#marginalisation cw

[blackcur-rants]

THE OWL HOUSE AS A CLASSIC DISNEY RENAISSANCE STORY

-The hero is a young outcast caught between diverging possibilities/two different worlds, and their character arc centres around the question of where they truly belong. 

-When a crisis arises in their personal lives and/or the world in which they live, those who society deems more worthy or more meaningful turn out to be inadequate and/or utterly evil. 

-With the help of a wisecracking and colourful mentor, a handful of mischievous and marketable sidekicks, and their love interest, the hero steps up and, with the help of their own unique strengths, the hero overcomes Evil and lives happily ever after with their Beloved. 

[enbycrip]

I am pro-kid because I am pro-human, and kids are people. No matter how much social bullshit tries to say they are not.

No one asked to be here. Everyone deserves a loving, gentle, safe childhood; and the world is actively a much worse place because that idea is somehow controversial.

Active hostility towards kids also *massively* entrenches the inequality birthing and feeding parents experience. If you really hate kids but you don’t hate women and people read as women, sell treating kids like people to yourself on fighting misogyny. And consider that hating any group of marginalised people for their marginalisation is bigotry.

You don’t have to like kids en masse. You *certainly* don’t need to have them if you don’t want to, or to babysit kids if you don’t feel comfortable doing so.

But you *do* have a responsibility to treat kids like people, including accommodating their needs. Don’t be a dick to kids you meet in the wild, and don’t be a dick to parents because their kids are acting like kids.

And be aware of the intersections of privilege when you are considering kids in public. Kids who are getting in your way in public spaces are likely to be doing that because of poverty, frankly. Very few parents *want* to take their young kids on a long ride on public transport, especially if said kids are clearly either tired and cranky or full of energy that public transport is a shitty environment to release it on. If they are doing this, it is likely because they have no other options.

And please don’t make the disingenuous “they chose to have kids” argument; horribly, bodily autonomy is not a given for birthing parents. About a third of births in “western countries” are unplanned. There is lack of access to birth control and reproductive healthcare and there are controlling partners (manipulation through sex and reproduction is a favoured tactic for far too many abusers).

A 3 year old having a meltdown is doing it because of their developmental stage and because their basic needs aren’t being met. It’s not deliberate and it’s not under their control. Being a dick about that as exactly as bigoted as behaving that way towards a disabled person who isn’t being accommodated either.

I’m physically disabled and neurodivergent. My adult brother is neurodivergent and learning disabled. I’ve seen a lifetime of people who hate kids hating disabled people too. Including too many privileged disabled people, frankly. There is absolutely such a thing as a clash of accessibility needs, but vocal hatred of other marginalised people, or being a dick to them, because their needs clash with yours is Not Okay.

I am also pro-old people for the exact same reasons I am pro-kid. Because they are all people, and marginalised people at that.

Childhood and old age are the times people living in economically-exploited classes experience the most poverty, because age, and the lack of capacity for economic exploitation that accompanies both old age and childhood, is a characteristic that people are marginalised for.

We live in a society here. We are communal creatures. We have a basic responsibility to be decent to other people, including people who are marginalised and dehumanised, and that includes kids and old people.

If you are organising, including kids and providing childcare is as essential as accessibility. If you don’t, you are literally entrenching the same power dynamics you claim to be organising against. This is a huge fucking problem on the left, and it’s one thing the second wave feminists got entirely right, despite all their other issues.

[frogchiro]

Not saying you can’t write reader how you want but could you possibly tag certain posts as such? Like #curvy reader/chubby reader or wtv the description is because for the most part reader fics are neutral about body types so that’s usually what I expect unless they’re tagged specifically. So it’s kind of awkward for me going into a fic thinking that and then there end up being body descriptions that don’t fit me 😭

For a lot of writers that have specific descriptions for readers I’ll usually see them include it in the hashtags or the “cw” section of the post which is really helpful. Thank you 🙏

The thing is, you say about 'neutral' body types abd yet like 80% of the time the reader is either straight up described as slim/skinny or is slim coded. I've never seen a 'cw: slim reader' and I certainly won't put up a tw or cw for 'chubby' because...why would I? Why does a certain body type need a tw?

If something doesn't fit you and you feel that it's just something not for you then you leave it be and scroll away. It's that simple.

I never hid that my blog is mostly targeted towards chubby reader as a very marginalised and niche type that I rarely see. If you're a new reader who just happened to stumble upon one of my works then I'll be more understanding about your possible confusion but if you've been here for a while and noticed how I write and describe the reader and yet you're still here even though you know it's not for you and makes you uncomfortable then I'm sorry but that's on you.

[ladymazzy]

She Just Had a Baby. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade. | Time

CW for everything in this story

As ever, marginalised people - Black, indigenous, immigrant, poor, gender non-conforming, minors and disabled - are disproportionately affected by unjust reproductive legislation

Trauma upon trauma

[queermoths]

on "leftist" activists and their blatant ableism and sanism

cw: frank discussion of the blatant, excessive, and harmful ableism within so-called "leftist" circles

im so done and tired of political commentators/ "activists" who claim to be "leftist" while throwing out "psychotic", "delusional," "schizophrenic", etc. as insults against conservatives. im so tired of my mental illness being the first thing i hear as an insult against these horrible people. i hate that self-proclaimed "leftist" political commentators are so incapable of understanding that ableism and sanism are things they should fight against, alongside fighting against classism, racism, queerphobia, etc. and that ableism and sanism intersect with these. i hate how they so obviously have no care in the world for disabled people, especially those of us with "scary" or more stigmatised conditions or presentations.

newsflash: you are not spouting leftist thinking when you further marginalise psychotic people. you are not being "progressive" and "leftist" when you cast us to the side in your so-called "activism."

(disclaimer: i am a leftist. this is not in favour of conservatives. i am merely calling out the hipocrysy and disingenuity i see in leftist circles where they say they want to fight discrimination, then further marginalize and other psychotic individuals, such as myself.)

[johannestevans]

New webzine, a new trans-centric erotica publication, and a bunch of new pieces from me!

Good evening!

Sign up for these updates as emails.

So simplest things first, I set up a TikTok! I'm hoping to keep uploading clips from my comedy gigs to Instagram and TikTok respectively.

I'm on the line-up at a comedy gig tomorrow night in Athlone if you're in the West of Ireland and you'd like to come along! The gig is at The Brazen Monkey, and the show is gonna start at 8:30PM.

You can get tickets online here for €10 plus the booking fee, and tickets will be €15 on the door.

There's also a new comedy night run by Black Crow Comedy here in Galway - it's an open mic intended for women and queer and nonbinary comedians, and it's at 9pm on Wednesday the 5th July in Aras na nGael.

This event is to raise money for Galway Pride, with tickets at €3, and I'm super excited about more marginalised comics having a dedicated space here in the city.

Anyway, out this week was Issue 103 of the Shousetsu Bang*Bang!

The SBB is an online webzine centred around original queer erotic fiction, and it's been running for nearly 18 years - I was so excited to be a part of this issue with my new novella, Fallen Dust, but I absolutely recommend going through the whole of the issue and reading every story. There's over 160,000 words of queer fiction in this issue, and mine is just 14k of that!

I've also set up a new publication called Trans Erotica, which is a Medium publication centred around trans and nonbinary creators.

If you're trans or nonbinary and you write erotica or erotic fiction, absolutely check it out - the characters in the work don't have to be trans or nonbinary themselves, so long as you are!

I've written up Submission Guidelines here, and if you're new to writing on Medium and would like a guide on how to go about setting up, I've written one of those too.

Media Recs

Donut (2023, dir. Rene Gannon-O'Gara) - My friend Rene's hour-long movie, Donut, is out now! It's a great short flick, super naturalistic, meditative, and exploring the weird intimacy/extra distance of customer service late at night when not many people are around. With nonbinary characters, too!

What Really Happens to a Human Body at Titanic Depths by JP Brown - This is fucked up. But interesting.

This TikTok from hahatoys2022 - I've watched this TikTok so many times this week, it destroys me every time.

I also watched the two new Poirot movies this week, the Kenneth Branagh ones - the second one is kinda shitty, but the first one is a fun enough watch, and I'm quite excited to see the new one with Michelle Yeoh.

I rewatched The Incredibles (2004, dir. Brad Bird) for the first time since I was a kid, and its politics are majorly fucked up. Tweeted about it here.

New Works Published

New Podcast: A Stranger's Visit: The Story, Episode 4

Fantasy short. A priest of Freyr receives a strange visitation.

3.6k, rated T. MB. Originally published May 29th, 2021. A little bit of Norse godliness versus Norse priestliness. Featuring Esben. Adapted from a TweetFic. 

It should be anywhere you get your podcasts!

Libsyn / / RSS Feed / / On Spotify / / On Google / / On YouTube

Erotic Novella: Fallen Dust

14k, cis M/trans M. A young trans man fleeing an abusive home finds sanctuary at a strange temple buried in a mysterious valley.

Featuring some Eldritch tentacles and mild horror, oviposition, breeding, some DP, and just the end of the world! CW for some threats of sexual coercion and pregnancy + transphobia and threatened detransitioning.

From the Shousetsu Bang Bang / / On Medium / / On Patreon

Romance Short: Easing Into It

An exhausted psychiatrist is wooed by his new barber.

4k. M/M, rated M. A few mentions of past abuse. Adapted from a TweetFic. There is a cute dog!

On Medium / / On Patreon

Personal Essay: As a Trans Man, Why Do Doctors Always Want to Get Me Pregnant?

I'm so tired of fielding questions about my "lost" fertility

In An Injustice! on Medium / / On Patreon

Get merch on TeePublic | | Look through my Directory of Published Work | | Listen to my Podcast

[cyberpunk-20xx]

about masc!V's VA

cw for general spoilers and mentions of typical-canon violence

I always find it strange that people find masc!V's VA emotionless, or even annoying or plain bad. I'm not gonna say anything about fem!V's VA because I don't pay attention at all to it cus if I do it gives me dysphoria.

I don't, on the other end, find it that strange that most people I've seen with this opinion are in fact cis men.

To me masc!V's VA is actually super emotional, but not in the conventional likeable, heroic way. Jaded and reserved at the same time. I like the VA a lot for doing what I consider great work at presenting us a character who has lived from 2050 to 2077 in a deeply fucked up world where hope is so sparse. A world that we have no idea how fucked up is, even reading about the ttrpg because to me Cyberpunk Red is much less fucked up even if it is already a dystopia.

Just as a reminder, in CP77's NC society:

Amputation without actual health concern is highly encouraged all for the sake of pure performance. And nothing else. Your physical body is socially just disposable. The only way to keep up with the world that keeps eating itself is just to upgrade, and if you don't have the money for it? Fuck you, fuck your ideals, fuck your dreams.

You get suicide baited on the regular by the fucking street advertisements.

Violence against marginalised people is at an all-time all. Sex workers have it even worse than in the real world and that's saying something on how women and queer people are treated in general.

Acid rain is normal.

The majority of the animal population is extinct in the whole world. The cattle industry has collapsed and unless you're Kerry Eurodyne levels of rich, meat is either made of worms or insects and it's not even something hidden or taboo. In fact, it's shown explicitly in ads. Real vegetables and organic food in general is scarce as well. We might, irl 2023, start to be desensitized about it because we're on the brink of the ultraliberal hell that the game is portraying, but human's civilisation started with agriculture, and cattle culture was a big fucking part of that, regardless of one's ethics and morals about meat consumption (do not clown about veganism on this post, people are allowed to value animal life regardless of this video game blurb). In various quests, namely Panam's and River's, we can see firsthand how the collapse of that industry has rotten individuals and left the land in ruins.

Even a mondial star like Kerry or a fixer queen like Rogue are just, in the end, the bitches of the corps they sold out to, and unable to fight back. In fact, they've both given up entirely until V comes crashing into their life, with Johnny in tow. The fandom paints them as charismatic individuals but I really just think that's the rose-tinted glasses effect of us knowing what they used to be, when they tried, and them just being... Pretty conventionally attractive, quippy and sarcastic. But really even those two people who we are presented with as Succesful Individuals TM just... Man they just fucking suck, okay? They're miserable, they don't like themselves, they don't like who they are anymore, they don't have any speck of joy left in their lives, they're both estranged from their kids, alone, and just going on because death is scary. They're so human. They're at the top of the world and in the end they're still nothing in the face of it. Love them both so much but they're heartbreaking.

V always starts the game after having lost everything. Any other fucker in their place would have most likely finished just like a certain Heywood kid with spikey brunette hair. V is an exceptional individual for even having a chance at a second life.

V pretty much has brain cancer and is promised a painful, slow agonising death unless they basically kill themselves, and the less painful way to go is to gobble down medication but then that means giving the body up to Johnny. Johnny's first interaction with them is: violent physical assault and suicide baiting. It's hell. V is in hell. It could not be me if I were honest, I would not bother fighting it and I would not only alt+F4 from life, I would do as Johnny wishes at this point and erase us both at once.

V's so traumatized that when they lose Jackie, they're still able to function, but not enough to see a blatant trap coming. And when they have to carry Evelyn's corpse out of that tub, they don't have a breakdown, they just tank it. Which is not badass by the way, if you frame this as anything positive you need therapy yourself tbh boo you deserve better.

V's also a cold blooded murderer very easily if you want to take that path, and I'd even argue that the game makes it very hard for them to not be a killer honestly. Even the "non-lethal" optic mod doesn't work that well past a certain point. I've yet to try my hand at a pacifist run.

If you want V to be a good person, a hopeful person, someone who does not sound deeply suicidal and terribly fucked up, someone who's not used to death and treason as their daily lot, someone who's going to make you feel good about yourself when interacting with the world... I don't think you understood the game you were buying, nor that you were paying much attention while you were playing.

I'll be the first to admit have my own biases and gripes with the game's bleak looks on life, at its pretense at being "cyberpunk" when it truly only has the "cyber" part down, but at the same time I gotta give it to it, it's cohesive within its own universe and tone. V's canon, vanilla character makes perfect sense in the settings we are presented with. Masc!V's VA just does a good job of translating that.

But I guess that's not all of it, the difference between my interpretation and the one I made this post about makes sense because it is true that masc!V's VA does not act like the normal hero archetype at all, but like an anti-hero, except without the whole "charismatic leader" bullshit tone and bravado, unlike… Well, Johnny himself.

Masc!V's voice is not only not the voice of a good guy, it also fails to be the voice of a leader, of someone who's got it all figured out, of, well, the alpha male. It commits the crime of not being Good and not being Manly, at once! It even dares to be human and vulnerable at times! No wonder it gets haters lmao.

And the people I see bashing on masc!V's VA are always fucking kissing Johnny's ass for being who he is in the flashbacks, in the legends and at the beginning of the game. And that, to me, is pretty self-explanatory why I cannot relate with their opinion on masc!V's VA.

[wyrdle]

"I for one, am f**king glad that scum is dead."

Part of my AU where Yuri's saved by the SWers who were going to be Lady Killer's victims. Mini fic snippet below. CW for mild swearing, rape/abuse/assault mention.

Yuri had been conscious for several days now, but was no less perplexed by the situation he had found himself in. He was laying back to rest and heal all the, he quotes, "f*cked up injuries" he had.

The bed is scratchy, and garishly ornamented, velvet cushions behind his back helping him sit up. The room he's been staying in is always dimly lit, with the musty smell of cigarette smoke, alcohol and other substances he'd rather not think about.

"The VIP room." The prostitutes, Maria and Lee, had informed him.

Lady Killer's next victims, had Lunatic not interfered.

And now, Yuri had them and a whole group of strangers who knew his identity and did not care, tending to his wounds and housing him away from the authorities.

"Screw the police, they don't give a shit about us anyway." they had almost hissed.

Yuri knew the high rates of rape and assault cases that slipped through the system. Either too dull for Hero TV to cover or ignored by incompetent and corrupt police. Lady Killer himself, had taken 3 lives before his arrest was issued.

Yuri found their company and honesty soothing. They did not mind his scars, and seemed to understand where others could not the horrors humanity could commit. Not the spectacles of heroes vs villains found on television, but the dark, gritty and messy everyday evils. Yuri found himself blurting more about his father and mother than he had ever been able to in years to anyone. (Not a difficult record to beat, in hindsight.)

His whole family is dead deaddead-

They offered their sympathies, but it wasn't patronising like when his father's associates offered their condolences and offers to "help" at his funeral. Freely speaking about his life with one foot in the Justice Bureau and the other in matters of vigilantism... helped. Funnily enough, Yuri found himself taking the role of mediator often, even advocating for viewpoints that directly countered Lunatic's methods for justice.

It seemed, one of the most marginalised of communities in society had many strong opinions about justice and how to enact it. Alternatives even, that Yuri had read once but ashamedly tossed for their idealism. (Or his own trauma-fuelled guilt?) All of them however, held little love for authority, whether it was the pigs in blue or heroes in gleaming gold.

So, Yuri healed, in this strange community of people who stuck out for each other. Each with their own experience of abuse, trauma and discrimination, spoken and unspoken. Only the beaten would have known how to help him with his wounds, physical, mental and emotional. Quite literally, sometimes.

Rei with a medical degree he couldn't use because of discrimination, Sato with their knowledge gathered from years of organising mutual aid, Mira with her kindness and understanding after an angry client blinded her in her left eye and left it scarred shut.

There were less people at Origa Petrov's funeral than Mr Legend's, but it wasn't as cold with these strangers who'd taken him in without judgement.

"What will you do next?" They asked him, when he was mostly okay, and possibly alright with living. Yuri doesn't quite know, but for the time being, working as a judge who was a friend to those who needed support the most sounded good.

Yuri was not a good man, but he learned that there was more to enacting justice than Kotetsu's heroism and Lunatic's punishment. With people he could rely on, life seemed bearable, even hopeful.

For Yuri, that was more than enough.

[everythingissomewhatrepaired]

Here is a comic about The Worst Man. My posting schedule is all messed up rn sorry. Thanks as ever to the glorious patrons. You can join them at pat re on dot com slash tomor Judy. - - - - - - -   Everything is somewhat Repaired: Worst Man cw: weird masculinities, burial.

We were at a bar watching people play darts. One guy was taking up a lot of space, grabbing the others, yelling, throwing the darts aggressively to make up for his bad aim. He made me nervous at first. (alt: Man with a rough beard, arms raised, pint in one hand. wearing a shirt that says "sport game team ball".)

Until I realised he was trying really hard to be "that guy" and his awkward performance of masculinity was suddenly so sad. This is a girl pretending to be a man and she's a terrible actor. (alt: Self portrait looking dismayed, hand held to chest, tears welling.)

Now every time I see the "worst man" in a group of people, my brain is suddenly flooded with sympathy as if they're a closeted trans girl, buried alive and digging in the wrong direction.   (alt: cross section of earth, tomb stone on the surface. Person having broken out of buried coffin, but heading downwards.)

I need to reset this part of my brain. (alt: Pink brain with eyeballs on stalks. out of the brain are a series of flags which read "Not everyone needs saving.", "My experience of gender is not universal." and "Some men are just really annoying men.")

Footnote: I feel like this totally falls into the "all vicious homophobes are actually gay" mode of thinking, which only blames marginalised people for their/our oppression while letting straight people off the hook.

[convertgrapeling]

Just saw that satanic panic post and the bizarre responses. what the actual fuck???

If you don't know how the satanic panic happened in the UK, there were numerous children who were wrongly removed from their parents on suspicion of ritual sexual abuse - not because they made allegations but because of pictures they drew which people projected ridiculous interpretations onto. This came about as a result of professionals having received training about a non-existent threat, leading directly to the harm of the same children that people claimed they were protecting. Here's a link for all that. [cw: child sexual abuse]

What I personally take from the event is the knowledge that authorities were swayed by public fears which had no basis in reality and they went looking for evidence of something that wasn't happening, enabling them to see a scandal where none existed. It wasn't about listening to children or survivors, it was about paranoid prejudices. Unsurprisingly, this took place on a working class estate with lots of poverty and I think it's significant that people were willing to believe ridiculous accusations about the people living there.

I think about all this sometimes when I see assertions that trans people or Muslim people are inherently some kind of threat to children. And every time some asshole accuses someone else of being a groomer or a sex offender on the grounds that you don't like their vibes or whatever. False accusations always end up hurting marginalised people. Always.

[obstinatecondolement]

One of the issues I have with purity culture in contemporary fandom is that a lot of its most ardent adherents have a very... unexamined approach to a lot of their most hardline beliefs?

CW: discussion of incest, rape, harassment, suicide baiting; references to the lynching of Emmett Till and anti-Black racism

Like, for example, many of them seem to a) have an extremely broad interpretation of what relationships are incestuous and b) do not really know why they object to incest beyond it being yucky disgusting. But here's the thing: lots of things are yucky disgusting that are perfectly fine to do with a consenting partner or partners.

Which leads me to what I believe to be the real issue with non-fictional incest: it is almost always a form of sexual abuse.

I notably saw a group of people (who I do not think would harass people over this, to be fair) very earnestly making the point that you could not ethically ship Saavik and David, because they were "step-siblings."

Let's unpack that. Kirk is the biological father of David Marcus. He did not raise him and only met him for the first time when he was an adult with a terminal degree. Saavik is, in Beta canon, adopted into Spock's family (she seems to have been raised by him and his parents rather than being his literal adoptive daughter, although I haven't read the relevant novels) as a young child. Kirk and Spock, in fandom, are a popular ship.

So like... let's take at face value here the idea that Kirk and Spock are definitely married post-canon and that David considers himself 100% Kirk's son and Saavik considers herself 100% Spock's daughter. Are we to believe that people who met as adults, whose parents get married after they met, cannot ever have a consensual romantic and/or sexual relationship? That this kind of relationship can only be exactly equivalent to one where a sibling sexually abuses another and should be condemned in exactly the same way? Like... really? Do you not think that is enormously insulting to survivors of incest?

To take a more actively harmful example: what are the people who profess to believe that fiction about certain topics can cause real life harm believe they are doing when they tell people to kill themselves? If they actually believe what they say they believe, are they not at best attempted murders by their own standards? Is trying to kill someone not bad? And if they don't believe that they should be accountable for someone taking them seriously and obliging their request by killing themselves... then do they not feel embarrassed to expose their own hypocrisy like that in public?

And it gets even more absurd when the same people claim to support prison abolition, because they have inferred from the social justice internet zeitgeist that that is an extremely progressive thing to support. Girl! You openly believe that immoral fan fiction is a capital offense! But you want to extend restorative justice to violent offenders? Make it make sense. Or do you interpret prison abolition to be a pivot to mob justice where "the real sickos" get what's coming to them, as opposed to a belief that the state's abuse of prisoners is unconscionable? Because I invite you to read Emmett Till's fucking Wikipedia page if you think that's a great idea.

And I hope that I'm not being gauche by invoking the murder of a 14 year old child by racists so married to white supremacy that they thought a Black child whistling at a white woman was punishable by torture and a slow, painful death. This is not that by any stretch of the imagination.

But people have killed themselves over this shit. Children have died because of harassment they got over liking Problematic Things. It's certainly not anything like comparable to anti-Black violence in scale—and being a fan of yucky disgusting fandom content is not a marginalised identity that is literally inescapable without becoming estranged from your family and community for life, and that itself not being an option for most, as is the case of passing for white—but it has been lethal, and to the families of the people who died, I doubt it is any comfort that it was because of fandom bullshit as opposed to systemic oppression. And I do think that the patterns of thinking are parallel here, even if it would be enormously inappropriate to claim a one-to-one relationship between the two. To be fair, I think that the people I am talking about here would not themselves participate in a physical murder, but they may certainly approve of one they perceived to be righteous.

But, ugh, yeah. I'm just sick of people parroting back things they have been browbeaten into believing are Irredemable™ without any fucking reflection at all about why those things are bad and why a proportional response involves harassment and death threats or suicide baiting. I think probably most of these people are afraid to think for themselves, in case they think the wrong thoughts, but at least some of them are aware that it's all a fucking grift and just love harassing people for the rush.

[sugaredoleander]

on the death of the arrowverse & what we owe to each other

gonnae say something potentially controversial bc it's exam season & i have all my notifications off so if people get mad at me i won't even know (& most likely no one will see this anyway, my longposts tend to go unnoticed)

in honour of the flash season 9 premiering in february, here's my opinion:

not lending any of their screentime to the cancelled arrowverse shows is a selfish move.

we don't know that they don't have cameos because the season isn't out yet, but i'm going off things the showrunner has said.

i'm not calling them bad people but i am saying it would be a selfish move, and i am saying that as an artist and creator myself.

because as an artist, it is my first impulse to sympathise. i get having a creative vision, wanting to stick to it.

but Also, as a Queer artist, i value solidarity in art. i want to uplift the work of my more marginalised contemporaries. i want to stand with other artists.

the flash got a last season in a move that wasn't survival of the fittest but was corporate fuckery, this is proven, and then, as for the thing we don't have solid proof of - who are we fucking kidding?

like are we really going to pretend that just because we don't have solid proof of something that would be a PR disaster to admit out loud, but that, if you've been paying attention, you Know happens and not infrequently, that just because we don't have solid proof it's not the case?

like wow, what a complete and utter coincidence. the only arrowverse shows with leads that were straight, white and male survived the cull, whereas the show that, as of its next season, wouldn't have a single straight white man in its ensemble, and the show with a Black lesbian protagonist, got cut.

both shows with Ridiculously passionate fanbases as evidenced by the fallout (there were billboards. there were planes. there was even Beebo.) legends was the Only show on the entire god damn CW. with ratings going up.

are we really going to act like that has nothing to do with it?

the fact is, queer shows are always up against unfair odds because a lot of people don't want to see us on screen. because a lot of people don't want us to exist. we're inherently a minority & from a capitalist marketing perspective, that often means our stories don't matter. but we defy the odds, because that's part of being queer. but also, as an inherent minority, it's damn near impossible to do it without outside support.

it's a unique opportunity. on most networks with most shows this wouldn't even be an option for the creators, even if they did disagree with other shows getting cancelled, there really is nothing they can do about it.

but the arrowverse is Full of crossovers, it exists in this larger world. a world they didn't build alone.

so taking your final season & running with it when the people you really built this great big world with, the people you worked with on crossovers - the people who decided to tell more diverse stories - telling your story while theirs are left to end on cliffhangers? idk. as an artist i want to be understanding, as a fan i don't want to act entitled, but especially as an artist i feel that is a selfish move.

a unique opportunity is presented here, to make a move of solidarity & give their stories the endings they deserve.

and if would be a shame not to take that.

i get needing to wrap up your own story, needing to prioritise that. but let's be fucking for real, they get to do that anyway, it's a full final season. a last season is generally a place to bring back old characters & guest stars anyway, especially the flash and legends are pretty tightly woven together, with crossovers and swapped characters over the seasons.

idk. at the very least, like. the very least they could do is consult the writers of the other shows on the endings they Would have wanted their shows to have & mention them in passing (which wouldn't be anything new on the flash, they've mentioned other shows before). a few lines of dialogue, & it wouldn't be Worthy of the shows we lost but it would be. a nice gesture of solidarity, and some closure for the fans at least.

like as a fan, it really is my strongest feeling that i'm not entitled to much. i mean, what are we entitled to in this world, not fucking much. but the question is more, what do we owe to others? when i twist it around and think about it as an artist, if i was put in that position, then i'd feel real selfish doing nothing

[massharp1971]

Hey! I saw your post on censorship in ao3 and the reality of grooming culture, this one: https://at.tumblr.com/massharp1971/hate-censorship-but-troubled-by-the-discourse-on/t4wxft92tqcb I wanted to comment. Ao3 was created as a reaction to people who claimed to be "protecting the children" and then turned around and targeted minority/lgbt spaces overwhelmingly. I think that relates very closely back into why many people on ao3 are unwilling to talk rationally about it now. Ao3 is a hotbed full of people who are sick of censorship and being told that they are horrible people, so they are pretty unwilling to go through that again. One thing I've heard a lot is "all lgbt people are predators" it's also that kind of thinking that lands the entire group back at square one. Once again, people in ao3 are unwilling to compromise/change because now their entire existence is being vilified. I would like a solution that makes things safer, but often times the problem has been that people have made situations worse by hiding bigotry behind protectiveness. For a lot of people on ao3, they ignore and somewhat judge the unhealthy fics, but usually elect to ignore it since in the past nothing good ever came of approaching the problem. What would you present as a solution? The main problem here is that people on ao3 are pretty unwilling to approach the topic because every attempt to solve it thus far has been a massive failure. Also, just generally demonizing one another. In my experience, regardless of what they've done when you demonize another person they become unwilling to consider what you're actually saying. Your example of Jenny reminded me of that. Jenny would probably become unwilling to face the problem because she believes it makes her an evil person, so then she avoids it like the plague and makes the existing problem worse.

CW CSA mentions This is really important and I'm glad you asked. Given my identity and my career, not exactly issues I'm unaware of.

My solution is we need to have hard conversations and talk about stuff out in the open. My solution is discourse that doesn't get shut down. If we want a site that contains adult material, the bare minimum is to be able to have grown-up conversations about it. We need to wrestle with ethics in our writing and we need to think a lot about consent and perpetuating harmful structures because we're part of a community and communities should take care of each other even when we disagree - especially taking care of the most marginalised among us, who are more vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.

One thing I want the free speech to say is that it is absolutely despicable when people throw pedophilia or bestiality, both of which cannot be consensual, alongside consensual LGBTQIA+ or kinky identities, or sex work. Especially when the very structures that enable child abuse stifle queer and other marginalised folx.

Whichever side people are on, that has to stop.

I'm not in favour of censorship, but I do not accept that my freedom as a queer person has anything whatsoever to do with people's right to read stories about adults fucking children "as long as they're well tagged". These are separate discussions and it's harmful to LGBTQIA+ people when they get dragged into this by both sides. "Protect the children from the kinksters and queers" is a vile right-wing authoritarian narrative, but equally "words can never harm anyone and people should be free to do and say whatever they like" is a vile right-wing libertarian narrative. I have no time for either of these positions.

LGBTQIA people and kinksters and sex workers should be safe and protected because we're not doing anything harmful just by being any of those things. This is, or should be, an entirely separate discussion to the pros and cons of censorship of morally reprehensible content.

My rights are not going to be won by some wildly generalised ideals that somehow mean we can't even talk about the fact we have child abusers in our spaces, because child abusers are everywhere and we really, really need to talk about this more. Abuse thrives on silence.

I think the following article could be helpful in thinking about an alternative to either a) kneejerk prohibition moves that never work and often cause harm or b) pretending like there isn't harmful af stuff on ao3, as there is everywhere (including places where prohibition is attempted). I cannot tell you the sick, abusive harrassment I've received for writing what I wrote, from people who are apparently pro free speech but not when someone says something they disagree with because they've wilfully misinterpreted it. Apparently, writing about fucking children is a-ok but writing about challenging grooming culture and having adult discussions about it makes me a terrible person who must be silenced at all costs. Interesting, isn't it? I don't want it censored but I don't have to like it. At the heart of anti-censorship arguments there has to be an understanding that we will be defending the right of material to exist that we personally find deeply troubling.

Nor is disapproving of something or wanting to discourage it necessarily demonising. To me, it's about having good boundaries and an ethic of care. Let's talk to people more about consent, self-consent, and how we uphold or dismantle harmful power structures within our spaces.

[annamarabella-grumble]

As I said in my intro post, I've always been here (feeling like Darling from Control saying this lmao), and still it feels so strange to be doing anything other than reblogging shitposts on this dash.

It's worrying to have to find new shores are years of getting pretty comfortable on one platform. It's nothing I've not done before, but it's exhausting every time; moreso because this time there's also supplementary income attached.

I'm feeling instinctively more at home here than on Mastodon, though -- obviously, kinda, but also because just this morning I saw three separate posts re: "use CWs if you discuss politics; respect the culture" pop up on my feed over there, and it's like... eurgh.

To be clear for anyone who's not checked out Mastodon yet: content warnings blur the entire content of a post. Unless users have set their preferences to posts marked as sensitive always being shown, they will have to click on the post to see it. Pretty much like blocked tags with xkit.

Perhaps this is my 12 years of tumblr talking, but we are all responsible for curating our own experience. If your dash sucks, that's on you; if your timeline sucks, that's on you. Yes, Mastodon has additional local and federated feeds -- and plenty of filter options.

Writers and scholars I follow are having their profiles shadowbanned on Mastodon because they're continuing their work on race, queerness, and systemic inequity there. I appreciate that instance admins are within their rights to set up guidelines and enforce them -- however it smacks of something when the tenor seems to be, 'ugh, the activists are ruining the culture.' Especially because those bans are going to disproportionately affect users of colour; especially on large federated instances like c.im, mastodon.social or mastodon.online.

You might answer, well, those writers and scholars are welcome to set up their own server. They are. And then, if larger instances refuse to federate with them because they're "too political?"

I support using tags, content warnings, and sensitive content features; I do the same on here and on the bird app so people are able to filter out what they don't want to see. But there's a difference between giving users tools for content curation and filtering versus demanding summary self-censoring of marginalised people for literally anything that isn't sunshine and roses; crucially so when a "no politics" rule lacks precise definition. We've been through this, here and other places.

I read those posts, and immediately I ask myself: If Mastodon's supposed to democratise social media... what culture's that, then?

[tye-wig-music]

cw murder, transmisogyny, discussion of serial killers

ultimately I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that brianna ghey’s killing was motivated more by a Leopold & Loeb-esque desire to commit a murder as the enactment of a power fantasy (the alleged killers discussed multiple potential victims before settling on Brianna) rather than principally by transmisogyny per se (although - in case you haven’t read the reports - one of the defendants referred to Brianna as “it” in whatsapp correspondence & the other seems to have been erotically fascinated by her; dehumanisation & objectification were doubtlessly factors here; I mean more that it does not seem on the face of it to have comprised any sort of first step in a genocidal programme). of course, dahmer’s victims were preponderantly gay men of colour; the yorkshire ripper’s, predominantly sex workers; it is no accident that the targets of sadistic and psychologically-motivated murders are regularly vulnerable, disempowered members of marginalised groups. this trial is in its infancy and further facts may come out, but for the moment it seems that the transmisogny implicit in this horrific act of violence was indeed largely implicit; her killers may have had an easier time committing her murder because of her trans identity, but were not apparently motivated specifically by it. Which I did find surprising, but perhaps should not have.

[nopoodles]

What Is Etiquette - Short Story

CW: This is one of those pretend historical novels (alternate history) and includes the intolerances of the era as they did or would have applied to certain groups. Specifically, in this story, as it would apply to marginalised genders. * “What is etiquette?” “The customary code of polite behaviour in society or among members of a particular profession or group,” Bobbie droned. “A Liege such…