#normalization

[st4rxstruck]

Can we normalize liking popular characters ?

Ive seen a lot of people throughout all social media post about their favourite character but the comments sre quite... weird.

Lets just say you like Mizuki Akiyama (from pjsk), and you make a cool edit for them since their your favourite character. But the comments go.. “you only like them bc of mizu5” “newgen” NO??? Thats NOT how liking a character works. You cant expect someone to like some character who got 1 frame of animation

These comments are scattered around EVERYWHERE. Its not even characters. You like a popular song, you get called a newgen, its overrated or even get called a POSER. If you know too much, apparently ur trying too hard?? EVEN GAMES??? Oh.. you probably play grow a garden because its popular SYBAU😭😭

Im trying to say its okay to like a character, whether it's popular or not. On either side, your a normal person. BUT if your one of the 1% and talks like the examples above PLEASE have common sense.

Hating on a character, popular or not , is OKAY if you have a reason to do so. Not everyone has the same taste, but you cant hate people for liking the character you dislike. Thats uncool🥀

You can like Miku more other than the other vocaloids, you can like another member more than the unit leader, You can like a popular song an artist released regardless how many months or years ago was it. We're ALL human beings, we have our likes, dislikes, and favourites, and liking something popular doesnt change that fact at ALL

[eccentricphilosoph]

So true. I always lived my life being proud of being weird and that things I did weren’t perceived as normal. It’s worked out well enough for me overall.

Not everything has to be nor does it need to be normalized.

Let’s normalize people being weird and different in general rather than normalize all specific things.

[pruneunfair]

What it feels like to have a desire to be raped and how predatory books can prey upon that.

Warning: There is going to be a lot of TMI, triggering subject matter and NSFW related explanations in here

I've been getting a few private messages lately from some people asking me things like,

"Why do you care so much about problematic manhwa?"

And

"If you don't like it, stop reading it"

This isn't a call-out post for anyone sending me critical messages. If anything, I am actually happy for these messages because they were ultimately what gave me the confidence to properly explain the real in-depth reason why I hate storylines like cry or better yet beg besides the obvious glorified rape in the plot.

As the title suggests, yes, I do have a fetish/sexual desire to be raped or groomed. It is not something I am proud of, but thankfully, now that I'm older, it hasn't been controlling my life as much as it did.

But when I was around 9-13 years old, it was a completely different story. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure HOW I ended up developing a fetish for being raped but I didn't grow up with what I would call an attentive father. The best way I could describe my dad is that he was there physically and bought most of the things I own but he was definitely better suited as a fun uncle rather that someone responsible for keeping a child safe, he would do the easy and fun parts of being a parent like taking me and my siblings shopping every now and then but as for responsibility, not so much.

The lack of male validation from a father figure combined with some self-esteem issues I was having is what I am assuming led to me leaving home to go to the local library or downtown with people who were at least 5 years older than me. I was 9 years old, and the library was right across the street, so my parents didn't mind me going over there to play with the computers they had. At the library where I used to live by, there was the corner full of computers where you could basically do whatever you wanted until someone else signed up for one of them. As a result, I met a few boys who were in the high school before I was even in my double digits.

Over the course of four years, it wasn't uncommon for me to tell my mom I was going to go to my "friends" house (In her defense, I would lie to her and claim I was going to some school friends house, you know, kids who were actually my age) but I would really go to the library or a skate park or wherever these boys wanted to meet me at.

Now thankfully, a lot of these teenage boys were decent to get annoyed by some random fourth grader following them around trying to act extra mature because most of them started to tease and make me fun of me until I left them alone. Not exactly the nicest way to do it but hey, it worked for the most part but that didn't mean ALL of them were decent people.

I am not a victim of sexual assault, but I came really close to getting what I thought I wanted by being groomed. The fucked-up part was that the boy I am going to talk about was not only 14 when he met me when I was 9 but he was also my older brother's friend. I had never met him before since he never actually went to my house to do whatever he and my older brother did.

What this boy would do is that he would bring me to HIS house when his grandma was gone, and we would watch movies or little clips he found online that frankly, no 9 year-old should be allowed to watch. He liked picking me up and carrying me around in private, I remember sitting on his lap and him insisting that he follow me everywhere. I would've even given him a phone number if I actually had a phone at the time, and he would say some things that I now recognize to be extremely predatory such as implying how I was going to be so hot by the time I hit puberty or that it was fine for me to stay at his house for as long as I wanted. Luckily for me, his grandma caught him with me in her home one day and informed my mom right away, swiftly ending what could have escalated into something way worse.

But this didn't mean anything had really changed when it came to me. I may have been under a stricter curfew and my mom had to meet any new friends before I would be allowed to leave home with them alone but that didn't stop me from finding gratification elsewhere, mostly in other rape themed erotica and putting my sights on getting sexually abused by adult men instead of teenage boys.

How the books I was reading enabled this outlook.

First of all, I want to make it clear that I don't think fiction can affect reality, or to be specific, I don't fiction can affect reality the way most people think it would. No one reads a crime thriller and immediately thinks "Oh wow! This book about a serial killer was so good! I'm going to do everything the killer did because it looked that easy!"

The way I think fiction affects reality isn't that it's what makes new rapist or murderers but that it actually can impact people who are either victims of sexual abuse and begin to normalize what happened to them after seeing so many different pieces of literature normalizing their abuse or people like me who aren't victims of sexual abuse but still desire for it to happen to them or simply because they don't realize what they read was toxic. By normalizing and even romanticizing the subject, it has the potential to damage the psyches of developing teens, this doesn't mean this happens to everyone and that's what makes this whole topic even more confusing, a lot of people have the ability to understand that what they are reading is not something that should be viewed as romantic or arousing which spurs on more confusion when they see other people gushing about something that is seemingly so in your face with its depravity.

Throughout my teenage years, these types of books were what I lived for, ranging from something as little as typical power dynamics between a CEO and a poverty-stricken college student to me rushing to find a copy of Haunting Adeline as soon as I got the reviews of what it entailed. If I wasn't going to find a pervert who wanted to traumatize me, then I at least wanted to feel some sort of validation that what I wanted was completely normal and everyone else was just stupid and kink shaming me, I was aware at this point the kind of harm sexual abuse has on a person but by my logic, if I was the one who WANTS it to happen, then I should be safe from gaining any long term trauma. This logic would also be applied to later special interests of mine such as yandere simulator and Hazbin hotel/Helluva boss, media that claimed that one type of sexual assault is bad while the other "technically" isn't abuse of power when it uses its own screwed up logic to justify it.

The saving grace that pulled me out of a full-on porn addiction were the hate comments I would notice being sent to my new favorite interests, calling them out on their gross behavior and normalization and long video essays dissecting what it was that was wrong with the book/show/game. At the time I was just like a webtoon commenter, valiantly defending my own gross attachment but slowly, I matured, and I started to listen more to the reasons why my favorite things were harmful. This was about 1-2 years ago.

Having a fetish like this is definitely something that I still feel very ashamed of to this day. As someone who is surrounded by plenty of people who have faced this kind of trauma, I hate that I used to want, and still kind of do want, to happen to me. It's another reason why I sort of just made it my mission to call out problematic manhwa because I don't like the idea of crap like that validating any more rape fantasies of kids who are actively hoping for the same thing to happen to them, not taking into account that rape and grooming has way more dangers than just the trauma alone. The abuser in question could be someone close to you like a friend or a family member, somebody who holds more emotional significance and therefore would have even more power over you through the form of emotional abuse, verbal abuse, manipulation, gas lighting, guilt tripping, threatening, blackmailing, and much more, to the point where you could even be killed if it meant ensuring your silence.

I was extremely lucky to have a mom who noticed the signs and got me the hell out of there before it was too late but not everyone is that lucky, so please, don't normalize that kind of logic and thinking, don't do what I did when I was 9.

[tales-from-syscord]

Jeez sometimes I wish the normalization wasn’t 100% total source separation = everyone and anyone’s goal, ever, sometimes, especially since it seems so unfair who gets targeted with it. I’ve been in servers where I specifically was told to go by another name, not talk about source stuff, etc, because of my own identity. I get people being uncomfortable around me at times but when even ex friends were being all “who invited J” “Who let J fill out that quiz?” “Haha, why is she here?”

A lot of people also got VERY weird when I wanted to talk about my boyfriend by name, because of source implications again! I don’t know how they always spew the same “introject aren’t their source” (which is super complicated for us since,, I am but I’m also very much not? Dunno.) and yet when I’m dating another introject from the same source and I talk about how much I love the man, suddenly I’m basically a proshipper because I’m evil and he’s “canon gay” (he’s bi.)

I wish people would just! Decide what they believe? Certain introjects are treated super unfairly and people really seem to forget they’ve been preaching that introjects aren’t their source when it comes to an introject commonly thought to be exclusively mlm dating a woman or similar,

Be normal about people’s relationships pleaseeeee

.

[girlactionfigure]

And so it begins.

[olena]

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

(fuck that guy 🇺🇦🖕)

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A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.

The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

+

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

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The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

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The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[juicebokks]

What is the problem with Latinos in the media? 

In the midst of Hispanic Heritage Month, I think it’s very important to acknowledge the problems and faults of Latinos in media. When many people think of a Latino influencer, they may thing of this stereotypical “copy paste” Latino that encourage or try to normalize problematic behavior. Now, while this “type” of Mexican or Latino identity in and of itself is not necessarily bad, it does portray Latinos in a bad light. That is where I would like to bring up the question, “What is the problem with Latinos in the media?”. 

The types of people we chose to allow to represent us are the people we are showing to the world to say, “This is what Mexican is”. In hindsight, many of these people represent an uneducated, toxic, and sexualized culture. Again, just to preface, there is nothing wrong with being less intelligent, or having faults, or being a sexual person, however, I do believe that it isn’t fair to the people that try to represent Latinos as hard working, strong, smart, creative, and accountable. These issues are what the problem is with Latinos in the media. 

Many of us Latinos tend to feel underrepresented in places like Hollywood, most of the biggest names in the entertainment industry playing a lot of the same roles. Instead of embracing this “copy paste Latino” we should embrace the differences we all have. All Latinos are different, we have different interests, we look different, we pursue different jobs. A single visual trait does not define what you are or what you aren’t. Curly hair, straight hair, blondes, brunettes, redheads, big noses, small noses, tall, short, skinny, fat, and others are all traits that any Latino can have. One characteristic does not “make you Mexican”.  

The big issue with Latinos in the media is the people we chose to let represent us. Women like Antonia Hernández, the first Latina staff to the counsel of the Senate Judiciary, and men like José Moreno Hernández, a Mexican American engineer and astronaut are forgotten and marginalized. Famous names like Jenni Rivera, Selena Quintanilla, Juan Gabriel, Vicente Fernandez, and Ana Gabriel, represent so much of our culture and our struggles as a community, but are slowly being drowned out by modern influencers that want to normalize high school dropouts, sexualizing minors, toxic relationships, and people who want to misguide our youth. 

Hispanics make up a large chunk of the students that drop out of school every year. Latinos throughout history have always prided themselves on being hardworking and having grit. However, our education rates don’t reflect that aspect at all. There are many Hispanics who have reasons as to why they are incapable of finishing school, but so many of us have the facilities and resources to help us complete our lowest levels of education, but for some reason we ignore them. We choose to embrace this stereotype that Latinos are dumb or uneducated.  

Our youth are being sexualized and preyed on before our eyes, but these issues go unnoticed by our community because we are so caught up in toxic influencer culture. These are the harmful pieces of representation that we are choosing to let represent our community. 12-year-olds online have grown men and women sexualizing them and shaming them for being themselves. These destructive routines create unpromising futures for our youth and future generations if these are the experiences that kids from today are having. 

The rate of domestic abuse in Hispanics is getting higher and higher, and the number of influencers that regularize abuse and toxicity is not going to help bring that rate down. Domestic abuse is a serious issue that isn’t spoken about very often. Teaching kids and other adults the things to look out for is what will help our community break through this cycle of generational abuse and trauma. 

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we should use platforms to spread kindness, to embrace the positive aspects of our culture, and reform the way that Latinos in media are being represented. We can all bring unity back to our community, but it all starts with yourself. 

Happy Hispanic Heritage month, and si, somos Latinos! 

[yourfriendlyneighborhoodem]

Normalizing something doesn’t make it right. Lemme repeat that for my friends in the back:

Normalizing something doesn’t make it right.

[juleswilliampress]

for those learning Old Norse:

you might not know this, but what you probably know as Old Norse is language that has been normalized to the end of the 12th/beginning of the 13th century. A decision that was made by one Ludgwig Wimmer.

but we have wayyyy more surviving manuscripts from like. the 14th century.

so in editions that come out of texts, they're usually normalizing the language to be older than it actually was. and for some very late manuscripts like from the 17th century, there's about as much time between them and where we are today and them and the language we're normalizing to.

[tinybluebolts]

i wanna rant cus why tf are people so...fucking mean? like so RUDE for no reason? i saw a tiktok of a billie eilish concert, i think it was like an acoustic set so people were silent so they could listen yk. and this girl goes "i love this song", and this random dude says "shut the fuck up" like WHAT. cus she said "i love that song"???? she was so silent with it to, she wasnt screaming it. thats sooooo fucked up like what possesses you to be so damn rude about a little comment like that like are you well??? i hate it here goodbye. and everyone in the comments were like "i mean same"... i fear society is hitting a wall cus what is this behavoiur. rudeness is so normalized on tiktok and im afraid that the younger demographic will think that this behavouir is okay. cus it is NOT bro. we are derailing byeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[netscapenavigator-official]

I love when TikToks or YouTube Shorts of drag queens (or whatever) breech containment and make it onto straight people's front pages, and they're just normal about it. Like, a video of some drag queen giving life advice, and all the cishet dudes in the comments are like "She's spitting facts! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥☝️🚫🧢"

Like, I know we're not supposed to reward straight people for the bare minimum, but there's just something so comforting and heartwarming about people who are total strangers to our community, looking into it, and being completely normal about it.

They're not substantializing it, and they're not denying it. They're just being totally normal about it. Nothing makes me feel more valid and welcome in this world than normalization. Just having other people treat me like the human being I am, not some clown for entertainment or abomination for arguing about. It just feels good when cishet people treat queer folk as their equals; Nothing more, nothing less.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Writing in Alaraby, Hulmi al-Asmar writes that normalization maybe isn't so bad - that perhaps if Arab nations act nicely to Israel, Israel will implode from infighting since it is dependent on aggression.

Setting aside his main argument, al-Asmar gives a brief description of how Arab leaders have used the Palestinian issue for their own benefit, and how they have actually hurt the Palestinians with this cynical pretense. For years, official Arab discourse used to murmur a heavy [Palestinian] "nationalist" sentiment, to the effect that "Palestine is the Arabs' top issue." From this slogan, a series of canned phrases emerged that affirmed standing by the Palestinian people and calling for their victory. Preachers filled the space with resonant speech in forums all over the world, and printed millions of pages with them. Books, poems, and commentaries were written about it, and they pulled their voices and roared their throats with enthusiastic songs. Millions of statements, and thousands of conferences and summits were also held, all of which threatened the enemy, or at least “confirmed its position in support of the Palestinian people, and their right to establish their independent state and defeat the occupation.” More than that, under the heading of “confronting the Zionist threat,” billions were spent on arming their armies, while morsels of bread were withheld from the mouths of the hungry, in preparation for the decisive battle with the “enemy” to build what they called “Arab national security,” and for that purpose legislation, emergency laws, and martial law were enacted. How can it not, when the nation is in a state of war and on constant alert? Therefore, there is no time for the luxury of “democracy,” nor for the “mockery” of elections, social justice, and other rights. This is not the time (!), as the nation is passing through a “delicate circumstance” and a “turning point.” It is a "dangerous time in history" and a "sensitive stage" that requires not paying attention to these "trivialities", and focusing effort on confronting "the enemy's plans" aimed at tearing apart the Arab ranks, and undermining "national dignity and nationalism!", etc., to the end of this series of great lies that may have passed on the minds of the "masses"... So what was the result? Israel is expanding and strengthening every day, while Palestine is withering, and its nakba has been “Arabized” and reproduced. It was not limited to the Palestinian people, but the Arab regime produced other versions and more and revised versions of the Arab catastrophes, so that almost every Arab country has its own nakba. 

This is stuff we've been saying for many years.  It is rare indeed to see these words in Arabic:

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[cinemafromcinema]

“You can’t put lipstick on that pig and make it look good”

[because--palestine]

Historic Win, Flawed Film & Toxic Collaboration - Oscar 2025

Ok so i have been quite perplexed these last days by some Palestinian American activists' harsh criticism about the movie and the Israeli co director thereof. It's not that I liked his speech but, to me it was an insignificant detail in the greater picture which is the symbolism of such a win.

Anyway, I think that Indie dissects ingeniously and objectively here the whole thing about the importance of details and nuances in this particular matter.