Twitter be like "oh? Oh? You have 'rape', 'raped', 'raping' and 'rapist' muted already? Why, have you not considered muting 'rapes' too? POW!" and radiate the tweet right into your face
Meanwhile tumblr will take your hand gently and go "oh. You sweet innocent child. You have muted the word 'ntr' I see? Why, I will hide this one post talking about a 'country' in it! Heaven knows, you might see the Bad Word and we cannot allow that!"
And then it will show you like "HEY THIS POST CONTAINS THE WORD NTR! WATCH THE FUCK OUT" and you will be left wondering, "why the fuck is my mutual who has never once talked about ntr in their entire LIFE is suddenly talking about it?", until you check out the post in question and turns out that no. It has just been country all along
Meanwhile on Twitter, the yearly #Rape[character]Week week has already started and there's nothing you can do to stop the sudden and imminent influx of retweets from that one mutual of yours who's crazy into that kind of stuff
Oh and another thing, despite how overprotective tumblr can be with its muting system, the best thing that has ever happened to it was having separate mute tabs for words appearing in tags AND words appearing in posts
Like, you love a character but people have the coldest fucking takes about them? You like a ship but its haters are justifying their hatred of it with fallacies that would make even the ancient Greeks, CEOs of arguing, to shame? Why, just mute the word itself! Leave the tags intact because it's more likely that those who genuinely love the character/ship will merely tag it, meanwhile all the flaming trash about them will stay muted, because they're only named inside the post itself! It's so easy
Meanwhile twitter, the dumbass that it is, might hide the muted words that appear on your TL, but it absolutely will NOT hide them in search results and on people's pages. So if you're browsing your beloved mutual's profile then oh no, despite their careful and dedicated TWing, you will STILL get slapped with the tweet having "rape" in it
God anon you are SO FUCKING RIGHT, it's one of THE worst things about twitter and one reason i love tumblr's tagging & muting functions SO much. Sometimes I have friends who simply have kinks/interests/ships that I just cannot do, but I still love those friends and want to follow them and see their other work! I am so so SO pro "curate your own experience & attend to your needs, block filter & mute so that you have the ideal experience" but twitter is just a HORRID platform to do that on. Especially not being able to append tags to retweets without QRT-ing them- it's so hard when the only way to add a filter-able word to another person's art/post is to QRT it, which ESSENTIALLY makes an entire separate post (and is considered poor manners for many artists who don't like their work QRT'd)
It's SO nice to be on here and simply, filter things and know that if there's anything I need to filter I can simply ask my mutual to append a tag to it, which is easy to do and does not affect the original post in question. And being able to click through and check on muted posts means that if something DOES get caught by the overzealous filter, I can still check and see (plus getting a warning I am going to see something before I see it is often all i need to keep a trigger or squick from bothering me; i have time to prepare myself, hit 'ok' and then engage, with the extra resilience that a simple warning gives me. after all, most of the time, when i'm given a content warning for a movie/show/etc, i still consume the piece of media, just with a little extra delicacy/awareness/preparation to take breaks if i need)
anyhow you're so correct and this is another reason i cannot stand twitter and am glad i'm seeing more people revisit tumblr
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So I've seen a few too many people on twitter talking about The Kiss Scene from the new Scott Pilgrim anime. People saying it's fetishistic and indulgent, people calling it male gazey, etc. And while the kiss itself is certainly a bit exaggerated, I felt like writing a bit about why I disagree, and why context is important, like it always is. But it basically turned into an extended analysis on the metatextual treatment of Roxie Richter. So bear with me. It's a long post.
What really matters about this scene is not the kiss itself, but what precedes it. Not even just the fight scene just before it, but what precedes the whole anime series, really. And that's the Scott Pilgrim comic book, and the live action movie. Because in both, Roxie is a punchline.
She's a joke. Her character starts and ends with "one of the exes is actually a girl, I bet you didn't expect that." Jokes are made about Ramona's latent bisexuality, the movie especially treating it as funny and absurd, and her validity as a romantic interest is entirely written off by Ramona as being "just a phase." There's a fight scene, she's defeated by a man giving her an orgasm which implicitly calls her sexuality into question (come on), and the movie just moves on. It sucks. It really, really sucks.
The comic fares a little better. It never veers into outright homophobia like the movie does, and while the line about Ramona having gone through a phase remains, Roxie actually gets one over on Scott when Ramona briefly gets back with Roxie. But Roxie is still only barely a character. Like all the other evil exes, she's just a stepping stone towards the male protagonist's development. She barely even gets any screentime before she's defeated by Scott's "power of love." But Roxie stands out, since she's the only villain who is queer, or at least had been confirmed queer at that point (hi Todd). In a series that champions multiple gay men in the supporting cast, the single undeniable lesbian in the story is a villain. She's labeled as evil, made fun of, pushed aside in favor of the men, and then discarded. Her screentime was never about her, or her feelings for Ramona. It was about the straight, male protagonist needing to overcome her. And that was Roxie Richter. An unfortunate victim of the 2010s.
Fast forward to current year, and the new anime series is announced. Everybody sits down to watch the new series expecting another retelling of the same story, and.... hang on, that straight male protagonist I mentioned just died in the first episode. And now it's humanizing the villains from the original story. And there's Roxie, introduced alongside the other evil exes in the second episode, and she's being played entirely straight, without a punchline in sight. No jokes are made about her gender, no questions are made of her validity as one of Ramona's romantic interests. The narrative considers her important. In one episode, she already gets more respect than she did in either of the previous iterations of Scott Pilgrim. And this isn't even her focus episode yet... which happens to be the very next one.
The anime series goes to great lengths to flesh out the original story's villains and to have Ramona reconcile with them. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Roxie gets to go first. While Matthew Patel gets his development in episode 2, Roxie is the first to directly confront Ramona, now our main protagonist. This is notable too because it's the only time the exes are encountered out of order. Roxie is supposed to be number 4, but she's first in line, and later on you realize that she's the only one who's out of sequence. She's the one who sets the precedent for the villains being redeemed. She's the most important character for Ramona to reconcile with.
What follows is probably the most extensive, elaborate 1 on 1 fight scene in the whole show. Roxie fights like a wounded animal, her motions are desperate and pained. Ramona can only barely fight back against her onslaught. Different set-pieces fly by at breakneck speed as Roxie relentlessly lays her feelings at Ramona's feet through her attacks and her distraught shouts. And unlike the comic or the movie, Ramona acknowledges them, and sincerely apologizes. And the two end up just laying there, exhausted, reminiscing about when they were together.
Only after this, after all of this, does the kiss scene happen. Roxie has been vindicated, she has reconciled with the person who hurt her, the narrative has deemed that her anger is justified and has redeemed her character. And she gets her victory lap by making the nearest other hot girl question her heterosexuality, sharing a sloppy kiss with her as the music triumphantly crescendos.
It's... a little self-congratulatory, honestly. But it's good. It's redemption for a character who had been mistreated for over a decade. And she punctuates the moment by being very, very gay where everyone can see it, no men anywhere in sight. Because this is her moment. And then she leaves the plot, on her own accord this time, while humming the hampster dance. What a legend. How could anything be wrong with this.
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