#mircocosm

[kawaii-disgusting]

Not to get too discourse ramble-y on here but I just need to scream for a minute.

I hate that when defending of taboos in fiction some people will make such a giant distinction between "pornography" and just portraying it. Like the two are somehow oh so different and there isn't a grey area. Especially when it comes to media made to process trauma or portray someone's lived experiences. Sometimes porn can be made or used to process trauma. And while porn is not sex ed, some porn can be made inspired by the creator's lived experiences. And even porn that is entirely fantasy can be argued to be a representation of that person's experience of sexuality. These things are far from mutually exclusive. And even if it isn't the creator's experiences, it very much still could resonate with an audience that sees their own experiences in it in a way. Or be used to explore experiences other have but you haven't. Yes, even if it is "pornography."

And then it's like, I understand the difference in comfort someone would have with a 250 page novel about a coming of age story with a two page sex scene between teenagers vs a porn without plot fanfiction about two teenage characters on ao3. But to police it, what page count makes it okay? At what word count and amount of other buildup does it become no longer "pornography"? Or what is the page count that separates a story about someone with a fawn response to trauma with a sexually abusive partner from a noncon porn story? Or what runtime separates a drama about an incestuous couple from incest porn? Or what runtime separates a slasher film from torture porn? Or what panel count separates a drama comic about a teacher and student in an inappropriate relationship from drawn teacher/student pornography? Where is the line with this?

This is especially tricky because a lot of current arguments for banning books about minority experiences will call any and all portrayals of sex "pornography" and then people online will echo similar sentiment, but then others who see that as bullshit will make their own version with the line they draw in ways that feel hypocritical to me. And even if there was a clear place to draw that line, "pornography" isn't any less of a form of media. "Pornography" and the things people defend the "non-pornography" media for being are not at all mutually exclusive. Just because something crosses the line into porn in your opinion, doesn't make it immoral to create or consume and that stigma is just as a much a form of censorship. And there is no way to contribute to that stigma without giving more power to the people who think every single portrayal is porn.

And I don't just mean this is a proshipper/antishipper discourse context. Honestly I'm so tired of those labels and the discourse around it so much and only use the label proship because that is what people see my opinions as. I don't personally identify with the term moreso than that. Proship/antiship discourse is just a chronically online mircocosm of much larger issues with censorship, stigmatization of sexuality and kink, misunderstandings about psychology, reactionary beliefs and so many other larger issues at play. A while back I saw people talking about book bannings and booktok discourse where people were stitching tiktoks about antishippers taking them as the people in support of certain types of book bans, because that is what it looked like to them with little context on fandom culture. Because these things are the same.

Like at this point, to me my beliefs aren't "proship", they're part of being for freedom of expression. Like shipping discourse is just one tiny piece of a much larger puzzle, and I don't know what "proship" can say about me that isn't already said by my beliefs about how people view art and fiction as a whole. Everything I've said here applies to both chronically online fanfiction discourse and the larger discussions on taboo fiction and "weird art."

[lunarlagomorph]

I still remember when my half-brother saw me playing Sorcery! and was like that is a book its not a game and at the time i had no idea that it would reflect an entire mircocosm of online vn discourse

[blacksails2017]

MIRCOCOSM

that’s the word!!!

[raeseddon]

On the Hotakainen Family

Because I don't wanna be that person that shoots their mouth of in the comments section, I'm putting my broader thoughts on the newest Stand Still, Stay Silent update here (@inquiisitor, @ sugarpenchant DO NOT READ.)

I think what we're seeing in this exchange (or attempt at one) between Lalli and Emil has nothing to do with Emil at all, but an underlying dysfunctionality between the Hotakainens, and if you look back at the prologue you kinda get hints of that then as well. They feel safer because they're together, but as individuals they have very different ideas about what long term safety actually means. There's this friction between their insular safety as a family unit, and how that could be theortically maintained in the future. Some of them are really gunning for things getting back to normal (taking refuge once again in the community at large) whereas others seem content to say "we're fine as long as we can look after ourselves and have each other."

90 years later, this is reflected to a large degree in the remaining Hotakainen ancestors. They've re-joined a community but only after having left another in apparent shambles. (Somehow I'm not sure there's much left of Saaima, they talk about it in the past tense as if once they left that was it, there was nothing left to go back to at all.) But there's still that friction--I feel like if it were realistic to do so Onni would have Tuuri and Lalli living with him at a remote outpost somewhere where it could be just them. (Other people are just risk factors and nothing more.) Whereas Tuuri wants the sort of community that her ancestors were looking to return to as soon as possible in the prologue. She's convinced herself it exists in mircocosm in the team, and while she's not entirely wrong, she's not right either. And she's been a not all that low-key asshole to Lalli the entire time she's been searching for this special community where she can belong and feel safe but also have a degree of freedom she'd never have otherwise. A freedom that has not existed in 90 years, because it's that sort of thinking that wipes out entire fucking communities (like Saaima.)

The Hotakainens don't know each other as individuals, really. Tuuri admits this herself. She has a very shallow understanding of Lalli's thought process, and it's obvious for as many times he's asked her "when do we get to go home?" that she either honestly had no idea how ill prepared he was to leave or worse, willfully ignored how unready he was. I can see her thinking rather selfishly that maybe the expidition would "help" Lalli somehow; break through this wall he and Onni errected after Saaima. The language she uses talking to Onni when he gets to Mora says that she has a very juvenile understanding of why her brother and Lalli are the way they are. "Were you sad?" she asks, not intentionally mocking but there's something... incredulous about it that's not necessarily a complimentary thing to say to a grown man who's been severely traumatized. It's a lack of respect for Onni's experiences, based in an inability to understand his abilities: she's never been able to hear or see what he does and Onni is so messed up by it, that she no longer wants to try. She stopped trying a long time ago when she dismissed him as a coward and while she hesitates to use the word as an adult, implies it very heavily.

She has a similiar issue with Lalli, only it's not that Lalli is a coward, in fact I'm sure on some level she sees her cousin as very brave (braver than Onni at least) but it's what that bravery has cost him that she fails to grasp. He's seen so much, all the horrors of the Silent World: the wails of the dead and the lost and forgotten-- that he genuinely finds it difficult to connect with people who don't know what it's like to have that as a reality. That in and of itself it harder for Tuuri to understand than Onni simply being repelled by what he sees and hears. She's deaf and blind to it, and the people around her have never wanted her to be otherwise because they don't want her to share that horror and fear. But it's created this... incredibly dysfunctional series of relationships where no one really tries to understand the other and even has Lalli giving up on the idea of a real connection with Emil because he is also deaf and blind, so why would he understand? Lalli is lumping Emil in with Tuuri because he has no other point of reference. He's either interacted with people who "get it" (Onni, his grandmother) or people that don't (Tuuri) and because of his training everything and everyone else has just been white noise.

This sounds really hard on Tuuri, but there's a lot of that burden on Onni too because it's obvious he purposefully sheltered her and explained only the bare basics she needed to understand their abilities in very simple, childish terms. I love all three Hotakainens as characters, but as family they are.... not ideal.