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wen-kexing-apologist · 1 year

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Moonlight Chicken is For the Queers

Ok I started my rewatch of episode 8 and figured out what I want to talk about for this series' finale: intentions and resolutions. This post will be about intention, and how I truly feel that Moonlight Chicken is a gift for queer people. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but for the purposes of this post, I will simply present the following title card.

Moonlight Chicken, Chapter 8: The Self-made House and Home

(if you are expecting this post to be anything other than a jumbled mess of my personal experiences with no clear through-lines or relevant transitions between sentences, thoughts, etc. then turn back now)

Whatever we want to say boy loves started as, fetish or otherwise, queer people are still able to see themselves or get comfort and representation. But coming from watching literally 25 boy loves in the last four months, this show feels different from most (not all) of them, to me, because of how strongly this show centers around built community, rather than romance, as it's central theme.

And yeah while any standard friend group in BL could be considered community in the abstract, the idea that they are a community is never quite presented. It's Team taking food from Pharm and all three of the gang teasing each other, it's Kuea and Diao spending most of their time talking about their relationships, it's Porsche forgetting Pete exists because he's so caught up in Kinn. More often than not we are building towards and hoping for declarations of love between two characters. And do not get me wrong, that is all well and good, and always what I'm rooting for in those shows. And we get something akin to that in Moonlight Chicken too, which is when you finally have Li Ming and Jim calling Heart and Wen (respectively) their boyfriends.

But the "I love you" we get in Moonlight Chicken? That isn't between the couples, it's between Li Ming and Jim.

Because the thing that makes Moonlight Chicken different from other BLs is the emphasis it puts on queer elders raising queer youth. It's about queer youth learning from queer elders and queer elders learning from queer youth. It's about how home and birth families don't always fit quite right, and how you build families and homes despite. And it's applicable to many people, children in abusive homes, disabled people, etc. too. Which is why P'Aof adds strained parental relationships and deafness in to this piece. But because this is fundamentally a BL show, I'm viewing this more through a queer lens.

So naturally, this also means I am informing my analysis of this show through my feelings as the only (known/out/visible) queer person on either side of my family. When I was little, a decade or more before I realized I was queer, I asked my mother one night if I was adopted. I'm not, and I know that, but why did I ask? Because I never really felt like I fit. Not the way I was supposed to fit, not the way family was supposed to fit together. My house never felt like a home.

And it's why I love this exchange between Wen and Jim at the end of episode 2

"I want home," "Don't you already have one?" "I don't." "A person like me doesn't fit to be anyone's home,"

And technically we know this isn't true. Wen does have a home, he has a condo, he has a place to sleep. But emotionally is where the problem lies. Wen is living with his ex, the apartment is cold, he has work colleagues and a friend that he and his ex both know and that's it. And as he tells Jim in episode 7, all his friends are straight. And then he meets Jim, and there is a spark, and maybe it's possible for home to grow there.

Literally, physically, I have a home. I have a family. But the more I embrace my queerness, the more I understand and am comfortable with myself, the more isolating and cold that house and family feel. I'm such a different person now than I was, and there are homophobes and transphobes on both sides of my family, and that makes it hard for me to feel like I am loved. Even when logically I know I am. But it's hard, when your mother says she accepts you and has yet to use my pronouns properly despite me being out to her for over a year and having three separate conversations about it. When your uncle spends twenty minutes or more complaining about trans people, when your cousins don't think trans people should exist. That's my family...technically. That's my home...technically. But it hasn't felt like that in years. So I understand what Wen means here, Wen's definition of home is not a place it is a feeling.

And Jim? We know Jim is already everyone's home. He is home for Li Ming, he is the closest thing to a parent that Leng has in his life, he makes sure the community not only has food, but has as much as food as they could possibly eat. He is first and foremost a community caretaker. But he is so wrapped up in his grief about Beam, his self-hatred, his stubbornness, his exhaustion that he is not able to believe that about himself. Home is a place and not a feeling for Jim, because he can't allow it to be.

The key to Wen and Jim's relationship is finding and building that home.

Home, Family, Community. These are incredibly important themes to Moonlight Chicken and those themes are incredibly important aspects of being queer.

I don't know how Thailand is re: homophobia and transphobia, if kids risk the same chance of getting kicked out of their homes for being queer, etc. But that is a very real possibility for many queer people in the States. But I'm thinking of homelessness in queer youth, how 28% of queer youth have reported experiencing homelessness in their lives. I'm thinking of ballroom and ball culture and how participants in the Ballroom scene were parts of Houses with mothers and fathers at the head of them who acted as mentors to their queer children. When I think about queerness and what it means, I think about ballroom. I think about connection, I think about community.

But that community is often forged from necessity borne out of isolation. What do I mean by isolation? I mean the isolation that Li Ming feels in school, around his school friends. I mean the faces Li Ming makes when his friends are talking about girls:

I mean the physical barriers the show places between Li Ming and his school friends.

It is the isolation that comes with queerness, with poverty, with everything about Li Ming. Beyond the fact Wen is a little younger than Jim and thus better able to understand and see Li Ming's desires to be seen as an adult. I think it is this state of listlessness in Li Ming is also something Wen recognizes. I think at this point Li Ming is so desperate to get away, to go to America, to be listened to and respected by Jim.

Jim who is too caught up in constant stress to see the home he has built for himself, Li Ming who is too caught up in wanting to be understood to appreciate that he has a home to run from. Wen who is working as a go between for Li Ming and Jim because he wants them to be his home. Heart who has been trapped at home and found his freedom because Li Ming understands the frustration of misunderstanding, and the importance of community.

I'm thinking about how so much of the final episodes are dedicated to showing community, showing family, showing the audience that home lies in the collective.

We see it in how many people rush to help Mrs. Hong:

We see it in the people who help you carry your grief:

We see it in how deeply and broadly the pain is felt when community pillars are lost:

We see it in the end of and era:

We see it in the olive branches:

And in new beginnings:

Very few people in these shots are connected through blood, but they are a family. And when I look at these shots the only thing I can think about is how I felt the night I threw a party for all my trans friends. All I can think about when I see these shots of everyone sitting and eating together is how many times I would look over to my friends and see them beaming. How many times someone came up to me to excitedly say this is the first time they felt like they could fully be themselves. How everyone kept asking to do an event like this again. How everyone kept asking to be added to a group chat at the end of the night so they could keep in contact.

And I remember how it felt for me to realize that I had built a community for myself in a place that I have really been struggling to feel was home. Because I had spent so much time in school and work, barley able to scrape together enough money to cover expenses, exhausted and stressed and unable to see what I had sitting right in front of me.

And I think about other queer people I have met, who light up when they see someone else who is gay, who talk about how lonely they feel because they only have one other queer friend. How immediately the need to invite them out, to introduce them to people, to make sure they have community strikes.

I think about how I worked at a summer camp out of state, and got to try out my pronouns, and figure out who I was, and then a few months later, I had to return home. Where I wasn't out yet, where I was going to get misgendered, and how quickly I came out to all of my close friends about my gender identity to try to mitigate how much my mental health tanked when I had to be someone my parents thought I still was. How at the same camp, the queer kids flocked to all the queer staff, how desperate they were to bond. How much lighter they got to be when they were away from their parents and allowed to be themselves around people who also understood not only them as people with the identities they held, but also their struggles existing in a household that didn't see who they were.

I think about how, in the States at least, "are you family?" is/was used as code for "are you gay?"

It's why it is so important to me that Moonlight Chicken ends with the line: "I just built a home. I don't want to move anywhere."

Because Wen has finally built his home. Because he has found his family, his queer community, his home. And yeah, we get the romance, yeah we get Li Ming and Heart holding hands, and Jim and Wen making out, but the emphasis of the final episode is moving forward, being brave, allowing yourself to love, and allowing yourself to stop, look around, and realize that you've made a home for yourself that is built of the people you love who love you in return.

Community building is a huge part of life for literally everyone, but it vital to the survival of marginalized communities. And when I think about my own relationship to queerness, one of the most sacred and important aspects of being queer is building the family you need.

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al-hekima-madara-blog · 6 months

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Madara Week Day 5 : found family

Originally analysis but there is a lot of my own interpretation so let's say Meta/Headcanon?

Madara sincerely tried to consider Konoha as his new home. He did it for the sake of his people but mostly because the warring state era, the death of every single member of his family left him emotionally exhausted.

Paradoxically what Madara feared the most in his youth was solitude. It is revealed during the monologue Obito did to Naruto just after the death of Neji and Madara noted that Obito sounds just like him back then.~

Hashirama's hand came like a relief from the horror of his situation. Everything had been destroyed anyway so yeah... maybe let's build something brand new from scratches. Yeah maybe he can trust the Senju clan after all and life would be easier. But the effect of this renewed friendship was unfortunately temporary, it was like applying a tiger balm in an open infected wound full of filths. The weight of guilt, the promise he made to Izuna on his death bed, the distrust from his clansmen he wanted so badly to save, it was still haunting him... And later the village revealed itself to be just an illusion of peace. People were living side by side but they still hated each other in silence and soon he could already prophetize his clan would be in great danger under the Senju's authority. But he never found a way to properly communicate his worries to the Uchihas that have now a warm roof over their head and a meal everyday. He couldn't neither communicate with Hashirama, and the main reason in my opinion was because they have changed too much during the last decade.

If you think about it seriously there is something unrealistic about Kishimoto's writing. Close you eyes for a minute, remember your best friend when you were 12 years old. and then you go your separate way and you see him again fifteen years later. What would you say to each other? Sure you still have dear memories together but...that's it.

The fundamental period of your life when you grow from being just a child to a grown adult many things happened that change you deeply:

1) puberty, often more spectacular in men. their physical appearance, their height, their voice, their hormones like testosterone that makes them more aggressive, open to sexual experience. Just from being 12 to 17 it's two different characters. Your parents who have to deal with your teenage angst can talk about it.

2) socially you change too. from 12 to 17 you're still cocooned by the educational system, for most of us we still depend economically from our parents. and from 18 to 26. Some goes to university, changes for a different cities, hang out with different friends, shape their values different from what their parents taught them. Others start to work straight away and the changes are even more brutal, now you confront the child that you were with the reality of building a career, earning a living, pay your own taxes, vote for your president ect... in a nutshell being a functional and independent member of your society.

3) emotionally you mature : it's obvious that from our 12 to 26, most of us went through different phase of first love, second love? maybe third? maybe just broken heart, maybe just a period of chaotic love affairs one after an other, maybe long abstinence. and probably after 26 some choose to finally settle down. other may already have children and being a parents which means you don't live just for yourself anymore. It's a complete shift of paradigm when someone else depend on you for survival. Your social circles change a lot too, slowly you befriend people based on your workplace, your hobbies, your political views rather than just sharing the same playground. Some of you can befriend people from lower or higher class that what you originally comes from, forcing you to understand new codes, new skills, new cultures, new languages. And when you almost reach your thirties you may experience for the first time the death of the elders from your community. A grandma, a grandpa who was there since you were born is now gone. The brevity of life suddenly slaps you in the face. Children thinks of themselves as eternal, not adult.

Birth, childhood, adulthood, love, deception, growth, rebirth, mourning, wisdom ect...Why do I say all of this? To describe the life of someone living in a relatively peaceful environment and born in a wealthy modern world which is all of us.

The fact that you are literate, you can read my words in english, you have an internet connection, a smartphone or a desktop, and the luxury to spend time on tumblr is a proof that you are relatively privileged comparing to the majority of people on Earth.

Now we are talking about Madara born into a traditional environment and during a war time when life was even shorter and fragile. Everything I've just described is basically done faster. At 15 you're already an adult, at 18 you have responsibilities as a breadwinner, at 26 you're a senior, head of clan, veteran of many war with all the trauma it drives, parents of many children, maybe widow, (not his case but for instance Tajima was). To put it into perceptive Madara at 26 lived the life of someone 40 years old in the modern world.

To pretend that Hashirama can cast out a a whole lifetime, and just hold to their childhood to build his dreamed village was indeed utterly naive. Between the moment he was elected hokage and the moment Madara shows him the Uchiha shrine, at least a whole year has passed, the relationship with Tobirama was still tense and the first hokage did nothing on purpose. Based on that, it's obvious that Hashirama never thought about discussing what Madara went throught the last 15 years of his life. He knew the child Madara but he completely brush off the adult Madara.

Yes they were close friend as children, but that were now two different persons with a separate background. Am I saying that their reconciliation was doomed from the start? No, they have healthy roots but it would have ask from both side to be more patient with each other and more attentive to what the other says rather than forcing a past childhood into the present.

@uchiha-event

#madaraweek2023 #madara week: day 5 #madara #madara uchiha #naruto #analysis-meta-headcanon #hashirama senju #uchiha madara #uchiha clan #naruto shippuden #founders era #uchiha

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sophieinwonderland · 6 days

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I wonder if there's a conflating of psychiatry and psychology happening in the beef anti-psych-pro-endo is having with you.

Like, one is a study of human cognition and behavior, the other is medical treatment of that subject.

Being anti-psych ourselves, we absolutely want to see the abolishing of psychiatry as it stands now, in favor of more durable and equitable systems of care. But the study you mused on could exist in such a world.

Idk what kind of world produces compassionate and consensual mental health support without having a robust psychology field. How does a community reduce harm unless they know what is and isn't harmful, or know what is and isn't harm? Thinking here of bigots weaponizing pseudoscience and inclusive language to promote and defend their bigotry. Or even just folks denying supports because they don't understand the need for said supports.

Maybe we're just fundamentally misunderstanding the two fields or the conversation or something. But it irks us that the anti-psych position is being anti-science.

This is a good point.

Anti-psych, as I understand, is generally short for anti-psychiatry not anti-psychology. And they seem to be pretty heavily conflating the two.

For context, I'm going to link to their own explanation of their views on psychology and psychiatry so I don't end up misconstruing anything.

I know that psychiatry is typically defined as involving medication as well as general "mental health", while psychology is more typically only things like therapy and other non-medicinal approaches to "mental health". In my opinion, however, anti-psych covers both, because both are used to harm neurodivergent people. Medication is both coercively prescribed under threat of institutionalization and withheld, and patients are not educated on the full scope of how the medication can both help and harm their bodyminds. Therapy is used to force neuroconformity - from well-known harmful examples such as ABA therapy, to lesser acknowledged examples such as CBT being used to condition patients into exhibiting "socially acceptable" thought and behavior patterns at the expense of their mental health; typically also blaming and punishing the patient when they fall short of the intended goals due to their own symptoms.

Now, maybe there can be some truth to this if we're solely discussing clinical psychology.

But psychology is a pretty broad field that goes way beyond "mental health."

There are experimental psychologists, neuropsychologists, forensic psychologists, engineering psychologists, educational psychologists, developmental psychologists, and many others.

Psychology is a massive field of study. I would even go so far as to say that most psychology ISN'T about mental health at all.

And most of the psychologists at this hypothetical school wouldn't be clinical psychologists. They would be developmental psychologists to study the development of the children in this environment.

This isn't really psychiatry, nor is it clinical psychology. It's just research. It's studying children in a unique environment with a different culture that doesn't exist anywhere else.

And I really agree with the point about pseudoscience. If you get in the way of research and prevent studies from being conducted, then that's all that you'll be left with. And if you take a position that children can't be studied because they can't possible be able to consent to the study, then that means we'll lack valuable data that can be used to help children.

Speaking of conducting psychological experiments on children, there was actually a really cool one conducted on children (with parents consent) showing they could create imaginary companions intentionally, and that those imaginary companions

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/icd.2390

And this study directly references tulpas as something to compare with in future studies.

These are cool findings that wouldn't be possible if we just decided children shouldn't be studied.

I need to do a more in-depth post on that study later.

#syscourse

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avelera · 2 years

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I've been thinking about "Giving Sanctuary" and by extension how I view Dream and Hob as fathers to adult children who have died, and kind of wanted to articulate how I view them in that light, because there's a very specific kind of fatherhood I envision for both of them and it's not the same.

Think of this as sort of a "Behind the Scenes" DVD commentary for "Giving Sanctuary" :)

Dream as a father - so with Dream, I see his marriage to Calliope and his fathering of Orpheus as something he did while he was young.

Now, canonically speaking, Dream is billions of years old and 3,000 years ago is hardly younger within that span if we take that at face value. But if we don't, and we take it more that maybe Dream's maturity is more closely tied to humanity's sophistication, as the lord of their dreams, then bear with me for a second and imagine that in terms of maturity, Dream is roughly in his early 20s when he marries Calliope. (This is also slightly inspired by Tom Sturridge having become a father in his early 20s and my sense he brought some of that to his performance of Dream.)

There's a very specific energy that comes with Dream and Calliope getting married out of a certain "young love" that's technically adult but maybe not fully grown or wise yet. The kind of young love that could absolutely be destroyed by losing a child together. Years later, when Dream rescues Calliope, they feel like a couple now in their 30s who still feel fondness for one another but have understandably remained apart ever since. They're different people now, people who were fundamentally changed by the loss, and the people they are now don't necessarily have an interest in getting back together, even if they can *remember* their old happiness together.

Likewise, to me, Dream feels like someone who lost a child when he was young, perhaps so young that most people of his age (speaking in human terms) have never even had a child much less lost one. He has no peers to share the grief with. Certainly none of the other Endless have families and those that have children, like Desire, don't seem to view them parentally or affectionately, they're just pawns.

So even within his own family, Dream is unique in having had and lost a child that he cared about. He doesn't have anyone to really relate to about it and I personally headcanon that the Dream we know, the dour figure that is weary of life, whom Death is trying desperately to rekindle before he self-destructs from his own depression, came into being with the loss of Orpheus. As an adult, Dream has been shaped by a loss that happened in his early adulthood. It has given him maturity but not necessarily wisdom, rather it has left him bitter, distant, and brittle because he never properly healed from that loss or came to terms with it.

Hob as a father - in contrast, Hob feels like someone who became a father relatively late in life, and after a great deal of planning. He waited until he was well-established, rich, with a knighthood, and able to shower all his life's accumulated achievements on a child that was very carefully planned.

Then, despite doing everything right, he lost that child anyway. His son was an early adult, Hob was at the time of Robyn's death, mentally, I'd argue, a middle-aged man, and it shattered him. He "didn't go out much after that" and it sounds like, if you do the math, he didn't go out much for roughly 20 years. There is a very specific grief one hears about with parents who lose adult children, especially at an age where they don't expect to have any other children, a lifetime spent together, putting your hopes in them. Hob clearly loved Robyn, who was his only son with his by then deceased wife, leaving Hob utterly alone after having such high hopes. Parents you hear about who went through this are destroyed and never really recover emotionally. I could go into some specific examples but first of all, they're all just gut-wrenching, and second I don't want to make light of those losses, but suffice to say those accounts are informing how I write Hob.

Hob and Dream relating to one another as fathers of deceased, adult sons - Now going back into the fic a bit, there is that energy of two men of roughly the same mental (if not literal) age, one of who lost a child as a young man, one almost too young to have a family at that point (again, according to my perception, not the literal numbers) and how he relates to Hob who more recently lost an adult son while more mature himself, having waited a long time to have one.

I think on some level, Hob pities Dream all the more for perceiving that this loss hit Dream while he was almost too young to have fully enjoyed a life himself. Certainly this loss has poisoned Dream for a much longer period than Hob has been poisoned by his own. The bitterness is so entrenched in Dream by now that he almost wishes he *could* erase the memory of his family, because he's lost so much of himself to mourning them, whereas Hob still would not trade their memory because being more mature when he lost them gave him a certain relative resilience and wisdom about the world, he can cherish the memory and mourn them without wishing the pain would just go away.

Hob is also, by extension, in a slightly better place to advise Dream through his grief, even though he's technically younger, because unlike Dream, Hob always knew he'd lose them but Dream very reasonably approached Calliope and having a child with Calliope from the belief that he would never lose them both (it's arguable if he thought Orpheus would be a god or demi-god and thus immortal too but let's say for the sake of argument that he did expect Orpheus to be immortal too). He was even more blindsided by the loss that never should have happened, whereas Hob was blindsided by a loss that happened sooner than he expected.

Dream feels his mistake towards Hob was not warning Hob in advance that to have a wife and child would mean losing them, given the gift of immortality was limited. He has no advice for Hob because the entire exercise around giving Hob immortality was Dream proving the point that no one could suffer through what he has gone through, or survive eternity, without wanting to die. He is, especially within the fic, looking for confirmation of his own worldview that life is unbearable through putting Hob through the same experience. He can try to help Hob by assisting him materially and being there for him as a friend, but Dream is also learning how to do that, how to be an adult, mature partner, as he does so.

Whereas for Hob, looking out for someone else is something he has done as a mature man. He misses being a husband and father. Having Dream to look out for isn't something he has to learn how to do, it's something he has always felt more natural doing and he's restored to a stronger sense of self by having the chance to do so again.

Anyway, that's it, just a little behind the scenes DVD extra for Giving Sanctuary :)

#1689 fic #giving sanctuary #sandman meta

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bloggedanon · 10 months

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what is a parental apologist??? sorry not trying to be rude

OH I DIDN'T EVEN SEE THIS ASK FJAKS HELLO YES MY APOLOGIES

Basically, I've got a whole hangup about youth rights, and have the mindset that everything about the way the relationship between a parent and their child works, and by extension the way adults view and treat minors in general, is kinda inherently fucked six ways from Sunday. ¯⁠\⁠_😅_⁠/⁠¯ A parental apologist is someone who thinks the parent-child dynamic as it stands is fundamentally good, or anyone advocating for "parental rights," which I kinda see as the antithesis of human rights tbh

Explanation below the cut, but like most things I say on the internet, it's long-winded and hard to read JFLASLSL

(and yeah, don't worry anon! you're fine lmao I made the thing in bio sound kinda vague in hindsight BFKWJZ)

Just looking at the parent-child relationship (or at least the standardized nuclear family model), I'm just gonna list some qualities a normal, healthy relationship between two adult human beings typically is supposed to have:

- Mutual communication

- Mutual trust

- Equality

- Mutual respect

- Freedom to make one's own decisions independent of the other partner

In the typical (nuclear) parent-child dynamic:

- Parents generally manipulate their children using lies (e.g. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc.), informational manipulation (like the kind we're seeing being called for by parental roghts groups to promote the censorship of schools and their books), refusing to give reasoning for their behaviour but demanding that their children do, etc.

- If a parent violates a child's trust, the child has exactly zero recourse, and no choice but to continue putting their lives and all their needs into the hands of the parent. The parent can't really rely on the child for everything either, since there's just so much someone in a kid's position is able to do for an adult. The adult's the one that's supposed to be providing, after all. In the nuclear family, parents are left to both care for themselves, their careers, their household, each other, and their kids all on their own, with no real support to be found outsode each other. In that way, the parent-child relationship is unfair to both the child and the adult.

- Equality... yeah, there's nothing about the parent-child relationship based in it. Skipping this one JDKAJD

- If the child doesn't respect the parent (as an authority), then the parent doesn't respect the child (as a human being). And then the parent may not respect the child as a human being anyway. Either way, this difference in what "respect" means for each party constitutes a lack of mutual respect for sure 💀

- The parent makes all the decisions. Children aren't allowed to make any. Any that the child is allowed to make is more the parent's choice than the kid's.

So the parent-kid relationship is built on literally the opposite of anything that would be a healthy (or even non-abusive) relationship between anyone else, and yet people still argue and believe that this isn't an inherently abusive relationship the same second one of the relevant parties is a minor. I'm highkey bitter about it HFKWHDJSJ

Disclaimer: I have yet to witness communal childrearing among other cultures, so I can't really offer any other point of comparison for nuclear family dynamics v.s. communal family dynamics 🤡👍

#asks #Log says dumb shit on the internet #youth rights

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fancyfade · 7 months

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I saw the post saying Batman fans think dc intentionally make Bruce a terrible parent to give Damian angst…just…have these people seen what dc writers and editors in interviews?

A lot of writers and editors revealed they see Damian not more than an arrogant and entitled brat that needs to learn his place and follow the status quo…which is hilarious as a lot of modern writing heroes make fucking frustrated with their holler than thou personalities.

Heck I remember the writer got Tim Drake last recent book said she liked Damian but he can be difficult at times

Oh like Ra’s and Bruce? Almost like he related to the some of the most complex mainstream comic book characters.

And from my experience, a lot of writers want to write the idolized version of Batman that made up as a kid. Which unfortunately makes Bruce treat Damian as afterthought unintentionally.

Now I don’t expect Bruce to be the perfect dad, but as you stated months ago. A lot of modern Batman writers have a fundamentally lack of desire to have Bruce act like a parent/figure. In fancy I notice this with the other batkids where their bonds with Bruce have been extremely watered down. Can you confirm that as you read more older comics than me.

Sorry for a long anon, I don’t think Bruce is meant to be a terrible father. Just a lot of writers project their personal bias against Damian into other characters…which in turn make a lot of them worse as writer forgot Damian is a child…not to mention Bruce bio son. Not saying parents and kids have 1:1 of personalities. But do writers remember Bruce can be an asshole too?

yeah a lot of the writers do project their personal biases - as well as they personally don't view Bruce's adopted kids as his actual kids* and it's more comfortable for writers to just have them do different things when batman doesn't "have" to be a parent. like dick and bruce have pretty good rapport in silver and bronze age.

for older comics its strange. like I'd say even tho golden/silver age bruce didn't refer to dick as his son, he still definitely had "dad like" qualities. like we see a golden age bruce knock dick out to stop him from following him to his presumed death**, and silver age Bruce encourages dick to spend time being a kid and enjoying basketball and for example 1 comic dick goes to his school's spirit night instead of on patrol.

bronze age dick is college age, so their dynamic is different. dick's out of the house in college, and honestly I wish writers would do this more if they just didn't want to write Bruce being a dad. Like for Damian's situation instead of Bruce being criminally negligent/stupid why can't we just see Damian living with Talia he literally has a mom. you don't want to write bruce being a dad there are options.

jason we see him being a good dad but also his tenure as robin is pretty short, and then for a while the robin of the time (tim) is important in that he is not bruce's son. he's a trainee. Bruce doesn't have any minor children for a while, and only after OYL (occurs 2006 in our world) do we see him adopt a nearly adult tim.

For which Batkids have had their bonds with Bruce watered down, I'd have to read more current batcomics. The old comics I'd say we do have phases where Dick and Bruce don't talk much, mostly due to the annoying post COIE retcons of how Dick becomes nightwing (Bruce initially tells him he can't be Robin after he gets shot, then immediately adopts Jason to make him Robin, and then later that is retconned for Bruce to kick him out). I've spoken multiple times about preferring pre COIE retcons where Dick had more agency.

Cass I am not sure if we've seen her interacting a lot with Bruce lately, due to the aforementioned not keeping up with current batcomics that don't have Damian. She does show up in spirit world but :P that's about Xanthe.

From what I hear from people who read current Tim comics, Tim's bond with Bruce is very strongly emphasized, tho I haven't read those comics myself so I can't comment firsthand.

Overall I think a lot of portrayal of Bruce as straight up negligent or abusive*** is due to writers just not caring about portraying him as a dad, they care about loner batman which maybe is the version from their head as kids? or could just be because that's a lot of what DC likes to emphasize. also the general "men express emotions by being angry and violent" thing many writers like. and DC was going to set up Damian as the villain for 5G, so they had to put him in a place where Bruce couldn't have seen this and stopped it, so they decided that he was going to claim any level of ignorance in order to not look bad (because I guess just not knowing what's going on with your child is fine)

*for a similar thing not in batman comics: i think that if Death of a Prince writers viewed Garth as Aquaman's ""actual"" kid, even though Garth was adopted by him and raised by him for a large portion of his childhood, they wouldn't have had aquaman being willing to fight aqualad to the death to save his biological child, arthur jr, at black manta's threats.

**which is also what Talia does for Damian in Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul - she knocks him out to take him away from battle and protect him

*** as opposed to realistically emotionally unavailable for his character, which I think works especially post Jason's death. but also WRT for why I think the negligent stuff is OOC (here - post)

#im not sure if i actually answerd ur quesiton sorry #anon #ask #bruce wayne #dc comics

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wingletblackbird · 2 years

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Anakin and Padme and Family and Parenthood

A part of the tragedy of RotS is that Anakin and Padme both wanted a family, and would likely have made good parents. This desire is, in fact, fundamental to both their characters and informs their actions.

Firstly, we see Anakin's relationship with his mother in TPM. They are close, and this is a relationship that Anakin values throughout his life. Likewise, Padme also values family. She still lives at home when she goes to Naboo and this is something Anakin appreciates:

You still live at home,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t expect that.”

“I move around so much,” Padmé replied. “I’ve never had the time to even begin to find a place of my own, and I’m not sure I want to. Official residences have no warmth. Not like here. I feel good here. I feel at home.”

The simple beauty of her statement gave Anakin pause. “I’ve never had a real home,” he said, speaking more to himself than to Padmé. “Home was always where my mom was.”

Padme outright tells Anakin in AotC that, "Actually, I was hoping to have a family by now. My sister has the most amazing, wonderful kids." Anakin also smiles when he meets said children. He thinks that he "couldn’t help but be touched by the scene, a view of innocence that he had never known." What he sees at the Naberries is something he wants.

Anakin also admires how Padme cares about her family. "[Anakin] knew that she didn’t want to bring pain to her family. Anakin, who had left his mother as a slave on Tatooine, could appreciate that."

Anakin so respects the role family has, in fact, that he is glad to meet the Naberries and spend time with them. He is also honest with Ruwee about the danger Padme is in, because he respects the love he has for his daughter. Anakin knows family is important to Padme.

[Anakin] could not deny the way Padmé looked at her family, the love that seemed to flow from her whenever any of them entered the room, and he knew that if Ruwee or Jobal or Sola didn’t like him, his relationship with Padmé would be hurt.

All of the above shows again how much family is important to them both.

The AotC novelisation honestly goes hard into this importance of family and home. It is something that brings Anakin and Padme together. Eventually, the text outright unites them on that subject:

“Home again, home again, to go to rest,” Anakin recited, a common children’s rhyme.

“By hearth and heart, house and nest,” Padmé added.

Anakin looked over at her, pleasantly surprised. “You know it?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I don’t know,” Anakin said. “I mean, I wasn’t sure if anyone else … I thought it was a rhyme my mother made up for me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Padmé said. “Maybe she did—maybe hers was different than the one my mother used to tell me.”

Anakin shook his head doubtfully, but he wasn’t bothered by the possibility. In a strange way, he was glad that Padmé knew the rhyme, glad that it was a common gift from mothers to their children.

And glad, especially, that he and Padmé had yet another thing in common.

So we can establish right here that Anakin and Padme have common values where family is concerned. They care about their family; they value their opinions; they want to shield their family from pain. They both want warmth and a home. Padme wants children. Anakin also does. It is implied in AotC, and outright stated in RotS. "This is the happiest moment of my life."

I've seen people say or imply that Padme did not value family, because she wanted Anakin to stay in the Order. This is not true. Padme suggests to Anakin that he stay in the Order in RotS because she was concerned about the war effort. She knew she couldn't stay in the Senate once the pregnancy came out, but did suggest hiding away for a bit to preserve Anakin's reputation first because: "Sometimes I think that the only reason the people of the Republic still believe we can win the war is because you’re fighting it for them—” Things were pretty desperate.

Another, perhaps lesser reason, is she is a bit worried that he will resent her, "I won't let you give up your future for me." They resolve that though and talk it through,

“I had been thinking—about going somewhere … somewhere else. Having the baby in secret, to protect you. So you can stay in the Order." “I don’t want to stay in the Order!” He took her face between his palms so that she had to look into his eyes, so that she had to see how much he meant every word he said.

Anakin was content to leave the Jedi Order for his family's sake. He makes that clear in the movies, books, and comics. It's very explicit.

Padme herself is not all about being a senator or politics, as she is often depicted. She is unused to any kind of life outside politics certainly, and that informs her decisions. She cannot divorce it from her life. However, she was "relieved when [her] two terms were up." She serves as a senator because she felt she "couldn't refuse", and, again, "was hoping to have a family by now." She's as happy about having a baby as Anakin is. This is what she wants for herself.

The reason we do not see Anakin leave the Order in RotS is because of his visions. He stays in the vain hope of getting access to information that might help him prevent these visions from happening, not because he doesn't want to leave or Padme is forcing him to stay.

Anakin and Padme's relationship does have it's issues certainly, but these do not stem from a lack of consensus where family and children are concerned. They both want the same things out of life. Had their sense of duty allowed it, they both would have left the Senate and the Jedi behind long before RotS to raise that family. Anakin and Padme are bound by the duality of duty v. desire that they both wrestle with.

Hence, the fact that Luke and Leia are unplanned is simply because Anakin and Padme chose to wait a bit, and keep their relationship a secret given the state of the Republic. A lot of people, no matter how amazing their marriage, would not want to start a family during a war. It's not a reflection on them negatively. Anakin and Padme both felt they were needed for a bit longer. At their heart though, the most important thing to either was their little, but growing, and much-wanted family. I argue even that their values of compassion and service flow out of and are informed by their home and family lives.

So, we've established now that Anakin and Padme both share the same family values, and have the same commitment to their family.

The last question I want to answer is if they would be good parents. I think this is a no-brainer, personally. Anakin and Padme both grew up with loving parental figures. They already have some idea of what this looks like.

Additionally, we see in AotC that for Anakin not only is protecting family important, specifically protecting innocence like what he was largely denied on Tatooine is important. He likes kids and is gentle with them. He would want to provide his children with what he never had as a child like peace, freedom, and stability. Anakin defined compassion as a Jedi's most important trait, this would translate well to fatherhood.

On Padme's end, we have her talk about how concerned she was that she was too young to be Queen. In AotC, she also tells Anakin "try not to grow up too quickly." I think there is a part of her that struggles with her childhood burdens. I think this would influence how she would raise her kids, as carefree and happy as she can manage.

In conclusion, I think that both Anakin and Padme would have been good parents. They both would love unconditionally. They would also do their best not to put undue pressure on their kids, (especially with their backgrounds), but support them kindly in their endeavors.

And thus, on a macro scale, RotS is tragic because we have the slaughter of all the Jedi and the rise of the Empire. On a micro-scale though, where the Skywalker family is concerned, we have a family that was torn apart.

Anakin falls. Padme dies. The twins are split up. This is a tragedy, and it is set up as one from the moment we hear Padme say, "Actually, I'd hoped to have a family of my own by now."

#Naberrie family #skywalker family #padme #anakin

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deathlessathanasia · 3 months

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„Classical Greek is rich in words signifying love or affection. Passionate sexual attraction is denoted by the term eros (verb eran, whence 'erotic'), the love of parents for children by storge (verb stergein). Agapan means 'to like or be fond of,' although the noun agape, sometimes rendered 'brotherly love,' first occurs in the New Testament. But the most general and widely used term for 'love' is philia, with the associated verb philein (d. 'philhellene,' 'anglophile'). This idea, together with its opposite, hatred or enmity (which we shall treat in the following chapter), is the subject of section 4 of book 2 of Aristotle's Rhetoric.

One might have imagined that love would pose relatively fewer problems of interpretation than other emotional concepts, and yet here too there are difficulties and disagreements, including over matters of terminology. Philia, for example, is not simply 'love,' but is often better translated as 'friendship,' and the cognate term philos, which as an adjective means 'dear' or (less often) 'loving,' commonly signifies 'friend.' Many scholars believe, however, that ancient friendship, both Greek and Roman, had little or no affective character, but was wholly a matter of duty. Thus, Malcolm Heath (1987: 73-4) writes that philia in classical Greece 'is not, at root, a subjective bond of affection and emotional warmth, but the entirely objective bond of reciprocal obligation; one's philos is the man one is obliged to help, and on whom one can (or ought to be able to) rely for help when oneself is in need.' Simon Goldhill (1986: 82) agrees: 'The appellation or categorization philos is used to mark not just affection but overridingly a series of complex obligations, duties and claims.'

Philia, then, would seem a poor candidate for a basic emotion, and hardly to correspond to the modern conception of love. But that is not all. Some scholars hold that the words philia and philos do not in fact refer to friendship as we understand the term but rather to family ties. Thus, Elizabeth Belfiore (2000: 20) writes that 'the noun philos surely has the same range as philia, and both refer primarily, if not exclusively, to relationships among close blood kin.' Worst of all, Aristotle himself seems to have doubts about how to classify philia. At the beginning of his extended analysis of philia in books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics (8.1, 1155a3-4), he affirms that philia 'either is a virtue or is accompanied by virtue and earlier, in his discussion of virtues as a mean, Aristotle treats philia as a disposition (hexis or diathesis] rather than a pathos, and locates it between the extremes of ingratiation or flattery, on the high end, and generalized grumpiness, on the low (110826-30; but note 1226b22-3, where Aristotle says that this mean is 'most like philia .,., but differs from philia in that it is without pathos.

In my book Friendship in the Classical World (1997a), I argued at length that friendship was fundamentally an affective bond in ancient Greece and Rome, just as it is today, and that philos as a noun means precisely 'friend.' Scholarly opinion, nevertheless, remains sharply divided. Thus, Michael Peachin, the editor of a recent collection of essays entitled Aspects of Friendship in the Graeco-Roman World (2001: 135 n. 2), describes 'the standard modern view of Roman friendship' as one 'that tends to reduce significantly the emotional aspect of the relationship among the Romans, and to make of it a rather pragmatic business' (and the same for Greek philia). Peachin notes that 'D. Konstan has recently argued against the majority opinion and has tried to inject more (modern-style?) emotion into ancient amicitia but the majority of the articles that follow, as Peachin says, 'point us back to a heavily formalized, even legalized, bond between friends. These controversies show no sign of diminishing.”

- The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature by DAVID KONSTAN

#emotions #ancient greece #philia #love #friendship #quotes #excerpts

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spurgie-cousin · 2 years

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Regarding your answer about the pink shirts. It’s insane to me that the Bates are fundie lite. If anyone would behave only 50% like them here in Germany, people would call them more than crazy. But anyways can you explain why they are fundielite and give an example of not lite fundies? Thanks!

"Fundie lite" doesn't mean they're not still super conservative or that they share the beliefs of mainstream Christianity, it is just used to differentiate between (what I consider) the true blue religious fundamentalism and people who only incorporate parts of Christian fundamentalism into their religious practice.

I could do a whole point-by-point comparison (and probably have before knowing me) but the main difference to me is that serious fundamentalists have a black and white understanding of good and evil with very little room for compromise, whereas fundie lites pick and choose aspects of fundamentalism as it suits them and reject the parts they don't want to follow. I consider the 1st generation of Duggars and Bates true Christian fundamentalists, for example, whereas 90% of their kids I'd consider fundie lite.

Examples I can think of:

The Duggar and Bates parents' had a commitment to keeping their families separate from secular society at every opportunity (homeschool, censored media, only fraternizing with other kids at family conferences and other church-sanctioned events). Most of the kids haven't maintained that hard line (Jill D allowing her kids to go to public school, the 2nd gen Bates allowing their kids to watch and listen to secular media, etc).

Michelle and Kelly Jo are strict gender-specific dress code adherents bc they find it integral to being a good Christian, but most of their female children have (fortunately) decided for themselves to not carry that on bc it doesn't serve them (and I'm assuming that also means they don't think dress has much to do with how good of a Christian you are).

Both the Bates and Duggar families were strict "leave it up to god" people as far as having kids, another decision they made because they thought it had moral implications. And again, we've seen evidence of family planning with the 2nd gen kids who decided that they didn't believe you needed to have a baby at every opportunity to be a good Christian.

Another example I always use when I'm feeling less long-winded is the Amish vs Mennonites because people often lump them into the same category but they're really very different: The Amish have a very black and white view of what is and is not accepted to participate in their religion and there isn't a lot of room for compromise. Mennonites on the other hand can be just as strict as the Amish in some areas, but completely progressive in others, and that varies from family to family so there's a lot of grey area in their religion. But people see the similarities and assume they operate the same way.

Anyway I hope that makes sense this is one of those areas where I can start talking for forever and forget to make my point lol.

#religion

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plushcat42 · 2 years

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Random ass post I felt like making but here’s my personal view on how Sparklings develop and concepts surrounding their general idea that can get very twisted very fast.

Yes I’m still in this fandom lmfao just not as hyperfocused on it

Created in a process that is fundamentally similar to becoming sparkmates but with drastically different intents(and results ofc).

By momentarily joining and combing sparks, data on both parents’ frames, abilities and maybe even personality traits are shared and mixed together as the Carrier/host spark holds the Sparkling’s spark or sparks as it develops. (Which a carrier/host is pretty much randomly chosen really.) Once it is far along and strong enough, the spark(s) are removed from the carrier/host spark and placed within a specialized containment unit thats loosely shaped like a pod; allowing the newly developed spark to generate its own body, using the data obtained from both parents to create a unique build with distinct traits from both parents, sometimes even while new traits neither have. A process that takes a few weeks to a month to complete.

Once the body is finished developing the pod opens on its own in most cases. Sometimes, though rarely needing to physically be pried open. Once out of the pod the sparkling is physically equivalent to a very small cybertonian with softer, less complex features, usually lacking the sharp angles ‘adults’ may have.

The sparkling, much like human children, is very impressionable in the early years of its life. Alongside that, sparklings are small and very frail for the first few years of its life. Slowly developing a harder, more armor like frame as it gets older. Although they can walk with relative ease the moment it’s removed from the pod; most sparklings need time to develop their speech.

However in the current society it’s not uncommon for a newly developing spark to be removed from its carrier very early on and having its coding completely reworked and modified so that the sparkling develops the way it’s modifier’s want it to. Even skipping the process of the sparkling growing to full size altogether. Although this can have some negative effects on the carrier since the developing spark is usually forcefully torn out of the host spark as it’s too weak and underdeveloped to be anywhere else. Which is why it’s not uncommon for the very prematurely removed spark to dim and fizzle away before it can be properly stabilized so it can continue to develop externally, post having its code modified and altered.

The process of creating a new spark is also being made synthetic in current times, completely disregarding the need for a carrier and sire. Although like the act of prematurely removing a developing spark can likely end in failure. Or a synthetic cybertronian that is improperly developed which in many cases causes constant physical pain.

Which if I do a written series starring my TFA characters I do plan to tie in these concepts somehow. Mainly the more horrifying concept of them trying to synthetically create life from nothing.

I may also do a post about the art of cybertronians modifying their own bodies and how things like Black Arachnia(I think that’s how it’s spelled) and Waspinator can be created and how the organic and cybernetic parts conflict with each other.

#transformers #transformers concepts #concept #personal take #sparkling #tfa #transformers animated

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interiordesignbooks · 1 month

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Best Interior Design Books - What You Should Be Aware Of

The introduction of art to children at an early age may spark their imagination and creativity giving them an understanding of the art form that will last throughout their lives and expression. Books on art specifically designed for young artists could be an excellent tool to aid in this endeavor. They offer direction, inspiration, and interactive activities that will make learning about the arts enjoyable and enjoyable. By exposing children to various artistic styles and techniques with carefully curated art books, parents and educators can nurture their creativity and help them develop an understanding of the visual arts. One of the most essential kinds of books on art for children artists is one that focuses on drawing and painting skills. These books typically include clear step-bystep instructions, which makes it easier for children to follow along and produce their own masterpieces. Books like "Drawing with Kids" and "Painting with watercolors to Young Artists" are excellent examples. They teach not only the most fundamental techniques but also provide plenty of space for children to play and explore. These artist books can assist children to create confidence in their skills and encourage a love of creating art. Visit the below mentioned site, if you are looking for additional information about interior design books.

In addition to instructional art books, ones that look at the lives and works of famous artists could be very inspiring for children readers. Biographies of artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso, and Frida Kahlo, tailored for children, can open up the possibilities of art. These artist books focus on the unique style and contribution of each artist. They show kids that there are many ways to express yourself through art. Books such as "The Noisy Paint Box" about Kandinsky in addition to "Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos" are fantastic examples of how to mix storytelling and art education. Interactive art books that blend reading and creative activities can be very beneficial. Books such as "Art Laboratory for Kids" as well as "The Usborne Complete Book of Art Ideas" include various projects that encourage children to explore different techniques and mediums. These artist books are packed with ideas that are sure to keep young artists engaged and engaged with art. They typically include advice on using common materials to create unique works creating art that is easy and enjoyable for all children, regardless of their abilities or resources. It is also important to include books on art which celebrate diversity and other cultures in a child's artistic education.

Books that feature artwork from different parts of the world or books that highlight the works of artists with diverse backgrounds can widen a child's view. Book titles such as "Children are Just like Me The Celebration of Children Around the World" and "My Art Book of Friendship" aid children in understanding the universal language of art and its power to bring people together across different cultural boundaries. These artist books emphasize the importance of art as more than an art form, but rather a means to be aware and appreciate the world that surrounds us. In conclusion, art books play a crucial role in introducing kids into the realm of artistic creation. From instructional guides and biographies to interactive art projects and diverse content, these books offer the most extensive knowledge and inspiration. Through providing children access to various artist books, parents as well as teachers can foster their creativity by encouraging self-expression. They can also develop a love of the arts. By investing in these materials, you can make a lasting impression on the development of children, helping them develop into well-rounded, imaginative individuals.

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maddielivinginternationally · 9 months

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Week 5: "Exploring Race, Segregation, and the Impact of the Black Lives Matter Movement: Lessons from Recent Discussions"

Our discussion in class this week on segregation and race was very interesting as it was partly new for me. As open discussions on race are only starting now in France, I feel that there is a comparatively large emphasis placed on it in the UK (where I have been studying for the past two years) and even larger in the US (where I just started studying since early September). In our class, we discovered that African Americans have faced significant disadvantages in various aspects of life, such as housing, employment, and overall societal inclusion. These disparities have had enduring impacts. Consequently, I am very grateful for this course because it has taught me to view the Black Lives Matter movement within a broader context, rather than solely as a response to a corrupt police force. I was especially taken aback by the government's systematic discriminatory housing policies targeting African Americans. What was even more astonishing was the persistence of residential segregation as a significant contemporary issue, despite the term itself fading from common use. This segregation, as described by Doug Massey in 2020, continues to be a fundamental and unaddressed aspect of modern race relations that both society and institutions seemingly choose to overlook. I gained various insights regarding the societal structure from this discussion, and I made an effort to contemplate its implications.

One aspect is the concept of the "culture of poverty," which suggests that individuals are impoverished due to having a deficient culture. For instance, academic success might not be highly regarded in this context. However, I find myself somewhat skeptical of this notion. My recent research collaboration with the French charity Institut Louis Germain, focusing on the education of underprivileged children in France, has revealed a different perspective. By providing talented high school students from modest backgrounds with the knowledge and skills necessary to enter prestigious university programs, we observed that it not only fostered tolerance and social progress among the participating students but also among their families and friends. However, I am aware that this study took place in France and that the two cultures are very different.

The second point concerns the actions of white society in relation to segregation and, consequently, desegregation. James Baldwin's statement about ghettos being "created and maintained" by white institutions and "condoned" by white society really resonated with me when I watched the video depicting how white parents in Seattle and its suburbs obstructed school integration. These white parents withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in private schools when they were assigned to southern, and therefore underfunded, schools. While I can understand this decision on an individual level (as I wouldn't want my child to endure a long bus ride to attend an underprivileged school either), from a structural perspective, their collective actions mirrored the very mechanisms that perpetuate racism. Moreover, the schools with the highest minority populations received the least funding, and this situation worsened when white children were transferred to private schools. Hence, the 2020 data from Logan et al. (2021) aligns with my understanding that there hasn't been a significant breakthrough in desegregating American neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, it's essential to consider the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which began in 2020. In fact, Bloomberg published an article on September 26th 2023, stating that Corporate America responded to the mass protests ignited by George Floyd's murder by significantly increasing the hiring of people of color, aiming to address the pronounced racial disparities within their workplaces.

The most significant changes in 2021 occurred in lower-paying job categories like sales workers and administrators, but this trend was also observed in well-compensated and influential managerial and professional positions. Remarkably, even at the executive level, over half of the newly added jobs went to workers of color. This demonstrates that when organizations face pressure to recruit and promote diverse, qualified talent, they are able to take action, often by making substantial financial commitments and dedicating resources to initiatives aimed at achieving racial equity. Consequently, I am left pondering whether this could be seen as a step toward desegregation.

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lazinesswrites · 1 year

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I know some people have Opinions about this, so I just wanna say from the beginning: I'm not tryna start anything, you can have your opinions and I can have mine, and they're all fictional people anyway, so lets just keep the discourse to a minimum, yeah? Great, love you all <3

But I've been thinking about Clones and sex, and. Hmm. So, I'm ace myself, which means I'm obviously gonna have a slightly different view on sex than most allo people, but I just think... I think sex will mean something vastly different to Clones than it does to most people who've grown up with the nuclear family model and a more or less Western-Christian culture (such as myself).

Because the Clones are Clones. They aren't born; they're created. They don't have parents; they have a donor and tubes and trainers and commanding officers. And they don't have children; they have cadets and shinies and men. And yes, they call each other 'brother', but the more I think about it, the more I think that's less so 'person born to the same parents' and more so 'brother-in-arms'.

We all like to give the Clones a bastardized version of Mandalorian culture, because Jango Fett was Mandalorian, so that's the closest the Clones get to a race beyond just being Clones. In Mandalorian, brother is 'vod', but 'vod' is also sister, and comrade, and mate - so not necessarily a blood relation, or even really a relation at all; it seems to range from 'actual sibling' to 'random person I just bumped into'. From the same link as before: "Copaani mirshmure'cye, vod?" translates roughly to "Are you looking for a smack in the face, mate?". 'Jatne vod' is the Mandalorian version of Sir (polite, not military), and 'ori'vod' is translated to 'big brother, older brother, or special friend'.

And beyond all the language-stuff (Hi, in a week I'll have a masters degree in communication, can you tell?), again: Clones were created. Their situation is unique, as far as we know - an entire race who're technically all the same person, except they're all individuals too. Specially engineered to learn and think for themselves. The words we have, the understanding we have of what 'family' and 'brother' means - even the understanding the Mandalorians have - it doesn't fit the Clones' experience 1:1, because their experience is fundamentally different. Just as my experience and culture, as a Scandinavian growing up in a culturally-christian society, is fundamentally different from the experience and culture of, let's say, an Indigenous person who grew up somewhere in America. And while we might have some overlapping experiences, as humans, our lives and cultures are again fundamentally different from that of, I don't know, penguins, or something. Aliens, if they exist.

So, even though the Clones are using words we know, to describe experiences and relationships that we think make sense, we can't assume those experiences and relationships are actually in any way identical to our own.

On top of all that, I doubt sex ed was a priority for the Kaminoans when they put together the curriculum for the Clones. I feel like it probably didn't really fit in there, between Battle Strategy and How To Always Follow Orders (Even When The People Giving Them Are Stupid Or Evil Or Both). And Clones probably have very limited access to things like books and movies and music and art, in any shape or form, beyond what the Kaminoans might have around for themselves, or find useful for the Clones' training and education. So, you know. Pretty much anything.

Which means, anything the Clones know about sex, they figure out themselves, or they learn once they're off Kamino (if they manage to find some downtime between battles - the existence of 79's suggests at least some of them do).

What I'm getting at is: If Clones have sex at all, it's gotta be more or less pure instinct and figuring things out as they go - and considering they pretty much only know each other, the Kaminoans, and a few other instructors, and also have little to no privacy, from what we've seen of the barracks on Kamino... that means figuring things out together.

#Star Wars #the clones #clones and sex #star wars meta #clone culture #I did not mean to write this #I definitely did not mean to write SO MUCH of this #but here we are #enjoy?#and please - again - keep the discourse to yourself #I know some people see sex between Clones as incest and thus absolutely despise it - you don't need to tell me if that's you

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nothorses · 3 years

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Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

#transgender #transphobia #trans #transmisogyny #radical feminism #radfem #feminism #transandrophobia #terfs #tirfs #gender critical #nothorses #cult mention #long post

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