#the misogyny as well from these fans. i literally cannot comprehend

[rewritingcanon]

this is me after spending my night arguing with marauder stans on tiktok, calling them all npcs, calling sirius black and james potter overrated flops that get bodyslammed by golden trio characters (hermione, specifically), pretending to be a snape stan so i can argue with them more, and calling the band of ‘james potter stans’ an actual cult that he would bully irl if he did exist

[lgbtlunaverse]

I often get a little annoyed when I see posts that are something along the lines of "Y'all have GOT to learn to engage in media without shipping. Art is not just for shipping. If you get into art for shipping and nothing else that's bad and you have no media literacy why won't you care about THEMES?" because, yeah, they are technically correct. If you only egage with art in this one hyperspecific way you're going to miss out on a lot of good art and miss a lot of good things about the art you do like because you're only busy shipping.

But also... it is literally impossible to tell if someone is doing that based on a tumblr blog. "Everywhere I go I can only find people shipping why doesn't anyone care about anything else?!" A lot of them probably do, they're just not talking about it on their ship blogs.

This is a fanfic focused blog. Fic, and shipping by extension, are a very specific way of engaging with a work that I only use with a small amount of the art I experience. You know what my favorite book that I read this year was? Piranesi. Favorite movie? Everything everywhere all at once. Favorite series? Midnight mass.

And guess what? I'm not gonna write fanfic about ANY of those. And while I'll reblog posts about them that cross my dash I am also not going to seek out other fans on tumblr for these works specifically. And so, from looking at my blog, you'll have no idea that I read and loved these works, or that I spend a lot of my time thinking about them, their atmosphere, characters, and themes.

And that's just the narrative art I loved most. I've also gone to museums, and I'm definitely not writing any fanfiction about mondriaan's paintings.

You know what work I'm thinking about most these days? The book Flatland by Edwin Abott Abott. (Yes he is named Abott twice) a book about A Square (first name A last name Square) living in a two dimensional world being visited by a sphere from our three-dimenaional world. I read it several years ago, interested in the mathematical aspect, because by looking through A Square's perspective of meeting a creature from a world with a dimension he cannot fundamentally comprehend, we can imagine what the fourth dimension might look like to us.

I read it, loved the mindfuckery aspect of it, but was at various points annoyed at the horrible misogyny. The men in flatland are polygons with social status based on he number of sides and the widness of their angles, circles on top and triangles at the bottom. But the women are all simple line segments, automatically lower in society than even the lowest ranking men. A Square tells us women have to emit a "peace cry" when they walk, because walking into them (due to their sharp point) can be deadly, and if they don't do this they're executed. And women with any sickness that causes "involuntary motions" which can be as little as sneezing too hard, is instantly killed. He seems to think these are rational laws in the interest of public safety and also in the best interest of the women themselves. He also says that due to their lack of angles, women "are wholy devoid of of brainpower, and have neither reflection, judgement, nor forethought."

Yikes.

"I like it, but you can definitelly tell this was written by a man in 1884" I remember telling my mom.

Well guess what? This year I found out that flatland isn't just about having a low-level existential crisis at imagining the fourth dimension (beings from the 4th dimension would be able to directly see and touch our insides guys. Like. Just entirely bypass your skin and poke at your spleen) it is also a satire and social critique of victorian society. The misogyny is there to criticize victorian concept of gender roles! The bogus and violent laws that are shoddily justified to be for "public safety", the complete exclusion from women in the advancement and social class, the made up standard of angles and sides pretending to be biologically sound such as to "scientifically" justify their oppression. That's misogyny, baby! It's on purpose!

And it's a flawed attempt. A Square, as a man of his time, has no respect whatsoever for women and the few female characters the book has get barely any pagetime. This is accurate for the sexist pov the story is written from, and Edward Abott Abott, in a foreword of a revised edition, makes it clear that thay was exactly his intention. But it does mean that we never get to actually hear what any of the women of flatland think about living in this horribly misogynistic society. It's intended as a critique of misogyny, but any misogynist reading the book who doesn't find the sexism of flatland all that outlandish, can read the whole book with those assumptions going unchallenged. The satire only works if you already agree women are people.

But it's still good, insofar as portraying a ridiculously sexist society and the mind bogglingly stupid and arbitrary justifications mysoginists try to give for their bigotry, it is accurate. By removing it from our own world and putting it in flatland, we can more clearly see that connecting social status to wideness of angles is ridiculous, and the misogyny has no material basis. As a person who does agree that women are people, and is no longer under the impression that, because it was written in the 1880s, the misogny must be genuine, I can now, on a reread, appreciate the satire.

Prior to this post, looking at my blog, YOU WOULD NOT KNOW THIS. And I don't plan on posting many essays about flatland in the future. I read it because my mom recommended it to me, and so the way I discuss my thoughts on it is mostly with her, in real life. And I enjoy that more than I would posting about it here.

So yes, people SHOULD approach media from different lenses than shipping alone. Because shipping only works well for a subset of all art out there, and it is only one of the many ways to engage with it. But posts on tumblr are not solid proof of whether people are doing that or not.

It's also funny because a lot of the complaints of "why is everyone only interested in shipping for X" are about, like, adaptations of ya novels or comic books or god forbid shounen anime. You know, the shows with huge casts of usually likable, attractive and varied characters? Where a big part of the appeal is the entertaining dynamics those characters have which each other? Aka prime material for shipping?

Like, yeah, it can suck when it feels like the rest of the fandom is too busy smashing fictional barbie dolls together to have interesting conversations about the things you liked about the show. But please don't watch the Ship Show and then complain that everyone is shipping.

I wanted to end this post by telling you to go read flatland because there's no fanfiction of that but there are, in fact, over 40 works on ao3 for flatland by edwin abott abott and over half of them are gravity falls fics. It completely undermines my point but it's too funny to leave out.

[skydalorian]

Thoughts on Marwa (and on the general direction in S4) below:

This is long, please bear with me though!

I was let down by this season as a whole. Much of what was developed was either underwhelmingly so, or was jettisoned before it could reach fruition. None of Colin’s plot matters unless they have the tenacity to stick to Laszlo’s reaction to the amnesia...and I don’t hold out much hope that they’ll be quite that introspective. They may, but it wouldn’t align with prior handling of him, they save that for Nandor.

Nandor’s plot was compelling and a nice extension of his crises of last season, but ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth when the bits that are crucial to his growth - the acknowledgement that one doesn’t need to cling to their past for relevancy, one doesn’t need to repress their emotions for a figure previously regarded as vulnerable, one doesn’t NEED to have a reason for existing - were spurred on by the fruitless deconstruction and whitewashing of the ONLY recurring female POC.

Nadja and the Guide didn’t even need to be there. Nothing of note occurred. I don’t have anything negative to say, but that’s not a good thing either.

That’s not to say the season wasn’t generally funny, charming, and full of the same energy from prior seasons that makes me care for the characters. Who else is going to give you a changing room montage with half a torso, an eldritch progenitor, and two nasty fancy goblin women?

BUT. It’s hard to retain any positivity when the season ended on such a blithe note, prefaced by misogyny and racism.

I think it's valid to be critical even if you're not a fan of Marwa (I mean yeah, i didn't much like her - as an extension of her whole plot - even though I'm glad she was around). They could've illustrated Nandors depravity a host of ways that didn't include stripping the only POC woman on the show of her agency and self and literal personhood and literally whitewashing her into a white guy from a colonialist country. When your POC only find happiness by turning white? That's repellent.

I’ve little energy left to attempt to elucidate for those that condescend to those who are frustrated, with arrogrant aplomb as they jeer how they saw what was obvious, that there’s no issue with Marwa’s death within an universe where side-characters are commonly the butt of the joke and are expected to be killed off. I’m SO beaten down by it, that I’m going to copy and paste again. To those that cannot comprehend why Marwa’s specific situation (not even her “death” really, though that was also uncomfortable): 

You really are that disconnected from the reality of POC women and the struggles they constantly face trying to navigate around whiteness and objectification and the lack of allowance for existing huh. This should NEVER have been treated as comedic. Regardless of how efficacious the plot point was in underscoring the lack of humanity of its characters, SOMEONE needed to speak up in the writers room and illustrate that this method would bring up negativity and upset.

I am so unimpressed by the posts of people snidely pointing out "oh well OBVIOUSLY I predicted she wouldn't last the season/this show is a comedy/side characters are always tossed away"  like. You missed. The entire. point. (Also side characters have become recurring main roles throughout the show, cmon now).  You paid enough attention to get frustrated by the others in the fandom (and have enough time and effortful care for your perception of the show to attempt to explain to others why they shouldn’t be upset at just another death treated for comedy’s sake in a show predicated on that kind of humour) yet you STILL neglected the glaring difference and inherent issues of objectification of a woman of colour and the whitewashing of a woman of colour. (Not to mention she's transformed into a man from a royalist/imperialist nation 😬)

TLDR when one of the main writers of the show proceeds to delete his proud lil tweet about his proud little episode that he’s so proud of (due to the fanbase pushing back), there’s something singularly rotten in your writing. (Please continue to go off on Zach Dunn, but hold the rest of the writers accountable who had their hands and eyes on this and had every means to speak up).