim to have a very informed opinion outside of being in fandom and watching it with my eyes. Also, I lived during its historical context. But, I've never taken a media studies or GWSS class.

That being said... to me, Pegasus' queer coding all comes down to his voice and his vocal tics. Here:

To me, the more obvious way that Pegasus is queer coded is the sing-songy lilt in his voice, which is not dissimilar to the stereotypical valley girl speech that was often assigned to gay men by bullies at my school in popular culture at the time. This could be written off as an English language interpretation of a vocal tic... especially since he has a vocal tic in the original Japanese that would be hard to translate and also sounds sort of similar.

I do not know enough about Japanese culture to comment on whether this verbal tic from the original anime had any queer connotations whatsoever. I can't even say that the creative choices made by 4kids were a bad way to represent Pegasus' Japanese actor's voice in English, and I certainly can't speak to their intent regarding the perception of Pegasus' character. I can only say what connotations I as a viewer brought with me to this creative choice.

Regardless, Yugioh was being aired in the United States divorced from its original context, and heavily censored. So, if the audience has a connotation about the way Pegasus talks.... the audience has this connotation. The resources to look for why this choice might have been made weren't meant to be available to US viewers in the 00s. I had them right after my viewing because I didn't watch Yugioh until I was an adult, sometime around 2015.

Back to the lilt. Obviously Pegasus isn't meant to be gay in the "falls in love with other guys" sense. The story gives him a female love interest, who dies. This motivates him to get the Millennium Eye and "become evil" because it's a 00s era kid's show and we only get extremely cut and dry morality, so characters are usually either good or evil. (Please ignore Kaiba here, I understand he's allowed to toe the line of being antagonistic without being evil, but most other characters do not get this treatment.)

Instead, Pegasus is meant to come off as creepy towards the teens on the show. He's already doing a LOT of bad shit, like say kidnapping Yugi's Grandpa, kidnapping Mokuba, and holding Kaiba Corp hostage. But this needs to be hammed up even further.

This is where predatory stereotypes come in. Specifically, I want to connect Pegasus' verbal tic of calling Yugi "Yugi-boy" and Kaiba "Kaiba-boy" to the predatory stereotypes that began with the Cleveland Street Scandal.

Ok. See the connotations of the word "boy" in the 1890s above. Sure, it is less recognizable that this language is meant to imply homosexuality today, but Pegasus' words still come off predatory and creepy in a modern sense. Add in the already threatening visuals, and some creepy music, and you know this is a guy you want to stay away from.

When finding clips for the above video, I never heard him use this pattern of speech on Mokuba, an actual boy. He only uses the phrase on the teenagers who are defying his will. This honestly makes the choice in language more threatening to me, because it's not simply something he says of other people. It something he says to specific people at the very least as a way to unnerve them.

Even if the Cleveland Street Scandal wasn't something in the public consciousness a tad over a century later, the same "gay man after teen boys" stereotype still permeated media and culture.

This was an era where tragedies like Brokeback Mountain were considered revolutionary positive portrayals of gay people in media. If your audience was meant to feel sorry for or empathize with gay characters, you were doing good by them, no matter how much the character suffered. Obviously, to be gay was to suffer. That's what made Brokeback a good portrayal.

More commonly, however, queerness was the butt of a joke, and lumped in with jokes about Michael Jackson or Catholic priests and molestation (source, once again: school bullies). These were people you stayed away from. And I feel that 4kids was drawing on this stereotype in their portrayal of Pegasus.

Still with me? Cool.

At this point, I believe I've demonstrated why I see shared character traits between Pegasus and Lord Henry, that these traits are primarily things the audience would view as predatory, and that these traits would be seen as predatory for similar reasons.

Ok. So let's talk about censorship.

If you haven't been following these posts, and you've made it here, holy shit congratulations. Reward yourself. I'm verbose AF.

And, I'll note that I'm reading The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, which is an annotated and illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde's typescript that he sent to Lippencott's magazine. I've mentioned Lippencott's already, in contrast to the 1981 book. Most people who read The Picture of Dorian Gray, read the 1891 book that Oscar WIlde re-worked after extreme negative backlash to the Lippencott's magazine version, both for its homosexual allusions, but also for the way that Dorian Gray treats women and for his promiscuous heterosexual life. Better modern printings of the novel will include both the Lippencott's version and the book, so that readers can see the differences. But it took until 2011 for Wilde's original typescript to be reprinted, which is what I've checked out from the library and have been reacting to. [Check out the "#liveblogging the uncensored picture of dorian gray" for my other posts.]

Anyway, the reason the typescript is important is because Lippencott's had already censored a fair amount of the manuscript, and Wilde would not have been able to review these changes before the magazine was published. Because of the magazine publishing culture at the time, it would have been highly unusually for a magazine to go back to the original author and get an ok to edit their work. So the typescript is the closest we have to a version of the novel that Wilde would have written and published were there no societal pressure whatsoever. It is, as the title claims, uncensored.

I assume my audience is more familiar with the history of 4kids as a company and its use of censorship to make foreign animation palatable to the post-9/11 US parent in the midst of what essentially amounted to a moral panic.

In spite of both media being censored in order to protect impressionable people (the cause of the uproar over the Lippencott's version, as well as the raison-d'etre for 4kids removing death, alcohol/drugs, foreign foods and foreign names from any anime they touched), both characters retain this malignant queerness in the final versions of their respective media.

The chapter that I'm reading right now only has one textual change listed. It is to make Basil seem less homoerotic, like most of the changes in the first chapter had been. Nothing was done between the parts of the typescript that I quoted and Lippencott's, nor Lippencott's and the 1891 book. From my understanding of the general and textual introductions, the 1891 book overall actually drew on Lord Henry more and is more explicit about his negative influence on Dorian Gray.

4Kids was famous for censorship, but seemingly went out of their way to make Pegasus a queer-coded villain, despite this explicitly not fitting with his redemption arc and backstory. While this could be a consequence of trying to translate a verbal tic, if this interpretation was considered problematic, it would not have made it past their censors. 4Kids historically chose censorship over accuracy with much smaller things.

While homosexuality was/is considered bad for society and bad for young people, portraying it was never "bad" if it was clear the media was treating the homosexual character as a "bad person." That didn't change for over 100 years.

[xelles-archive]

Ard you okay? You know they probably just think it was cute or something, you dont have to worry

sjbsdjdjd i'm fine!! i just get extremely anxious when a blog with no correlation to self shipping interacts w/ my posts or blog at all.

[furvillaconfessions]

Rotsy here. There seems to be a lot of hurt feelings going around about this, so I'm going to try to tread carefully, but I'm not going to sugar coat anything either. If you make it all the way to the end of this very long post I have some cool stories to tell you.

I'm not going to pick apart what @/post/634692733521559552/ said just yet, but I would like to address some of the replies, because they felt like a kick in the guts after reading the post of a clearly upset person.

I don’t see it as “gate keeping.” also this spirit is known around in many other cultures not just one. better to respect the ones who asked us to cenceor it over not cencoring it at all. now I got no proof but I see so many people say that they where asked to cencor it there for what I’m doing.

If you don't see it as gatekeeping when a native person asks (begs even) someone to stop talking for them, then you're part of the problem. How do you know they aren't part of the cultures these stories are coming from? We don't. All I ask is that you try to understand where this person is coming from before just outright rejecting what they are saying.

You cant say “literally no indigenous person” like youre getting mad at people speaking for all of us and then you speak for all of us lol. If youre truly to the point of wanting to VOMIT from seeing a censored word, i think you need to take a break from this blog and probably the internet. Nobody is treating us like primitive babies. Theyre respecting our culture when we ask them to.

Atilla, you know I love you, but you should respect the culture of op too, and have a talk with them instead of assuming their disgust is simply because of text on a screen. By saying they need to get off of the internet you're not affording them with the space to share their hurt feelings- which could be the only place they have to share those feelings for all we know. It was wrong to say 'literally no one,' but I believe that came from a place of pain and not malice. This person is clearly hurt and feeling like people aren't listening to their feelings on the subject- which is what many of us feel all the time. (Assuming you are also native because you said 'us' and 'our.' Correct me if I'm wrong.) There's a bigger problem here that's been brewing for a while, and I'd like to band with you to work on this instead of fighting with you, so if you want to pm me, please do.

Now some context:

A massive reason why (was it the only reason? I can't say) the word wendigo/windigo/wintiko/whetiko started getting censored is because individuals on twitter were making posts about how the wendigo is greatly misunderstood and misrepresented (even appropriated) in white dominated culture. These individuals were tired of being harassed by people who refused to give their culture respect (or blatantly insulting them) so they started censoring the word in order to prevent their posts from appearing in the search. The same thing happened on tumblr. A lot of native people are bullied and harassed into silence when we try to speak up about things so we use code words and censoring to stay safe on the internet. This is the reason why we started censoring conversations around the entity- and also the big reason why I abandoned my original tumblr.

The wendigo is complicated. It is not a demon or a boogyman, and it's not part of a religion. Our stories (the choctaw word literally translates to stories, so I don't mean to be disrespectful) are not a religion in the same sense a christian or a muslim has a religion. Religion in the way people are talking about it doesn't exist in native american culture unless, like previously said on this blog, they are christian. It's more complicated than that. Hinduism might be a closer relative in terms of cultural and religious structure, but I'm not hindi so I can't really say for sure. On top of that, various groups have their own interpretation of the entity. Stories of the wendigo are like your grandmother's christmas dressing recipe. Everyone's family has one and they all guard it zealously. Even within the same nations, it can be regarded as a spirit that possesses people who become greedy, or simply an allegory for sexual and/or physical assault from white people. It's not a monster in the same way white european culture has come to understand the monster analogy. This misunderstanding itself is appropriation in the most basic definition of cultural appropriation. This is before we even get into the discussion of how it should be depicted. It's not simply a monster or evil spirit or physiological disorder. The wendigo is so much more than that.

I don't pretend to understand any of the algonquin languages, so the translation is both literally and figuratively lost on me, but this is the best way I can explain it from a dear canadian friend: The creature is greed. Be that just greed or lust or hunger or colonialism, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't even have to be a creature for someone to be consumed by it. Even just what it represents is dangerous and goes against the very nature of our virtues all across the nations.

I posted a very long post here once before, but I can't find it in the search so I don't know if it even exists any more. Basically what I had said in that post is that this whole situation, on all sides, is causing more damage than good. The longer we keep winding in long circles around this topic, and the more people try to sink their teeth in to control the narrative, the more power the wendigo has over us all- literally or metaphorically is up to you. Don't yell at people when they are upset, don't harass people who use the word as a screen name, don't try to speak for everyone, and most importantly, don't disregard an native person's feelings on the subject, even if you disagree with them. We all have to vent, and some people are getting to their breaking point.

If you find someone misrepresenting or appropriating any part of your culture, the best thing to do is to talk to them about it. I know they don't exactly afford us with the same respect, but clearly yelling at people and harassing them is just making them dig in their heels.

If you made it this far, thanks for listening. Here's the cool stories I promised:

As a choctaw person, I have a proposition for people who genuinely like the deer-man monster concept. There's a creature in choctaw stories called kashehotapolo. It's a contraction (sort of) between kashesho (pronounced kah-she-sho) meaning woman, and tapalo (pronounced tah-pah-lo) meaning scream. Together it's pronounced like kah-she-ho-ta-pah-lo. These are deer-human hybrid creatures who live in forests and swamps and scream (like a woman) when hunting (I picture it as sounding like a cougar scream). They have been described having deer legs, the body of a man, and either a wrinkled human face or a deer face, sometimes with antlers. Kasheotapolo are more like tricksters who like to stalk people just for the fun of it, and go out of their way to be creepy. Sometimes they are straight up violent and want to eat people, but most of the time they just like to creep people out. Another one is the deer-legged lady. In choctaw culture it's called the issikashesho (is-see-kah-she-sho) or just deer-legged lady/woman. The cherokee call them anukite (ah-noo-ki-tee; which I think means something like two-faced). These are shapeshifters who turn into beautiful women, old women, deer, deer-legged women, and anthro deer women. They hate rapists and cheaters, and will stomp rapists to death with their deer hooves. There's even a story that adults used to tell their boys at powwow's, that if they saw a drunk girl, don't take her off in the woods to take advantage of her because she could be a deer-legged lady and might stomp you to death. In more recent stories, there are deer-legged people, because women and non-binary people can rape and be raped too. Badass, huh? My proposition is to research these two creatures and start using them for your characters, stories, and usernames instead. They aren't as sacred to us as the wendigo is to the algonquin people, and they are exactly what people misrepresent the wendigo as looking like. I just think it's time to put this beast to rest.

I love you all. Be excellent to each other.