#so I'm not terribly surprised

[praetorqueenreyna]

Wait: what happened with ao3?

The short of it is that OTW (the company that runs AO3) fired a volunteer for having "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" in their bio. Their warnings to this person said that they were being antisemitic and equated the phrase to a slur. @feynessupremacy put together a list of sources here (in an ask that QUITE FRANKLY was very rude; somebody not posting about something doesn't mean they endorse it. Please be kinder about trying to inform people of serious issues! But Simi answered it very well and included sources which I appreciate).

Anyway, the question is whether or not to keep posting fic on AO3. They don't profit financially from fic being posted or people visiting the site, but it still supports them as a business to use the site. Which is what I (and other fic writers) are trying to figure out right now.

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[descendantofthesparrow]

Uma ROR redesign draft

i took the 'd2 but worse' design and made it-navy captain that took on being headmistress at Auradon prep.

also i love the idea of her with her natural hair so...yeah

[horsemeatluvr23]

the juppet !! i just realised he is jerma posing i swear that was unintentional...... i spent so long digging thru muppet concept art and looking at old puppet designs just to end up doing a rly simple drawing but. i love joehills!! i have only been watching them for like 4 years but their videos r so special to me :3

[batrachised]

.

[fl00mie]

i'm fricking tired of listening to every single song and relating it to utmv in any way😭 i don't lack the desire to make animatics i just need willpower istg

[pushing500]

I assume it's not easy coming to terms with the fact that you're not the person you thought you were and are, in fact, only a few hours old and also a clone. Poor Mechi II (Mechii?).

Makya "Mechi" Jones and his newly acquired "twin", Kwahu Jones! They're gonna get along great, and I'm sure nothing bad will happen because of this unexpected duplication. No siree, no issues here in the foreseeable future. Just lovely twin shenanigans. 😅

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[encouraging-growth]

You ever see a fat person (especially a gainer/feedee) being fatphobic and just ????? Be so confused???? And I don't mean in the sense of fat-shaming kink talk or exaggerating how out of shape they are, I mean in terms of general belief.

There's this gainer I follow who's had to stop gaining for health reasons, and someone asked how he was doing health-wise, and he talked about how he's had to change his diet fairly drastically, then said something to the effect of "There's no way that people who are super fat aren't eating junk food 24/7 to maintain/actively gain, it's just not possible to gain by eating healthy" and I just????????? Yes???? It is????? It's certainly *easier* to gain weight eating fast food and soda and whatnot but like....that's not the only way to gain. Nor should it be.

It just threw me off SO HARD seeing a gainer espousing such textbook fatphobia as "superfat people only eat junk and if they say they don't, they're lying." Like girl be so ffr with yourself

[whiskeyswifty]

i was tagged by @littleoblivions 🩵

rules: shuffle your spotify 'on repeat' playlist and list the first ten songs

so long london - taylor swift

clara bow - taylor swift

ottoman - vampire weekend

apple - charli xcx

bodyguard - beyoncé

i know - trent reznor & atticus ross from Challengers (SCREAMING LMAOOO NOT THIS)

eau de toillete - beatenberg

since you been gone - kelly clarkson (LMAOOOO)

I guess - lzzy mcalpine

the black dog - taylor swift (hell yeah brother i got scared this wouldn't come up and i would look like a FRAUD lmaooo)

tags: uhhhh im terrible at naming anything on the spot so just looking at my recent tumblr activity lmao @kaylor @yuneu @sapphicscience (esp with all your fic writing lmaoo can't wait to see how that turns out) @h-f-k (all your rhaenicent taylor songs) @fruitytaylor ok, I have to go back to work so i can't think of anyone else quickly but any buddies are welcome to do it and sorry and ily if i didn't mention you!

[fountainpenguin]

???? I forgot in the OG script of "Baby Face," Gary jumps off a train while blindfolded with Betty tied to his back? ok...

[lobsel-erik]

I was originally going to write on Twitter but character limits are too much of a bother so here I am. This will probably be very messy but I'm dealing with media that probably 10 people are familiar with, so... Whatever!

I've recently found this site: https://nervetower.neocities.org/analysis.html

It has a bunch of translations and essays on the game Baroque, originally released on the Sega Saturn.

This specific bit of info has made me OBSESSED with thinking about the game.

Sure the game was literally written in burst of inspiration by drawing tarot cards because the writers had a deadline and writer's block at the same time, and the protagonist being canonically trans was only in a draft for the prequel material, but the game is surprisingly consistent with its themes and the symbolism can still be read through a trans lens.

And because it's not confirmed and ambiguous, the protagonist can be read through multiple gender povs.

But like, why is this such a big deal? Well, Baroque and its prequel material just so happens to have one of the most incredible anti-bigotry narratives I've ever seen in a game. Specifically anti-ableism and anti-eugenics, among probably some questioning of organized religion and how corporations use it to further alienate the public into a cycle of oppression towards marginalized people. etc.

The protagonist is mass produced and manipulated by the Archangel to "purify" whatever he deems should be "purified", using guilt (the Christians/Catholics favorite thing) to do so as the protagonist is made to not remember anything besides their immense guilt over something.

For the game to progress the protag must regain their memories and find out they're a copy of who knows how many other copies, a human made into a product basically, made to feel special because they won't be distorted by their desperate delusions to escape a world destroyed by corporate greed like all the rest and have the power to "purify" things, when in reality they're just emotionally and genetically manipulated into being that.

A perfect pawn.

Now where is the trans symbolism? Well, aside from how little bodily autonomy the protagonist has, here's where things really get interesting:

In Baroque, God is presented as a woman. Before the Great Heat (aka apocalypse), God's Sense Spheres (her omnipresence, transferring data like the world is a body) assured that no great distortion would come to the reality humanity lived in, God would feel pain and know there was a wound to heal. Then the Archangel, who's really just some scientist, started fucking with the population's mental health on purpose because he wanted to kill God and create his own perfect little world. That's the short summary anyway.

At one point, with a lot of brainwashing using God's screams of pain, he created the Order of Malkuth to help him. But later the members woke up from the brainwashing and organized a desperate attempt to stop the Archangel: they would fuse Koriel number 12 (presented as a boy) with God so she could communicate in data that humans could understand. What they didn't expect however is that Koriel 12 had their own problems, and with Archangel interrupting the fusion, those problems were very amplified.

Koriel 12's guilt over being alive and God's suffering made shit hit the fan for good with the Great Heat.

And that's how the protagonist becomes mute and receives the power of God and anim- I mean, "purification".

The game begins and despite Koriel and God being now two parts of the same being, the Archangel tells Koriel to go to the bottom of the Nerve Tower, where the "Mad God" is basically imprisoned, and "purify" her with a rifle (with ammo made from the embodiment of her pain hormones).

The Archangel is literally making Koriel kill a part of themselves that's already literally buried deep into a mind tower that goes down instead of up but still has the image of a tower instead of a hole. He's basically forcing Koriel to bury the closet with them inside it because the closet isn't enough apparently.

Koriel also can't speak for themselves anymore but their thoughts can be read by the Horned Woman, which she just says out loud without explaining anything and unless you're thinking about it you won't even recognize those are "your" thoughts being spoken by another person.

Jumping ahead, when Koriel gets to the bottom of the tower, you can either do what the Archangel tells you or can just walk towards God and unite with her.

When you do this after some dying and finding out, you'll receive the true ending, in which it is made clear that while it is in a state at which it's harming everyone, the "distortion" is actually the natural way of the world, everyone needs to cope at least a little to survive, the Archangel's eugenicist campaign was the greater problem here, not the people "distorted" into representations of their suffering and coping mechanisms by his actions.

This is primarily focused on ableism and particularly the stigma around mental health.

With a trans reading, it forms a bridge so it can also just mean bigotry in general too.

Why? Well, since the 70s or something, trans people basically have to be diagnosed with a disorder to be granted legal access to transition, that's even truer for Japan, which literally puts it on paper as a disorder. And overall, transphobia and ableism go very hand in hand.

This game is now the closest I've come across to finding a game that's secretly about trans people too like The Matrix.

And this has greatly developed the brain worms 👍

[the-busy-ghost]

The seagulls on the roof opposite me are courting, this is not a drill

[averlym]

@remylong :

[quasi-normalcy]

.

[zukkaoru]

this is my villain origin story. btw.

[ra-archives]

Hyrule is tired of the vets pining bullshit. Legend is tired of Hyrule in general. Wild just finds this all amusing, mostly, except when he's terrified.

LU-Tober Day 7

'Just Kiss Already' Prompt from a friend cause they think they're funny

I had a different plan for today but I ended up spending 6 hours painting a wall, so change of plans bc I needed to get this out quick and didn't have time.

Its not my fav piece or concept, but I also say that about half of my art pieces so-

Anyway, bird bois cause I think its cool and also they're my new go to when I just need to scribble a bit :>