#the problems were there early on

[ashthehermit]

Harry Potter & shallow worldbuilding

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but once again, I am demonstrating that my self-preservation instincts are poor, and that my family refuse to listen to my rants anymore. [TW: Harry Potter and all that entails].

I was a little confused when I saw the trailer for Hogwarts Legacy (source of ire for me, and many many other people).  I had thought that it was supposed to be set in Victorian England, but honestly, it looked a lot like it was still set in the 1990s (or the early 2000s, the films never came down on exact dates).  Perhaps this is because the movies - upon which all subsequent media has based its design - relied heavily on Victorian and early 20th century design elements.  Think Hogwarts' gothic architecture; the ministry's early London Underground tiles; and the entire interior of Grimmauld Place.  This wasn't in any way a bad thing.  Harry Potter, as a story, made good on a sense of whimsy and old British aesthetics.  The wizarding world, having no need of technology, would not modernise its aesthetics at the same rate as the non-magical world.  It was a design choice that was of great consternation to my mother.  We went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, she whispered to me 'why do they have wheelie suitcases?  I thought this was set in the 1930s?'

It makes me wonder now, why doesn't the world in Hogwarts Legacy look much different to its predecessor?  I suppose that they are wearing vaguely Victorian clothes, but shouldn't we be looking at some 1700s aesthetics, or is the wizarding world caught in a perpetual loop of Victoriana?

Truth is, the Harry Potter universe has fallen foul of the problem that irks most fantasy universes once they are analysed for too long.  It isn't logically coherent.  Like the history of Westeros, the history of the wizarding world repeats itself perpetually, never looking or behaving especially differently.  In a series of children's books that were focused on the life of one teen, the cracks didn't show.  Sure, Voldemort was in power twice, and before him there was Grindelwald (for all intents and purposes, Voldemort but European).

J.K. Rowling's world building is fine for what it was in the beginning (again, the life of one teen in Britain), or as fine as it could be.  The world was not greatly expansive, but it didn't need to be.  The best parts of it were whimsical and extensions of the cheerier side of Britain.  There was the Knight bus, a purple routemaster.  The entrance to the Ministry of Magic was inside a red phone box, one of the great symbols of British tourism.  The primary setting was a boarding school.  One of the most popular elements is the house system, which is just a more complicated extension of your average school house system.  It is touted as a categorisation of identity, but it obeys all the rules of school houses.  Siblings going into different houses is rare (to the point that it's only mentioned once) because family groups always go into the same house (unless your school just doesn't care about houses).  The bigotry in the series is also British by design.  It ends up being a simplified version of classism, that features more in subtext than text.  This being said, there isn't a great deal of specificity in the world building.  I still don't know where Hermione's home town is.  I only know that her parents are dentists and they like to ski.  Where does Malfoy live, apart from in a manor that has peacocks in the garden?  These are the kind of flaws you notice when you have analysed the story for as long as I have.

The worldbuilding gets thinner the more expansive it gets.  The students from Beauxbatons are more or less French stereotypes, Fleur especially.  Durmstrang is the same, but Bulgarian.  Much has already been said on Rowling's shallow naming conventions (Cho Chang, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and now Sirona Ryan).  Without the crutch of something being British and vaguely quaint, the world loses all of its charm, and all of its logic.

Fantastic Beasts, for some reason, begins in 1920s New York.  Most of the richness of the setting is achieved by production design rather than the script (incidentally, flashbacks set in Hogwarts still manage to look like it's the early 2000s).  Conflict in the story is wrought from an American government that is more anti-muggle than the British equivalent.  If it is allegorical in any way, I do not understand it.  But let's not pretend Rowling's allegory has ever been any good.  Claims that Lupin's lycanthropy was a metaphor for HIV and AIDs only serve to lessen the character.  At best, it's an allegory for general prejudice.  The assertion that Lupin, at the age of six, was attacked by Greyback with the express intention of passing on AIDs, is well, it's dicey.  Rowling might have intended to create an allegory for stigma around 'blood-borne conditions', but failed to consider the extra baggage that that allegory might entail.  

The same is true for Fantastic Beasts, where the nonsense is turned up to twenty.  There's a group of muggles who somehow know about the existence of magic.  They name themselves after Salem, despite the Salem witch trials being appropriate for neither this setting nor this geographic region.  Any commentary on the nature of the Salem witch trials is hardly a commentary on the nature of America at large, but rather a commentary on a single Puritan colony.  Rowling takes pieces of Native American culture for her lore, with no understanding of the cultural legacy at play.

It gets even weirder in the sequels, which zip through countries so fast there's barely any time for worldbuilding.  There's a circus!  Why!  I don't know.

For no reason at all, there's a deer that chooses the outcome of an election.  In a baffling moment, Grindelwald (as played by font of virtue, Johnny Depp) tells a group of wizards that they have to kill muggles because they are going to start a world war.  He is wizarding Hitler, and that isn't a subtle analogy.  In that same scene, Queenie Goldstein, a character heavily coded as Jewish, joins wizard Hitler because he promises her that she will be able to marry her muggle beau.  The man that just gave a speech about killing muggles, is apparently all for marriage equality!  By all means, it doesn't make any sense.  It’s far from being respectful either.

There are of course attempts to make the wizarding world more diverse in Fantastic Beasts, but without any attempt to make these characters more genuine.  There's an Asian woman, but she's Voldemort's snake and she's going to be beheaded by Neville in a few decades.  The second film has Zoe Kravitz!  Yay!  But she's part of a needlessly convoluted tale in which a powerful white man hypnotises a black woman to be his wife, and then she dies?  I don't know what to make of that.  It's not good representation, and by gum it isn't good storytelling!  The Fantastic Beasts trilogy has all the perspective of Emily in Paris.

Hogwarts Legacy can hardly improve upon this worldbuilding, because it comes from an unstable foundation.  I might have been more understanding had the game been set in say, not Hogwarts, or even a Hogwarts that was fundamentally different from the Hogwarts that we already know.  The worldbuilding remains as shallow as it ever was, and with all the bigotry retained.  Of course, the main story is based on a piece of anti-semitic folklore, expanded upon in the books, and even more so in the game.  The problem being that Hogwarts Legacy can only make sales based on nostalgia.  It can't be that different from the world of the novels, because no one is bold enough to alter the world and alienate people who want nothing more than to experience their childhoods all over again.  As such, the shallow worldbuilding is laid bare over and over again, to the point that it is no longer a setting in service of a series of novels.  It now has to be a real, coherent world, which it fails at.  We have to examine the nature of Hogwarts houses, and the mechanics of time turners (thank you Cursed Child), and the reasons why house elves don't want their freedom.  

They'll never get freedom anyhow, because Hermione's attempts at activism are used for comedy.  The world at the end of Deathly Hallows is not greatly different to the world at the beginning.  Voldemort is dead, but we are not assured of any big changes.  The world returns to what it was.  For all that The Legend of Korra may not have lived up to its predecessor, it made an effective attempt at showing that the world had been altered by the actions of our heroes.  In the Cursed Child, nothing is different.  The story spends all of its time looking to the past and imagining increasingly unlikely alternate timelines (Cedric turns evil?  Ron marries Padma Patil?).  Hogwarts Legacy does not set up the world of Harry Potter, nor does it fundamentally alter it.  The status quo is preserved.  Like Westeros, it cannot change. The new game does nothing with the world, and acts in its detriment.  Anyhow, it’s not a good work of fantasy.  J.K. Rowling loves the status quo.   That much is evident.  Don’t buy this game!  Support trans people instead.

[lesbianphobic]

I truly believe Stanley had the potential to be as smart and successful as Ford but because their parents designated Ford the smart one and Stan the "free-spirited" one, Stan never believed he had the same potential and still believes he doesn't

[halfdeadwallfly]

[ladybugsimblr]

A funny thing happened at the doctor visit to check their fertility... Bailey and Quinton went in thinking they were planning ahead and getting prepared for the future. But the future popped up and knocked on their door just a little bit early. Ooops

[unordinary-diary]

I’ve discussed before the parallels between Blyke and John, but here I shall call attention to the way that the two of them are drawn.

Unfortunately I don’t appear to have any good pictures of Blyke OR John where Blyke isn’t getting beaten up, but I’m here to point out how similar they look. They wear the same uniform, of course, they have similar builds, the same haircut/style, and the same eye color.

Even later on in the series, when Uru-chan began to vary the facial features of the characters (namely eye shape), Blyke and John remained strikingly similar.

(There was also a point in time where Blyke’s hair was drawn more out to the sides, presumably to differentiate him from John post-hair gel, but it is not drawn that way anymore.)

I’d like to point out this panel:

This was taken from the season 2 part 1 recap.

It... really looks like john is beating up himself. Of course, we as the audience recognize that panel and we know that it’s Blyke, but the two of them could’ve been switched and it would look the same. I believe that this was an intentional choice; not all flashback panels have the same effects on them, and this particular effect happens to make Blyke’s hair look black. Also, with the panel that is chosen, Blyke’s face is not visible. Even if their faces did look significantly different, we wouldn’t be able to tell.

[bigskydreaming]

The thing that kills me about the Star Wars prequel trilogy and why I will die on my hill that my problem is not that Star Wars is a tragedy, its that its a badly written tragedy, is that Anakin Skywalker was at his closest to being a good Jedi when he was ten years old.

[writer-room]

Rewatching the earlier, and even pilots episodes, of Ninjago are so WILD man. First of all, you notice all the things that are just plain forgotten about or pushed aside in later seasons. Kai originally being the main character, sure, we all know that one, but Cole was heavily implied to be, or become, the leader of the Ninja, that was Cole’s thing. Zane was automatically described with having a sixth seer sense, when nowadays it shows up very, very infrequently. Lloyd used to basically be the Avatar, does anyone remember that? This kid was just the Avatar.

And then you remember the silly things. Like how the skeleton army was once a threat. Like...the skeletons. We battled a giant snake, smaller snakes, robot armies, sentient video games, Garmadon a billion different times, the Overlord, Oni...and the skeletons used to be a worthy adversary. The skeletons.

Did you all remember that Cole’s earth dragon used to...breathe earth? I’ve been forced to remember. Rocky used to breathe earth as a form of attack. It was shown through brown swirly wisps in that beautiful, incredibly shitty 2011 effect. The Underworld used to be implied to be the place where all dead people went, or at least the bad ones. We never heard of a Departed Realm. Do we remember the time Cole had a scene that was a direct parody of Michael Jackson? I sure do. Genuinely the highlight simply because I don’t know how to describe the emotion I felt upon seeing it.

[figayda-meteor-shower]

Idk I feel like a lot of people are looking at the petty snipes tbk and trg make towards each other and going “this is why the bad kids killed them, isn’t that fucked up?”

If that were the case the rat grinders would’ve been dead way earlier? Bc they’ve been bitching at each other and disliking each other all season?Obv the reason the bad kids killed trg is because they were trying to destroy a town. The petty reasons are just garnish, and I personally love it. Like obviously the bad kids would be bitchy and snippy while fighting for the survival of their hometown. They’re teenagers lol.

[batsplat]

as our resident Casey expert i wonder what do you think would have happened if marc and casey competed against each other? since casey retiring is so important for marc coming into motogp im always thinking abt the what ifs...

my initial instinct with this hypothetical is always 'that sounds horrible', though I do have more thoughts and opinions about it than that! marc obviously would have loved the chance to race casey, and casey has even been one of his picks of 'guys he would've liked to be teammates with' before, so, you know, clearly something there - and he does very much respect casey as a rider. I think it's quite likely that by the time marc entered the premier class, casey had already developed... I don't know if wariness is going too far, but maybe a little bit of unease or caution where marc was concerned. marc already very much had a reputation based on his 125/moto2 track record, and some of these incidents were controversial enough that the motogp riders commented on them. so take the phillip island 2011 incident where marc rode into the back of another rider:

the valentino quote serves as a bit of a benchmark here, given he was generally pretty pro-marc. yes, casey's phrasing is perhaps a little harsher, but unsurprisingly none of the riders were big fans of marc's behaviour in that particular incident

on the other hand, it's not like casey never sided with marc. take catalunya 2012, where marc was slapped with a controversial post-race penalty:

yes, casey's main complaint was about inconsistent stewarding - but still, he believed marc had been unfairly treated here. feels like these incidents were some of the only things casey and valentino actually agreed on in those years, so that's nice

that being said, it's hard to see how casey wouldn't have his issues with marc and marc's whole approach to racing. I did include some thoughts on the teammate question here, but mainly I'm going to pilfer the relevant autobiography passage:

"if a rider doesn't care about his own safety then it stands to reason he doesn't care about anybody else's either"... there's nobody really who embodies the 'doesn't care about his own safety' maxim better than marc. he was the young rider desperate to win, and I can't imagine casey would have enjoyed actually racing him much. casey mostly didn't enjoy racing valentino, after all, who is a generally a lot more selective with his aggression than marc is (though casey did have to experience some of the worst valentino had to offer in that regard). casey talked in his autobiography about getting a sense when he just wasn't really able to trust another rider on the track, how much it bothered him - and that exact lack of respect is something that's been pretty closely associated with marc. that doesn't mean he would immediately declare marc his enemy... he'd just want marc to change, to learn, to grow up, to start treating his competitors with a little more respect. the way casey talks about young riders, there is a sense in which he has more time for them than he does for valentino - whose lack of respect casey views as more integral to who he is as a rider. valentino isn't a bully on track due to the exuberance of youth, he's a bully on track when he thinks he can use it as a tactic of intimidation. then again, marc by this measure is worse... and I think very quickly casey would have grown pretty disenchanted with how marc approaches all his wheel-to-wheel racing, especially when it becomes more and more clear marc does not feel particularly inclined to change

it's always important to remember how recent the trauma of losing simoncelli was for the whole sport, and it coloured both dani and jorge's wariness of marc... but also (in my opinion anyway) their restraint in how they dealt with him. how they tried to stop themselves from actually making an enemy out of him, in part because they'd just had an experience of harshly criticising a rider for a whole year and then having to process his death. both dani and jorge actually had more public and more serious disagreements with simoncelli than casey did, but I reckon there would have been an element of that restraint with casey too... on the other hand, his experiences with marc would have left him feeling even more alienated from the sport than he already was - at times frustrated (like jorge was) less with marc directly but more with the regulatory bodies for not holding marc back, for not giving him a race ban or whatever to teach him a lesson. that being said, marc's shamelessness vs casey's stubbornness means that if they had direct on-track encounters and casey didn't like marc's post-race response... well, I certainly think that'd end up being a pretty tense situation, even if it falls short of active hostilities

worth including irl!casey's take on marc in 2013:

which, you know. it's not just that marc's a hard racer - casey is accusing marc of deliberately wanting to make the defeats extra painful for his opponents, of wanting to not just beat but humiliate them. anyone else that reminds you of? someone who is as motivated in securing his psychological victories as his actual ones? perhaps someone who has a bit of a history himself with casey?

let's bring in valentino. it's not that casey would really have begrudged marc his friendship with valentino, and he generally kept his hatred of valentino quite 'clean' in that he wasn't conducting any proxy wars or anything (for instance, I don't get the sense the vale/sic friendship ever affected his view of simoncelli... though I have very little to go on here either way). also, if nothing else in this timeline changes, we're assuming valentino in 2013 is fairly clearly the... fifth? best rider? kinda depends where dani would have landed I suppose (casey's retirement announcement did save honda from a bit of a headache)... but anyway what this means is that valentino probably wouldn't initially have been much of a competitive threat to casey. mostly he would have been consigned to the sidelines

that being said, I doubt casey would have massively enjoyed the whole laguna seca saga. unfortunately, we don't even really know what real life casey's stance on the copycat move situation was... though if I had to guess, in this timeline I'd say his position would've been, a) marc could and should have carried out that overtake two corners later, there was no need in that race situation to take that risk, b) still, it was valentino's slight error as he attempted to reclaim the position (in what was a pretty aggressive manner, it has to be said) that led to them both ending up off-track and fuck that guy, and c) the problem with 2008 wasn't just or even primarily the corkscrew overtake and it's annoying that that's the only bit everyone talks about. of course, there's also the question of whether casey would have bought marc's explanation that it was totally by coincidence that the overtake happened there... and again, complete guesswork, but my sense of casey is that he would have assumed marc was being at least a little bit dishonest. (which, you know... laguna's not an easy track to overtake at, but marc did prove with the bradl move that he was perfectly capable of overtaking after turn 8 - might not have been planning on the off-track excursion, but he was still attempting to overtake just ahead of a blind crest that happened to feed into the corkscrew lol.) I think casey by his honda days had calmed down a bit (though he still certainly had some conspiratorial tendencies), but I also don't think it's a stretch to imagine that he would've felt like he was a victim of a joke between the pair of them... not ideal

overall though, I reckon casey's main frustrations would have been less with the move itself and more with how it was discussed. in the presser, while joking with marc, valentino does take the opportunity to get in a jibe at casey for old time's sake. there's this clip, where he directly addresses livio suppo (at ducati in 2008, by then at honda) - specifically about how both casey and suppo criticised him for that overtake. in response, suppo says something about how he's grateful to marc because they finally got payback. valentino is later asked directly about casey's complaints in 2008 in this clip, and replies with the following:

would valentino have said this stuff with casey still in the paddock? well, yes! honestly, given valentino did very quickly lay off needling casey once he had retired, there's a good chance he would have said something worse. and marc would have laughed along at the whole thing. I don't know, I just don't see casey taking particularly kindly to that... he can hold a grudge, that man can, and at a certain point he'd probably be increasingly less willing to give marc the benefit of the doubt. interesting situation though, laguna seca '13 + casey is a very juicy scenario that could play out in several different ways

but I'm guilty of burying the lede here - there's a far more obvious reason than anything I've described above for why the casey/marc relationship would have turned sour. it's the simple fact that they would have been teammates which would do the damage all on its lonesome; they have radically different conceptualisations of how that dynamic is supposed to work and would inevitably have clashed as a result. the one commonality they do have is they don't see their teammates as potential friends, which is... also not helpful! I think they'd probably initially be fine on the interpersonal level - and, actually, given how the casey/valentino relationship played out and marc's general approach to his rivalries, I can see marc/casey more or less being able to maintain a minimum standard of politeness towards each other even at their worst. like, I still think they'd be able to smile at each other and do some small talk when face-to-face, but I also think everything else would be a complete disaster. I talked a bit about how marc approaches his teammate relationships in this post - and I'm not going to rehash too much of what irl!marc got up to, but I'll include some bits relevant to casey

from marc:

related to casey:

and dani comparing the two:

we do obviously even have actual real life controversy wherein casey thinks marc felt threatened by him and forced him out of honda... and this in a timeline where they weren't even direct competitors! if this is the level of tension a test rider role can generate, then if they'd actually been teammates...? yeah, no. casey thinks that teammates should cooperate - and he thinks that riders enforcing divisions within the box are essentially doing so because they are "afraid". marc has openly admitted to lying about what parts he likes to make sure his teammate doesn't get any edge over him. this is the thing, right: marc might think casey is a cool rider, would've liked the chance to race him and even be teammates with him... but this is the stuff he did to dani, who was one of his literal idols! this is his understanding of competition - (like valentino) he might love the fight, but simultaneously he'll do pretty much whatever it takes to win, because he considers this stuff fundamentally part of the game. casey does not. to casey, this kind of victory is dishonest. any kind of gamesmanship is a sign of weakness... the victory is worth less if you're accomplishing it like that

now, hey, maybe marc would never have been able to go as far as he did with dani because he wouldn't have the kind of performance edge that allows you to definitively impose your will within the team. I think it's a popular interpretation that marc wouldn't have won the title in 2013 if casey had been there, which... I mean, I think it's true that it would have been less likely - in that in a season with that much volatility, the more plausible championship contenders you have the less likely it is that any single one of them takes the title (same goes for instance if you add in a valentino who had not gone to ducati for two years and would have presumably been more competitive in 2013). but it's not like casey would have been the defending champion and the clear class of the field... partly due to injury, he ended up finishing in third in 2012. jorge and dani didn't win the 2013 title in part as a result of their own injuries, and who knows how casey would have fared... like sometimes it's just luck of the draw really. you can be the better rider and still not win the title, shit happens. I think for as long as a more or less healthy-ish casey stays in the sport, it would have been unlikely that marc establishes quite the same performance edge as he did over dani... but, well, if anything that would have meant he would have fought even harder out of perceived necessity to win the internal honda wars

it's the kind of thing that can make a relationship quickly deteriorate, especially with a prickly character such as casey, and it's entirely plausible that dynamic would have become strained at best and horrendously toxic at worst... sooner rather than later. and the thing is, this environment would affect marc considerably less than it would casey. again, it's the fact that he relishes the fight... he's very good at shrugging off (most) criticism and thrives in that kind of tension. the emotional fatigue that this scenario generates would be painfully lopsided, where casey offers harsh criticisms and means them and is endlessly frustrated with marc's approach, while marc... doesn't really care. at least dani also had a questionable manager who was conducting behind the scenes warfare on his behalf - casey doesn't want to play these games at all. he just wants to ride a bike, and marc is never going to allow him to live in peace as long as he's an internal threat. if casey were exposed directly to all of that from marc, I doubt he'd walk away from the experience with a particularly positive impression of him

does he walk away? I think there's a decent chance that casey would have ended up so disillusioned with the whole thing that this would have been what pushed him into retirement. if he wants to get out of that mess, let's say after two years, his options would have been pretty limited. yamaha is closed off and I'd struggle to think of a scenario in which either jorge or valentino would have been particularly interested in a direct swap (also, if you're sick of being marc's teammate, you're probably not gonna be jumping at the chance to be valentino's instead). I suppose you could go back to ducati (which he did return to as a test rider so it's not like those bridges were permanently burnt), and maybe casey could do something special even with *gestures* that version of the bike. really though... I think enough would have been enough for him. regardless of the actual balance of success between the pair of them, my guess is marc wins that war because he's happier to get nasty and because he wants it more. casey has his two to four titles... he's done. let him go fishing

[bonefall]

If Pinestar was the Mi of his kits, why didn’t he try to take any of them with him when he left? Like Brightsky keeping some of her litter. He knew how the clans were, he was specifically leaving to get away from it, why did he choose to leave his children behind?

It wasn't a choice. Brightsky gave birth in the home she bolted to; Pinestar wasn't going to be allowed to take his children unless he snuck out with them.

He wishes he did something, when he sees what became of his son. But he tried to be brave when he left, announcing that he would not be coming back, and where he would be going.

He thought that was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, no one else appreciated it the way he hoped they would.

If he DID though, ThunderClan would not have allowed that. They see it as kidnapping. Being Mi doesn't mean you're allowed to do literally anything you want, especially if you do have a Ba involved.

In cases of handoffs (surrogacy, secret halfclan kits being given to their other parent, etc) it's actually SUPER important you do it before 1 moon, so you can pass the disappearance off as a fading kit. There are no funerals thrown for fading kits besides the Mi and any Ba quietly burying the body, so this is the time where you smuggle the baby out.

So you need all the Ba on board with such a handoff, in addition. Cloudtail is an example of that actually! When Brightheart surrogates, he is fully aware of how many are ACTUALLY faders and who is receiving their child.

Tigerkit was like 3-ish moons when Pinestar hit da bricks, unfortunately there wasn't a way he could take him along... plus it wouldn't quite make sense with how he was having nightmares about murdering his son.

[skitskatdacat63]

2010 Australian Grand Prix - Jenson Button(ft. Robert Kubica & Felipe Massa)

[underthehedge]

Y'know one of the fun things about having dyspraxia is the way my brain can just completely bork up sequences of actions I've been doing for the last 30+ years, especially if I get distracted at all.

The other day I went to get undressed for bed while I was watching a youtube video and instead of taking off my shoes and then socks, I took off one shoes and the corresponding sock and just ??? That is not how the sequence goes! Sitting on the edge of my bed feeling like a lemon with one fully booted foot and one bare to the world.

More than a few times of a morn, I've gotten dressed and stuck my feet in my shoes only to stop and think "nope, trousers first, then shoes".

Cannot tell you how many times I've poured cold water into a mug because I filled the kettle, put it on the base and just forgot to actually turn it on. I come back a minute or two later and assume it's boiled, but no, it was never on.

One time working in a restaurant I scraped a plate over the bin, and then went to drop the cutlery into the bucket on the far side of the bin, as I did many times every day. Except this time I just let go of the cutlery over the bin and then extended my empty hand over the bucket. Just straight up did the moving my hand and opening it steps in the wrong order.

Anyway, dyspraxia is ridiculous. And so co-morbid with ADHD if you've got one it's definitely worth knowing about. Especially if you were diagnosed with dyspraxia before like 2000 or something - I was diagnosed with dyspraxia aged like 7, and they didn't catch my ADHD until I was about 24.

Tbh, a bunch of the symptoms of dyspraxia I grew up knowing about and suffering with I now think are actually just ADHD. That they're commonly observed in dyspraxics because over half of us have ADHD. I was always told that dyspraxics often struggle with internal organisational stuff, timekeeping and attention and it's just like...yeah I don't think that's the dyspraxia actually.

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

this doesn’t even have anything to do with the actual text but it’s fucking hilarious. that “pardon” wasn’t in the original! they inserted it in the translation mid-sentence! some british translator in the 1930s translated this entire bisexual-ass book and the thing he clutched his pearls about was the mention of stomachs

[jacquiarno]

It’s Bisexuality Visibility Month (also Suicide Awareness Month), and the biphobia has been constant and intense, even in our own bi spaces, mostly from fellow LGBTQIA+ people.

Bi women have been told they are tainted for being with men, that we are dirty and dick obsessed. We’ve been told we are perverted fetishists by both cis and trans lesbians, with even gay men joining in on the insults, with one even threatening violence towards bi women if they come near lesbians. We even got told we deserve to be abused, raped, and murdered by our male partners because that’s what we deserve for dating men.

Bi men are being accused again for being HIV carriers, with gay men saying they are only good for sex because they will end up leaving them for women. One trans man said he would kill himself if a man started dating a woman after him, not leave him for one but just start dating again and that person being a woman.

I haven’t seen insults directly about non-binary bisexuals, but I’m sure there would be and a lot of hate lumps us all together. All this hates stings me but I can’t imagine the pain of all this for non-binary, trans women, and trans men dealing with it all, and it makes me so disappointed and angry that fellow trans people in this community are hurting them.

Pride Month a lesbian wrote “I wish god would eradicate all the bisexuals” while another wrote “For Pride Month let all the bi people disappear” with both having thousands of likes and comments agreeing. Now during Bi Visibility Month, a non-binary lesbian with feminist in their profile posted “Happy bi visibility month, I hope they find a cure soon 💖”. While continuing to mock us after.

Our allies and so-called LGBTQIA+ advocates have been silent and have even participated in bierasure, laughing at us when we point it out, saying “It’s not that serious.” “Lol the bis are getting upset over nothing again”. Only the bisexual advocates and pages have spoken out against the hate.

The B in LGBTQIA+ is suppose to be for bisexual but this community says and treats us as awfully as the bigots do to all of us. Bisexual is the sexuality that is attracted to two or more genders, that we have the ability to love anyone regardless of their gender. But we’re treated as greedy, perverted, hyper sexual, unfaithful, which from bigots you understand and usually brush off, but from those within the community who go through similar prejudice and should understand, sharing the same ignorant mindset.

These spaces are suppose to be our safe havens as well, but are just as dangerous. We try making our own spaces and even that is invaded by these people, we are beyond exhausted. We need the other members of the community that aren’t biphobic to speak out more and shut these people and this hate down. Because the lack of empathy from this community is frightening and all this in-fighting will allow the bigots to pick us a part more easily.

[street-corner-felines]

Zero Day (2002)

[vimbry]

I honestly keep forgetting that, not only will I get to see a band I love this november, but I'll probably run into people from here there too ?? which is cool