#so so tired of the prejudiced/biased criticisms

[teafiend]

GIFs credited to: @Nungchae (Twitter/X)

Tangent: While watching “Money Game”, I found that I enjoyed the minimal/naturalistic makeup for Lee Hye Joon too (Shim Eun Kyung) too. Very nice and just lovely.

[irithnova]

....about that post going around again saying "hetalia isn't real sweaty :))" yeah dipshit anyone with a fucking brain cell knows that hetalia is not real but this take is one dimensional and incredibly tone deaf considering the nature of this fandom.

Having the liberty to participate in a fandom and create content does not absolve you from criticism; Freedom to be creative within a fandom is not freedom from tactfulness or good judgement. Especially within a country personification fandom.

You can cry "hetalia isn't real" all you want in order to deflect and belittle people who have to deal with discrimination by people in the fandom but it's very telling that these sort of posts usually come from people who's nations aren't targeted when it comes to this sort of crap.

Hetalia isn't real, so you can draw racist caricatures and write racist fanfics? Hetalia isn't real, so you can romanticise colonisation? Hetalia isn't real, so you can participate in historical revisionism? Hetalia isn't real, so you can excuse imperialism?

Maybe you can aim your "hetalia isn't real :))" garbage at people who blorbify the likes of Japan and Russia and America so much that they excuse actual Japanese, Russian, and American imperialism. Maybe you can aim your "hetalia isn't real" horseshit at people who use hetalia to showcase their prejudiced biases at certain groups.

If you think I'm joking, I've seen a certified Russia blorbifier post something saying "Go Ivan!" in regards to a news article about the invasion of Ukraine. I've seen people say that Japanese imperialism wasn't that bad because they blorbify Japan so much (Filipino here, if you think that please go fuck yourself!) I've seen people who criticise American imperialism get called vatniks/Russian agents by people who blorbify hetalia America.

Instead of telling people who are tired of dealing with this shit that they should get over it because hetalia isn't real, maybe go and tell the historical revisionists, imperialism apologists and downright racists to keep their trash out of the fandom, because you know. Hetalia isn't real.

[predvestnik]

o-|-<

Funny and tragic that, with all his maturity and wits, Childe is still immature in pretty basic matters, i.e socialization. Many of the biases he inherited from Pulcinella have yet to be challenged and overturned exactly because they're in place.

Even so, overwriting them is so simple. Arlecchino didn't need to offer much of an argument for him to brush it off with "oh? Was I prejudiced all along? My bad, that old man, tsk tsk" which... well, he was, he was fed half truths and his willingness to quickly accept different information implies that he's aware, to some extent, that what he's been told isn't entirely true. Does he actually know the full story of Peruere and what Arlecchino meant by Pulcinella's bad-mouthing not being wrong? I'm inclined to say no, he didn't stay to watch it unfold. There's no reason for him to know.

Even if his response to it was exclusively because he was helping the traveler buy time, it shows then that he may actually not care for the truth at all. Why would that be? Boy is so very tired already of how the other Harbingers push and pull him around (see how he tries to stave off his participation in the Project Stuzha, his criticism of Pantalone, etc etc), the manipulation of informations around him (Liyue Arc + Focalors framing him), so on and so forth. I HC that he will gladly let himself be "used" in the name of the Tsaritsa so long as he's not lied to, and, looking back, every single time he participated in anything it involved deceiving him for someone else to succeed in said mission while he's taken as the troublemaker. Sometimes you never stop feeling like you're fourteen, huh?

[fairycosmos]

I find it really funny when people say that JKR is this violent bigot who deserves to die and yet y’all don’t keep the same energy when it comes to transphobic men… like can you show me a man that has received the same kind of hatred that jk has? And this is not to defend JK clown ass Rowling, don’t get me wrong, but y’all cry transphobia every where yet how many violent transphobic men are still out there loved and praised? I mean shit look at Depp. This is not a dig at you or me trying to be rude but clearly the general public is so biased it makes me think they don’t actually give a fuck about the minorities they’re trying to defend, it’s giving virtue signalling, it’s giving “I posted the picture on my insta story that’s enough activism right?”, it’s very hypocritical.. it’s just a big fuck you to the lgbt honestly 😒

hmmm honestly i guess i hear ya in the sense that i agree that women are held to a way higher moral standard then men in the media generally speaking - like you said look at depp, a man can be a violent prejudiced piece of shit in just about every way and still have the internet falling over themselves to defend him - but i don't think the answer to that is to minimise the criticism leveraged at jkr. like the focus should be on extending that bullshit dectetor to dudes who say transphobic shit too rather than trying to pick apart whether or not the response to jkr is deserved LOL. i think with her, because she doubles down on her terrible opinions so often and uses "feminism" as a shield to justify her bigotry, people esp women are more inclined to go after her about it, not that that's an excuse for not hauling the same vitriol at men. i don't know, there's a lot of virtue signalling online and misogyny seeps into everything, but i don't think it reflects badly on the lgbt community who are simply tired of terf shit and transphobia no matter whos spewing it

[zwiebelbaguette]

I just noticed something. All the time people talk about Snape bullying the children and Snape only. Now, ignoring if he had a good reason for it (both psychological trauma and the cover as Potter hating Death Eater to uphold) and if Dumbledore actually wanted it (otherwise he would have had a good reason to stop it as he needed at least Harry as mentally stable as possible for defeating Voldemort?), why are they always just picking on Snape? Crouch’s version of Moody was actually brutal in front of the children. He even used curses that send you to Azkaban with a oneway ticket ON STUDENTS. Yes, WE know that he turned out to be a Death Eater just impersonating an auror. But the children didn’t know. Neither did Dumbledore. And not only has he either turned a blind eye on it or even enforced it, the children also LIKED it. Except for the one moment with Neville.  Maybe I’m biased, but to me actually committing crimes against kids is way worse and still they liked his teaching method, and wasn’t puniched. Not even Malfoy got his father to act, although he was transformed into a ferret. One has to assume that that would have enraged Lucius way more than a simple scratch from a hippogrip, as this also humiliated his son and therefore his family.  And let’s look at the beloved teachers. McGonagall? Making Ron and Harry look like fools on their very first day of class? When the school is actually like a labyrinth, and also changing the staircases? How is humiliating a student she actually LIKES better than Snape humiliating a student he has reason not to like? And she isn’t that fair either. Though she maskes her favoritism well, she still pushes her Gryffindors to success, because she is tired of having Slytherin win the house cup. Then there is Trelawney, who seems to love to frighten her student’s. She also humiliated Hermione once, but let’s be honest. Hermione was rather cool about that. Angry, sure, but she probably knew she was right all along and it lost her an unneccessary lesson.  But actually telling student’s that they and their beloved ones will soon die? Frightening the easier to impress students? Is that great behaviour? Even Sprout screwed up the one time she just ignores the fainted Neville. Isn’t that bad, as it’s neither humiliating nor actually harmful (as long as nobody steps on him by accident), but still not the behaviour we would accept in our society.

And finally then there is the matter of actually risking student’s lives. Taking first years, even early into the term, into the Forbidden Forest, with a greenkeeper that is legally not allowed to use magic while they never yet learned any protection spells themselves, a behaviour one can ignore? There is somebody on the loose that attackes unicorns, either beast or man - up to that point they didn’t know for sure - and also at least Hagrid knows about Aragog and his family. Still he lets Draco and Harry even go on their own, just with a dog he himself calls coward. Even if that were Dumbledore’s or McGonagalls instructions, he (and they) are still openly and willingly risking student’s lives that night.  So, YES. Snape behaved badly towards the children. No arguing about that. But even if you find ALL the arguments in his favor invalid, and ignore the fact that we see everything from Harry’s perspective, who was already prejudiced against Snape before even having his first lesson, thanks to the Weasleys, so we are MANIPULATED into being more critical with him, because Harry hates him. Even if we ignore ALL THAT, he still isn’t that bad, compared to the other teachers. We see more from him, because his role in the story is bigger, yes. But just because we don’t see the other teachers that often, doesn’t mean that they are nice and cuddly.  So we have to assume that not only that is all accepted by Dumbledore, but also that this is just the common way in magical society. That there are some exceptions like Lupin doesn’t make the others any better, does it?  So maybe we could at least get a little perspective into the discussion and admit that most of the teachers actually behaved in a way that we would not tolerate in our society and then finally understand that we can not use OUR society as a measure to judge characters in a completely different one? That if Snape were a bully, others would be as well, and that some of them were even worse? Yes, that makes Hogwarts not the warm and cuddly place we all wanted to go. It makes it a huge challenge for every student’s psyche, and sometimes even a real deathtrap. But that’s the way it is pictured in the books. And just picking one of the characters and hating him while the others behave in a similar way, that’s just plain stupid. 

[scientia-rex]

Lots of thoughts on privilege, learning, growth, the grinding annoyance of being marginalized vs the despair and shame of realizing you’ve been contributing to marginalization

I was raised, and then went to college in, super-white towns. I also grew up with parents who believe in The Bell Curve’s racist nonsense uncritically. I consumed a lot of media without questioning it. My entire education, I was never encouraged to think about it critically, and I didn’t; you can easily make the argument that I should have, but I’m not inclined to make whether I was somehow fundamentally good or bad the focus of this. I don’t think I really started to understand half of what tumblr takes for granted until I was... oh, twenty-three or twenty-four at least. Well into grad school.

So I’ve done racist things, been a Bad Ally, hit those checkboxes. I don’t expect the people I hurt to forgive me; it’s not about finding an emotional catharsis via forgiveness, it’s about trying to do better going forward. Taking criticism and turning it into meaningful positive change. You can easily find public documentation of things I’ve done that, now that I know better, I regret. On multiple fronts--racism, internalized sexism, internalized homophobia and biphobia, transphobia, fatphobia. And this isn’t some kind of public self-flagellation, just acknowledgement: I haven’t always been the person I wish I had been. I’m trying to be the person I want to become.

Learning to think critically about privilege didn’t come naturally to me. It doesn’t, for a lot of people. That seems to be how we work, as humans; we tend to be concrete thinkers, we tend to be cognitive misers, we have a host of defensive biases. It’s not an excuse, because being small-minded is something we should think about, but moralizing a fact of human behavior has diminishing returns. And even though I know from my own experience that thinking about privilege the right way doesn’t always come naturally, I still don’t think that makes it my job to educate every single homophobe or biphobe I run across even though maybe the world would be a better place if I did--I have a right to my own life--so I can hardly demand that black people educate me about anti-black racism, for instance.

It’s a catch-22, maybe: if you’re a member of a marginalized group, on whatever dimension (or dimensions), you’re always aware that you could be educating people, and you’re also always fucking sick and tired of not being treated like a person. 

If you’re looking for a clean, simple, morally pure solution to this problem, you’re going to be disappointed.

Anyway. I was thinking about this because, since starting med school, I’ve been on different rotations where I see more black people in one day than I saw in my entire life up to age 18. And simple exposure to people of other races alone isn’t enough, but I think it helps, because when you see so many more black people on television and in movies before you meet any, you start to believe what the tv tells you--which you realize, when you start working with real patients, was all a lie. There’s this archetype of a black man or black woman that showed up over and over again in media from the 1980s and 90s when I was growing up, and on some level it sank in, but my patients are whole people, complex and variable.

Which doesn’t stop doctors from stereotyping. My med school just confirmed that they did a study of clerkship grades: black students got worse grades than white students, even when test scores were controlled for, which means it’s not that black students were worse at medicine--preceptors just graded them down for being black. Black patients get worse care than white patients, when it’s studied on objective measures: worse pain control, worse treatment during deliveries. Doctors can treat black patients every day and still be prejudiced and still believe the lie of their own objectivity.

But I’m doing better than I would have, if it weren’t for one dedicated grad school professor, several good friends who talked me through things, and tumblr. It wasn’t anyone’s job to make me better, but by a combination of teaching and osmosis and shaming, I’m improving. (Shaming has a function; it’s also sometimes overused or inappropriately used; again, no clear or morally pure answer.)

I’m glad I live in a world where conversations like the ones on tumblr are actually happening, because without them, I would be contributing more to the things in this world that are shitty and inhumane.