#this would be a different problem if there was actual erasure going on but there wasn't. your gay shark is now your bisexual shark. move on

[onefey]

let's cut to the chase, zelda fandom. you're not gonna spout incredibly hateful (and sometimes downright misogynistic) things about yona just because she is prince sidon's fiancé. you're going to at least treat her with the same respect you'd give any other character. if you're upset because you're into sidlink you're going to remember that healthy polyamory or amicable breakups or gentle rewrites of canon or other numerous solutions exist, and if you don't like her or think nintendo made her specifically to spite sidlink shippers (they didn't, get your head out of your own ass 🙄) you're still going to be polite.

you are above taking potshots at female characters who "get in the way" of your ship, okay?

[lgbtlunaverse]

Now this is meaner than i like to be when talking about fandom because i am pro people having fun and doing what they want and playing around with dynamics. So let me preface by saying that if you like this headcanon there's nothing wrong with you and I hope you have a great day. That said, aside from the Wen erasure and trying to flatten a more unconventional family dynamic into a nuclear family shaped hole one of the main reasons I vibe less with the "wangxian are a-yuan's dads" headcanon is that I honestly think it's kind of... Lan Wangji character assasination.

Yeah that sounds really harsh but the headcanon recquires Lan Wangji formally adopting a-yuan as his own and/or raising him as his son and i cannot stress this enough he would not do that. Because that would be actively endangering A-Yuan's safety.

To be clear: Lan wangji and wen yuan canonically look so alike that strangers who'd never met either of them assumed they were father and son. If Lan Wangji suddenly comes back with a child that he is insisting to raise, and that child looks exactly like him, people aren't going to assume that's hanguang-jun's adopted son. That is hanguang-jun's biological son with a mystery mother!

Jiang Fengmian didn't even formally adopt wei wuxian, and people knew who his actual (married!) parents were, and they still regularly assumed that he was secretly jiang fengmian's bastard instead of the child of the man cangse sanren literally eloped with.

If that's how eager people are about bastard rumours, what do you think happens if one of the most eligible bachelors in the jianghu turns up with an "adopted" son who looks just like him and refuses to say anything about where he came from?

Yeah, Hanguang-jun knocked someone up and apparantly the union was so scandalous he's deperately trying to cover it up while literally bringing this bastard kid into his own clan. Can you imagine a more juicy rumour? Everyone would want to know who this kid's mother is. A-Yuan's background would be one of the hottest pieces of gossip around.

Which, if you're triyng to make sure that no one finds out that this kid is actually a Wen and came straight from the burial mounds, is really fucking bad. If everyone is looking for A-Yuan's backround and someone succeeds, his life is in danger.

A-Yuan lost his memories, and that must've hurt like hell for Lan Wangji, both for A-Yuan's own sake and because that means this child that Wei Wuxian loved and who loved him in turn now no longer remembers him, will only ever know him from the lies the world tells about him. But he didn't do anything about it, because not knowing was safer for A-Yuan. Even if Lan Wangji wanted to personally adopt him, he would not risk A-Yuan's safety to satisfy his own feelings.

On the other hand, A-Yuan looking like Lan Wangji means he looks like a Lan, and wonky as the mdzs timeline is it's pretty clear he was born during the sunshot campaign. The Lan lost a lot of people in the war, they probably have loads of war orphans, and this kid clearly looks like one, they'd have no problem taking him in. Are they 100% sure who his parents were? No, but they probably died shortly after he was born and weren't able to safely return him to cloud recesses.

It's really easy for Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji to come up with a story from here. Someone came across the kid on the streets, saw the family resemblance, and decided to take him back to his home! After the burial mounds Wen Yuan probably wouldn't look too different form an average street rat. Or maybe the boy was raised by a common family who told them about the cultivators that left him there for safekeeping, unable to idenify them exactly but mentioning the signature white robes and forehead ribbon. Who knows!

The point is that Lan Wangji and Lan Sizhui could, for Sizhui's own safety, not be seen as father and son. From Sizhui's comments that Lan Wangji was "like a father or older brother" to him, and the fact that Lan Wangji chose his courtesy name we can infer that after he got out of seclusion Lan Wangji was more involved in his life than he would've been with other disciples. But from the outside that could be explained as a teacher having a favorite student, and an honoured sect elder (and family member, though now the assumption is "distant cousin/nephew" instead of "bastard child") helping to name a child in lieu of parents that are no longer there. By all accounts, Lan Yuan was raised collectively by the Lan as one of the several war orphans they must have had. Just like how he was raised collectively by the burial mound Wen before that.

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

I know I’ve spoken about my issues with ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ (2023) before, both in my initial thoughts post about the film after it released and a couple of smaller comments since, but I’ve realised something this past week after rewatching the original Disney cartoon and the 2003 non-Disney live-action while sick, and I feel I need to talk about it.

It’s about Wendy Moira Angela Darling.

While I stand by that Ever Anderson was one of the highlights of the film and that she did a great job as Wendy, the Wendy in the film is not really the Wendy seen in Barrie’s book, nor the one in the play and other films adaptations. It’s a very different character in a lot of ways, and while it’s normal for characters to differ from adaption to adaptation - especially over the course of 70+ years - I feel like the Wendy seen in the 2023 is more like Jane, Wendy’s daughter, from Disney’s Return to Neverland sequel in 2002.

Let me preface by saying that I actually love Jane in the sequel as a character - I see a lot of myself in her, and while the sequel in itself is not really my favourite, I do have some nostalgia for it because I grew up with it and it’s a cute little story. I like that Jane is actually different from Wendy in a lot of ways; she’s a lot more headstrong and more of a tomboy, and while she’s also a storyteller at times like her mother (mostly to her brother Danny), she is a lot more practical I think and seems to be opposite to Wendy in that she’s trying to grow up too fast. Wendy believes in Peter Pan and doesn’t want to grow up, meanwhile Jane believes Peter Pan to be silly childish nonsense, that she has to grow up quickly and be more adult due to the war/her father being away - Wendy says to her, “you think you’re very grown up - but you have a great deal to learn”.

Obviously the 2023 Wendy doesn’t want to grow up, that’s still the same, but in terms of personality, temperament and the way she treats her brothers after the broken mirror incident (blaming John for it), she reminds me more of Jane than Wendy. Like Jane, she also doesn’t seem to have a good time going to Neverland (at least not at first?) and she seems to take on a lot more action than Wendy did in the animated film.

Of course, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen Wendy wielding a sword and fighting pirates - the 2003 Wendy was shown to play with wooden swords and use real ones, even remarking, “who are you to call me ‘girlie’?!”. I’m not saying that Wendy can’t be a sword wielding girl and fight because she can, it’s one of the additions I love the most about the 2003 film.

The problem with the 2023 version of Wendy is not her being a main character (she has always been a main character), nor her sword fighting and being generally bad-ass - it’s the erasure of the other qualities that make her Wendy Darling.

One of Wendy’s primary character traits is her mothering nature - she is very motherly to her brothers, and when she hears that the Lost Boys don’t have a mother, she’s aghast and agrees to be their mother. The whole “Peter is father, Wendy is mother” idea is clearly a reference to how kids in the playground will play games like “mummies and daddies” - kids imitating what they see around them. It’s all a big pretend game in Neverland for fun. It’s also undeniable that Wendy pretending to be the Lost Boys’ mother is clearly reflective of her own mother, who she adores and is portrayed as the loveliest lady ever, and how she’s imitating Mrs Darling in a lot of ways during this “game” - singing to them, telling them stories, medicine etc.

Some would argue that Wendy is “forced” into being the “mother” and that while all the boys are off having fun, she’s left playing house, which I understand. But what a lot of modern audiences and filmmakers don’t understand these days is that motherhood is NOT an anti-feminist idea - there seems to be this view that portraying a girl wanting to be a mother or expressing the wish to be married/have children is some old-fashioned misogynistic notion, which is absolutely bizarre to me.

As a feminist myself, I believe that there is no clear cut definition of “womanhood” or what it means to be a strong woman with autonomy. Some women want to have careers and not have children, and that’s fine; some women want to have children, that’s fine; some women want both, and that’s fine. What matters is that it’s the woman who is deciding what she wants.

For me, Wendy has always been this remarkable and extraordinary character to look up to because she chooses to grow up - and for her, that means having her own children to tell her stories to. That’s what she wanted, that’s why she went back to England, and that’s part of her character arc, realising that by growing up she has things to look forward to.

For some reason, when 2023!Wendy thinks “happy thoughts” to make herself fly when being walked off the plank, her vision for the future that she looks forward to involves piloting automobiles that haven’t even been invented yet and then dying alone? Which… I mean, if that’s how someone wants to live then fair enough but that’s not Wendy. That’s not the Wendy Darling I grew up loving.

A lot of my issues with the 2023 version of Wendy do in fact link with other issues of the film in general: the Lost Boys including girls, for example. Like I get wanting to be inclusive, and I 100% wanted to be a Lost Girl growing up, but the Lost Boys are boys for a reason (“girls are much too clever to fall out of their prams”), and when Wendy arrives it’s a huge deal because they’ve never actually lived with girls before, and the only concept of girls they have is their memories of “mother”, which is why Wendy becomes their mother figure - because they literally don’t have any other female figures in their lives to compare her to other than the tiny scraps they remember of their mothers.

There’s also the issue of the thing prompting Wendy not wanting to grow up being changed; in the original, it’s because it’s her last night in the nursery and moving from the nursery - aka the room she has spent her entire life thus far in - to her own room is a HUGE transitional worry that a lot of kids probably go through (usually it’s in the form of moving from toddler beds to big kid beds but still). In the 2023 version, she’s being sent off to boarding school for some reason which doesn’t really make sense to me because the Darling parents a) are so poor they have to have a dog as a nursemaid and b) love their children so much that they would never do that to them. I’m not saying that being shipped off to boarding school ISN’T a worry for a young girl or a huge deal, but it isn’t one that I think necessarily fits with the story.

There’s the fact that Wendy is no longer the storyteller; in most versions, the reason Peter visits the nursery is because he likes her stories. Instead, the reason he comes to the nursery is not because he likes her stories but because he used to live in the house? And instead of bringing her to Neverland to tell stories, he comes to take Wendy away as he apparently heard her saying she didn’t want to grow up? It just doesn’t sit right with me, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

Also, for some reason, Wendy and Peter don’t actually seem to like each other at all in the 2023 version - I’m not saying there should have been romantic hints or whatever, but even just in a friendship way they really don’t seem to care in any way about each other. They just seemed rather indifferent towards each other, and it’s kind of jarring to see.

In some ways, I feel like 2023 Wendy was made a little too bad ass and on the nose super feminist: “this magic belongs to no boy!”, slapping Peter across the face (which was just…??? Why?!?!), constantly criticising Peter/Neverland, having WAY more action and heroic moments than Peter Pan himself… maybe in a different story it could have worked but for this one, it came across forced at times, like they were intentionally trying to show “look! Look how badass she is! She can fight off grown men all by herself! She doesn’t need a boy to help her! She can do everything by herself!”

This is why I feel like the 2003 version of Wendy is the best one (so far): while they modernised her slightly by making her sword fight and express an ambition to write novels about her adventures, she was still a storyteller and motherly figure to the Lost Boys/her brothers. For me as a child, seeing Wendy be the storyteller and her journey of acceptance about having the grow up was really important to me because I could completely relate to it.

Of course, I recognize I’m very biased because this is the one I grew up with (along with the animated Wendy of course) so I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts!

[cripplecharacters]

Hello! Your post on facial differences was really helpful and eye-opening. I’m trying to amend the designs of my characters whom I’ve now noticed fall into those harmful tropes, and I was wondering what the opinion on facial tattoos is vis-a-vis stereotyping. Specifically I mean tattoos that are purely aesthetic (not done to cover a scar or anything) and not of any design that would mirror FD - in this case they’re just flowers, on a typical-looking face. (While I don’t want to contribute to erasure by simply removing the character’s scars, they are very necessarily a villain in the story, and I’d rather not contribute to harmful representation instead.) I definitely don’t want to just switch actual FD for FD-coding that does the same nasty job.

I hope you all have a fantastic day and know I’m really grateful for the effort behind this blog and its existence <3

Hi! I'm glad you found the post helpful :-)

I think that tattoos are completely fine, and making your villain have tattoos instead of a facial difference is a great idea!*

(*obligatory exception to this statement - please don't switch a villain's FD for tattoos like tā moko or tunniit. that only creates different problems)

I'm of the opinion that sometimes it's fine to "erase" a particular trait during the character making process if said trait would be harmful or offensive. For me personally, I actually prefer that writers un-FD their villains. I do believe that the harm the "evil person with a facial difference" trope brings is greater than the representation that it could.

(Other people might still consider it erasure and disagree with me here. Opinions differ, as they do in every community. But I think that most people will understand why you decided to go with that.)

I appreciate that you're looking for solutions to fix some of the issues you've previously run into - if you have any other concerns or questions, feel free to send another ask (I promise I will try to answer faster than I did with this one, sorry!).

Thank you, I hope you have a great day as well! :-)

mod Sasza

[sugar-coated-prat-dragon]

The problem with trying to ‘control’ the way others write fanfics (Merlin addition) 🪄🧙‍♂️

One of the things I hate most is when someone tries to control what people can write in a fanfic and who you can write about. 😵‍💫

For example: That somehow using submissive as bottoms and dominates as tops is both misogynistic and homophobic.

That a character in an mpreg fanfic (where it’s uncommon) being shocked about their partner being able to get pregnant or give birth is somehow… homophobic.

You apparently also can’t write about Merlin/Mordred as a couple, because there’s an age difference?

Merlin was about 16 years old in the first season and Mordred was (twelve maybe?)

That’s only a four year age gap (even if Mordred was 10; that’s still only six years).

Is it really so unbelievable that a 20 year old and 26 year old in the “Middle Ages of all things”, would have been romantically involved?

Oh my god. The horror. 😱 Merlin should be executed for it. 🪓

Yet in that same vein, it’s also wrong for Merlin to be a submissive/bottom, because then you’re taking away his ‘manliness’ and that’s some form of magical erasure that takes away his agency.

But you also can’t have Merlin be a dominating/top who uses his magic to tease Arthur (or his lovers), then you’re ruining his character.

And of course you can’t claim that Arthur loves Merlin more then Gwen, because then you’re a racist.

Despite the fact that Bradley James himself sees no attraction between Arthur and Gwen. That he himself views Arthur as loving Merlin.

All the actors and actresses’s actually see Merlin and Arthur as the OTP.

But I’m sure that means nothing? 😅

And that continually in the show, it’s shown that Merlin is the only one who gets to see the real Arthur.

That the creators of the show considered the show to be a love story of Merlin and Arthur.

A show that constantly emphasized that Merlin and Arthur are soul mates.

I mean honestly at that point, the only fanfics you can write is Merlin, Arthur and the knights sitting around the campfire playing cards. 🃏

Even then how do you choose who wins?

Because no matter who you pick; it’s either going to be racist, sexist or homophobic?

In the words of Merlin in (S5; E8)

MERLIN: Really? Get out.

[adarkrainbow]

By the way, speaking of the erasure of actors with dwarfism... Right after I have been hit by this Time Bandits mess, I have just watched the trailer for the live-action Disney's Snow-White. And... honestly all of the problems talked about and issues raised before seem truly non-significant compared to what I actually got out of this trailer. Which I think is the real problem with this movie.

The feeling of... unecessary. I watched the trailer, and I was left with nothing out of it, except a neutral "Why would they make that?" coupled with a tired "Why would I watch it?" Because there was nothing in this trailer that encouraged the audience or gave the audience the desire to go watch it if they already knew the original movie.

Here's my point: when the whole Disney live-action movies trend started (I am going to say "live-action remakes" to differentiate it from older live-action movies like the excellent 101 Dalmatians live-action movie), it worked with an immense success. Why? Because these movies had something to them. Yes they reused classic movies and stuck to them... but in their own, unique way and they didn't hesitate to change things up, to differentiate themselves from it. The most obvious being the Maleficent movie, which was a literal "perspective flip" with a ton of new stuff (moral reversal, backstory given to a villain, anti-villain situation, etc) ; but even the Cinderella live-action "remake" worked hard on having its own style, not hesitating to change the design of some key characters (Lady Tremaine would be my main example). Thus, they worked extremely well. Whether you like them or not, you can't deny they're their own thing and stand up on their own.

Cut to today. I am going to use mainly Disney's remakes of The Little Mermaid and Snow-White (though I could also use stuff like Aladdin or other movies). What's the difference? These movies are remake. Absolute remakes trying to stick as closest to the original as possible: same story, same shots, same designs. They are basically... transpositions. Sure there are some changes (in The Little Mermaid, making Ariel a different skin color and having a whole Caribean style) but they still feel very minor compared to all the efforts made to stick to the original animated piece. Compare the Lady Tremaine case above with Ursula or the Evil Queen in those live-action movies - there isn't an effort to reinvent the character to better fit a live-action universe or a different style of story. They are both created as an attempt to reproduce the original cartoon design as faithfully as possible. And this is what I mean by how "unecessary" these movies are feeling right now. They are literaly just retelling the same story, with minor changes. It feels like so much money and effort and special effects and acting is being thrown away at just... a repetition o what we already have instead of creating anything new.

It's not like Disney run out of fairytales to work with! Imagine that, we could have had a whole new range of live-action fairytale movies! But not it is just... recreating the exact same shots, over and over (I was particularly puzzled by how they worked so hard to recreate the shot of the Evil Queen going down the stairs while having her cape float behind her. You put a lot of effort to recreate this old animated shot, okay... But what's the point? Why would I pay to watch this same shot in live-action when I already did tons of time animated?)

In fact this is why these live-action remakes are bound to feel inferior to the original animated pieces - precisely BECAUSE they are trying to recreate and stick to the original... while being limited by budget and real-life physics and visuals, meaning they will have to tweak it slightly in unsatisfying way. If they had decided to go with their own style and stuff it wouldn't have been a problem (again, Disney's Cinderella live-action, the two Lady Tremaines feel like different characters and thus it is easier to separate these things and look at each on their own).

(It also doesn't help that Disney has been working a LOT of doing live-action versions of their own characters before, from Once Upon a Time to Descendants, so again... trying to recreate exactly things is just bound to cause unpleasant comparisons).

[damnfandomproblems]

I agree with 4119 for the most part

But the thing with race is that it is almost always done with the intent of erasure or "fixing"

It's never "I wanted to explore this character as if they had a different ethnic background in this setting"

It's always "this character would look BETTER with this specific skin color and that's all I'll add to them and ignore all other culture aspects I could give the character relating to their skintone because I actually don't care about representing different people. I just want to be viewed as inclusive and unproblematic by my peers and I do that by changing the characters skin and nothing else because all I care about it what skin color people have. Also I attack others for calling me out on this by telling them all they care about is the characters skin and asking why they care so much that I made the character with *x* skintone. Ect. Ect. Ect."

Listen we wouldn't have so much problem with this if people were actually creative about it.

There's nothing and I mean NOTHING wrong with wanting to explore a character with a different skin tone or culture or whatever.

It's when people have this attitude about it like the character is somehow better in someway for having an either lighter or darker skin tone. And yes I'm talking about both. Because both whitewashers and blackwashers do the exact same thing and have the exact same arguments as to why they think it's acceptable to racewash when they are both wrong.

It's supposed to be like race bending. It's supposed to be a fun way to explore a character in different ways.

It is NOT meant to be a way to "one up" the "Whites/Blacks" OR to belittle the original design. Not even "edits" are good because there's actually zero thought or research going into them. I've seen a significant amount of edits for middle eastern characters who are paler or tanned being made to look extremely dark even though alot of middle eastern countries and ethnicities are pale or lighter in color making the characters original design accurate actually.

People get so mad at characters like that because of their moms basement preception of reality that they don't even know what people from other countries even look like.

Never have I seen an actually well thought out redesign of a character where they actually explore said character with a different ethnicity and culture. It's always "wow *x* looks a million times better now and is so accurate to real life"

And hell this 8snt even touching upon the fact that some people mistake tan characters from somewhere like Europe or America or east and south(south east?) Asia as black. Not even Indian or Spanish or even Mexican. Not even native American or anything else. Just black. And if that's not telling how horrible people who blackwash are. Literally no better than white washers.

Or the fact that so many people assume Asian characters are automatically white because they don't have "Asian eyes" or yellow toned skin. (or the fact that alot of people will redesign pale Asian anime characters with yellow skin and slanted eyes to make it more "realistic" which as an Asian myself I consider that to be damned fucking racist)

There are ways to explore race in characters. There are ways to do so respectfully and without belittling the original ethnicity of the character. But that's not what people do. People just want to express their internal racism and prejudice and narrow and ignorant views on the world and it's people without being criticized by their peers.

Trust me I would not mind if someone took a character and decided to explore how their life would unfold and how characters might treat them (depending on how the world and it's people view such ethnicities) under a different ethnicity or culture. I would not mind if someone just wanted to see how they could design a character and their meanings but using a different culture. (like how two different flowers could have the same meaning. Or how different colors have different meanings. A character with the colors meaning passion might be designed with a different color of the same or similar meaning in a different culture), or how a character might choose a different path in life due to their culture or how they chose the same path despite their culture. there is just so much you can do but all people care about is the fucking skin and "how much better the character is now" with a different skin.

I hope that makes sense.

Posting since this is a reply to a previous problem.

[blackcrowing]

hi) I used to be a wiccan, I moved on from it because it no longer felt freeing and I didn't feel connected to it anymore, but I never knew it's something bad? could you please direct me to some good info about it?

There... is a lot going on with it to be entirely honest with you, probably more than could possibly be addressed in just one post of any kind. But I would say the core problems with it as a religion are centered in its founding, ie. that it was essentially completely made up by an English man in the 1940/50s. To make a very long story short, he was basically an amature anthropologist (the concept of anthropology interested him, but he had no formal training. which even if he did anthropology at the time was EXTREMELY colonistic in its applications). So he took aspects of many many different cultures, found similar belief structures in them, and decided to squish them together to make his own "ancient, secret practice." (The wheel of year is an example of this that is ESPECIALLY irksome to Celtic based polytheists.) Thus, Gardnerian Wicca was born.

Because it was pretty rigidly patriarchal (while saying how liberating and equal it was, which was standard for occult groups of the time) there was a backlash and Dianic Wicca grew out of that. They tend to have the most influence on butchering complex deities down to two dimensional figure heads, removing them from their cultural context completely and misappropriating them, causing great confusion to new polytheists looking for information. You're likely to see hundreds of blogs/articles/whatever if you look up say, Morrighan, that claim she is a triple goddess (in the maiden, mother, crone sense), and corresponds with other goddess like Freyja and Hecate. These statements remove her from her cultural context and are likely to set the blood of any one who genuinely studies her on fire.

There was also the Alexandrian Wicca, which set off the common mixing of the terms 'Wicca' and 'witchcraft' causing great confusion among lay-peoples and beginners that all witchcraft is Wiccan. This grew the concepts that are now popular in eclectic witchcraft books like the threefold law and again flattened and erased MANY folk practices as they got absorbed with little or no context into "Wiccan Witchcraft." See anything Silver Ravenwolf has ever written for an example.

Lastly (that I know of but honestly I can guarentee I have miss many many things even in this rather lengthy response) there was the W.I.T.C.H. movement, a semi feminist/occult... thing... which further muddied the waters and is more than likely responsible for the ideas people have in the community about male practitioners of magic and male polytheists, hell even some male deities.

Also I think this all continues to be a big problem because not only are people getting pulled into Wiccan framing when it comes to the occult inadvertently (because it has leaked into every "new witch" book that exists) but MANY folks out there when confronted about their appropriative behavior don't learn from that conversation, instead they double down on why its actually ok for them to "smudge" or why its actually ok that they misapproprate complex deities and treat them like collectable playing cards.

TLDR: Wicca perpetuates cultural erasure in witch/occult/magic circles and is in many ways responsible for problematic themes in those circles and when it comes to lay-peoples understandings of what those circles contain and believe. And they tend to defend their colonialist mindset whenever challenged on it.

[emotional-moss]

some thoughts about cultural appropriation

a few important notes before you read this: 

- here, when i say “white,” i am referring to specifically white canadian, white american, and white european, with white european being a rather loosely defined term but typically relating to britain. this is not intended to ignore the existence other white identities such as white south africans, but i am a mixed-race indian+white person who has spent most of his life in the united states and does not have enough experience or knowledge of these identities to make accurate takes about them.

- this is not me making excuses for cultural appropriation. it is a dangerous thing that waters down and erases culture, and should not be encouraged. - this is written in a gentle and hopefully palatable way to white audiences, who i encourage to read this. not every take from a poc is going to be nice-nice about these kinds of things, but this is.

i find it very interesting that when you ask white folks about why they’re so obsessed with certain aspects of culture, the palatable, easily-appropriated ones like native headdresses and whatnot, their reason usually is in the form of “mysticism” and “exoticism.” this is a problem in itself, obviously, tying into the long-standing colonial fetishization of culture, but here’s the bit i actually want to talk about:

when you ask why it’s so “exotic” to them, why it’s so obviously “different and other” at a personal level - it comes from a sense of community.

let me break this down a bit. culture and community are often used as very loose synonyms, and for pretty good reason. a culture is based around the ideas of societal norms and roles, material things, ways of thinking and whatnot - and these all come down to community.

there are certain things that are intrinsic and unique to every culture (even if they are a medley of various different cultural influences), whether they be classical carnatic music in south india, pinakbet from the ilocos region of the philippines, or the ninauh-oskitsi-pahpyaki social role/gender in the blackfoot tribe. even cultures we would consider to “appear” white have these, such as the tales of tuatha de dannan in irish mythology. but the idea of whiteness as a concept does not have these.

whiteness as a concept is a sterilized, “de-cultured” identity that attempts to assimilate most/many folks who appear “white” into a single monolith. this is obviously very damaging and dangerous to many cultures - for example, many ancient celtic traditions have been lost due to the deliberate erasure of these in order to assimilate these people into whiteness.

whiteness as an identity was founded on a basis of eurocentric values and traditions as well as either the deliberate assimilation or erasure of all other cultures and traditions - white supremacy. it still exists like that today (see groups like the KKK or proud boys).

now we know obviously that not all white folks are intentionally racist and a large portion of them genuinely don’t mean harm to poc communities…so why is cultural appropriation so rampant, even in white folks who would otherwise be decent allies to poc?

again, it’s coming down to a sense of community.

i have grown up and lived in the united states for most of my life, and as early as i can remember i have always had questions about the cultural identities of white americans. i’d look at the indian half of me and indian culture that i partook in and experienced, things i cherish such as cooking traditional South indian food, learning carnatic classical music, participating in religious ceremonies, etc. and then i’d look at the white half of me. there was no culture there i could find.

sure, i could look at typically “american” things, such as hamburgers and surfboarding and apple pie, but these fall apart very easily with minimal research. similar hamburger-looking foods appear in europe as far back as the 4th century. bodysurfing/surfboarding has existed in peru, africa and various polynesian countries for thousands of years. versions of apple pie existed in british and french cookbooks as far back as 1390 BCE with influences from the ottoman empire - and apples aren’t native to the americas.

the colonization of the americas and the subsequent reframing of canada and the states as “white” areas is due to the influence of colonization, obviously - and the genocide of millions of first nations people. this was deliberate.

but here is the interesting bit. for hundreds of years, as far back as the pilgrims, cultures that were not fully assimilated into whiteness were rejected and oppressed - even as they colonized.

take italian-americans, for instance. the late 1800s to early 1900s saw a huge influx of italian immigrants to the united states. these immigrants faced oppression in the form of religious and political discrimination (anti-catholic sentiments and anti-communist sentiments). they were often subject to horrible living conditions compared to their american white counterparts as well as violence - one of the largest lynchings in america was the mass-lynching of eleven italian immigrants in new orleans in 1891.

yet today, when we think of italian-americans, we often see them simply as “white.”

a huge amount of immigrants to the united states and canada were forced to give up their original cultures in order to assimilate into whiteness. if not, they were subject to prejudice, discrimination and overall just shitty conditions. for some groups that resembled “white americans” in appearance, such as irish folks and italian folks, this method worked eventually and they were assimilated and accepted into whiteness. for many others due to their skin color or features, such as black enslaved folks or jewish folks, even giving up their own culture still meant they were not accepted as white - they didn’t “look white.” additionally, many cultural groups resisted assimilation and rejected being seen as white.

this is somewhat why i believe so many white americans, canadians, and british participate so heavily in cultural appropriation. it comes from a sense of loneliness, of little to no original culture - and whatever is left has been bastardized and reduced to just “white,” neglecting the cultural nuance.

growing up as a brown-skinned mixed person with heavy ties to the indian side of my culture, i was subject to a fair amount of racism. i remember people asking why my hair was “oily and gross,” and then begging my mom to never put coconut oil in my hair ever again. i remember people telling me that the khichdi my mom had carefully made for my lunch “looked and smelled like fish eggs,” and then only eating bland sandwiches at school. but there is one experience i remember very clearly.

i had a white american best friend when i was very young, from kindergarten to third grade. she never judged me for my food or my clothes or my grandparents’ accent or any other part of my culture and i loved her for it. but i remember having this experience with her one day.

she’d met my grandmother who came to pick me up, donned in an elaborately-formed red sari. the next day, when i sat with her at recess, she said something like, “i liked your grandma’s dress. it was pretty.” taken aback by open appreciation of my culture, i just mumbled a pleased “oh, thanks.” but she didn’t stop there. she said, “my grandma only wears boring clothes, like sweaters and granny dresses. i wish i was indian.”

i said something like, “granny dresses can be nice. you can be white and wear cool clothes.”

“yeah, i know. but any old person can wear sweaters and dresses. they’re just…not from anywhere.”

at the time, i didn’t fully understand her desire to be connected to a specific culture, but i understood in a bit of a detached way. i was always very connected to and appreciative of my indian culture, but look to the white side and i was met with exactly that - a gaping white void. the closest answer i got was “well, your great-grandparents came from germany.” that answer dissatisfied me, although i couldn’t articulate why. now i can.

it’s something like, “but after such a long time, they’re not really german anymore.” i’d seen the absence of culture in whiteness, and how my white friends and family could name a distant time where their family belonged to another culture - but not anymore. now, they were just “white.”

whiteness as a concept strips and sanitizes culture to fit a very, very narrow version of culture - a culture defined on the surface by cheeseburgers and british accents and football and canadian politeness, but dig deeper and you find colonialism, colonization, eurocentricism, racism, and various other systems of oppression.

once again, this is not an excuse for white folks who appropriate culture nor is this me trying to reason my way into approving of it. it’s not, and i’m not. i die a little bit inside every time i see some random hippie on the internet bastardize and water down the concept of chakras. but it is a bit of an explanation, and this is why i have some degree of sympathy for white folks who culturally appropriate.

so, to all white or white-passing folks who read this and understand/relate to it: i implore you this. please, please, please, if you have the time and resources to do so, reconnect with your native culture. talk to older irish folks, or learn about traditional welsh folklore. learn german, or watch documentaries of italian culture. read stories from white-passing native folk, or talk with your black grandparents. please do not lose the culture that your ancestors had to give up in order to assimilate into whiteness. understand that whiteness is a part of you and that it impacts those around you, but if you can, please make the effort to reconnect with your culture. it does wonders for your identity and sense of self.

[kits-ghosts-corner]

That's a problem of the ace community's own making. Gay means not interested in the opposite gender. Straight means not interested in the same gender.

But ace means... anything and nothing these days. Of course people don't take the identity specifically. "Aces can want sex, feel sexual attraction" okay then it means nothing when a character says they're ace. People can ship them and write them having sex because, well, ace can.

People even argue sex repulsed people can want sex.

Sorry, when your entire communtiy is about how words mean wahtever you want them to mean, people are going to make asexuality mean whatever they want.

Ace doesn't "mean anything and nothing these days". Being asexual is defined as experiencing little to no sexual attraction, and it has been that way for a while. That doesn't mean experiencing no libido or never wanting to have sex, because attraction doesn't equal action. We have enough accounts of that outside of the ace community, plenty of allo folks fuck people they don't find attractive just because they want to. Folks in the ace community can opt to use labels like "sex-repulsed", "sex-indifferent", etc. because it helps them communicate or categorise how they experience their asexuality. It has been this way for some time, and it's not a thing of "these days".

When characters are canonically portrayed as having absolutely no interest in sex - or active disgust towards it - it is uncomfortable (at least for me) to see others write them as engaging in it. Again, I'm going to point towards the example I used of everybody (quite rightfully, I think) getting up in arms if a character who was a gay man was written by someone as being incredibly attracted to a woman. It's an erasure of what tends to be an important part of a character (or, if not important, then at least an aspect of that character). It shows a lack of nuanced and critical thought, to be honest, and it's an indication of a shallow way of viewing a character if you throw out what can be a vital way of how they experience relationships (or lack thereof) just for the sake of like... idk a fic or something. I made the original post because I'm sick and tired of people not treating asexuality seriously, and this ask proves that people still don't.

It's fine if you don't understand asexual experiences, but you don't have to pin that on the ace community. I said the post isn't aimed towards ace and aro people because I can generally trust that what they write is done with these nuances in mind because they are our lived experiences - allo people can write the same things, of course they can, but it would be much better if actual experiences were taken into account rather than slapping on the label of "sex-favourable" and being done with it. (This will depend on POVs of the fics, but it's never difficult to add a little mention of it here and there. You don't need paragraph upon paragraph explaining the specifics, but just a simple thing would be very nice.)

The entire asexual community isn't about "how words mean whatever we want them to mean", it's about asexuality, and there are multiple ways to experience that. There's - and I'm sorry to keep repeating the word - nuance, and it is incredibly frustrating when people do not take that nuance into account when writing. And if you want to write a simple fic about sex, that's fine, but it's not hard to pick literally any other character.

My post was made very quickly and I hope I made it clear that it was a quick rant and not a full take on it all (maybe I need to edit the post to make it more obvious /g), and even this response here doesn't go into all the nooks and crannies of it because it would take a long time and a longer post than this already is. But it's weird to pin other people throwing away characters' sexualities and experiences on the entire asexual community because we have differing experiences amongst ourselves.

[royalberryriku]

The more I learn about the history of the middle east in general, the more I realise that the "Israel-Palestine conflict" is actually just a group killing their own fellow shared ethnic group who are "too brown".

Hebrews and Arabs both originate from Phoenicians, aka "Abraham's descendents" according to their respective oral stories and passed on histories. They are from the same place and people. However, there is a narrative that twists this and claims that Arabs were "always an outside force that invaded", when the various groups within that ethnicity always had their share of cooperation and conflict in various stages of history. Just like, say, the various groups in France. They were of the same group and no particular ethnicity had no more of a "claim" to the land than the other, they just had their beef and eventually integrated.

So when I see "but the Arabs are colonisers" I can't help but ask; what is a colonisers to you? Seriously. If colonisation means "any conflict in the past between a shared group from the same place" every single group would be colonisers. There's no such thing as "an innocent conflict" where atrocities weren't committed by either side. So please get that out of your head if you want to say "but the Arabs did X, Y, Z to the Hebrews so it's colonisation and they don't belong in A, B or C areas". That's just not how colonisation works. It's like calling TERF or cis a slur when they're not. Conflict between the same people from the same area is, yeah, a conflict hit not colonisation. However, a people who are from a completely different place who want to erase an ethnic group and take over their culture, erase their history and get rid of their physical features? Yeah, that's what colonisation is. It's genocide with the aim to erase a specific group or culture and take it and the land over. For example, the British in the Middle East.

The problem with calling Arabs "colonisers" is not only is it completely historically wrong, they're from the same place and have the same origins as the Hebrews, but they (like Palestinian Jews) have been their since before the British came. Compared to European Jews who came later on after having lived in Europe (and became European as that is genuinely a part of their culture and ethnicity as well and shouldn't be erased or forgotten, that's also cultural erasure of Germanic, Polish, etc traditions passed on) and, sure, do have origins there *as well* but it needs to be understood that they, specifically Zionists, are a part of the British colonial project aimed at killing *both* Arabs and Jews. The point isn't to help Jews against a colonisers from the first few centuries (sorry to tell you everyone, but no, the Ottoman Empire, Baylon and the Pharaohs literally do not exist anymore, like how Italy isn't the Roman Empire by default because that's where Rome is), but a group of people who've just been living there for the past few centuries and generations who just want to live. The problem is, they haven't been allowed that and propaganda keeps being pushed that completely jumps around historical facts like, for example, Jews (ethnically speaking) were not always Jews but the Ancient Hebrews, aka, Phoenicians, aka where Arabs came from ethically. They are the same people, just who moved to different areas and developed different cultures and languages. Sort of like, you know, every other nation with specific dialects for specific regions and different cultures and folk stories depending on where you go.

The point is, so much of Jewish history is actively being erased to "protect the Jews" by...commuting cultural genocide of the Jews and Arabs. It ignores the actual impact of Nazism within Israel's formation and history, how much it influenced policy, how Jews who were "too visibly Phoenicians" aka appeared too Jewish or arabic or middle eastern in appearance were deemed as "weaker" and "lesser" for my surviving the holocaust and used as a reason to deny rights to both Jews and Arabs who were too visibly Semitic. It ignores how antisemetic Israel is towards Jewishness and how utterly antisemetic Islamophobia is because they are literally from the same origin and, yes, hatred and fear of one does carry into hatred and fear of the other. So much of the propaganda and denialism of history happening right now is a direct response to dear and hatred of "big noses", "brown skin" and people deemed as too middle eastern because they, just like in World War II, World War I and beforehand, antisemetism is the backbone of British imperialism and conquest of the middle east (yes, this also means a targeting of Arabs and Jews as people who look a specific way). And yes I'm annoyed and yes this is a ramble that's probably not very coherent, but damn I'm so sick and tired of misinformation and the twisting of everything to suit this narrative of "Arabs versus Jews" as if they aren't both just Semites who are being collectively oppressed, erased and reinvented by the west to suit western ends.

[slayerchick303]

In honor of Pride, here are some more of my Queer as Folk hot takes:

I hate the Jenny Rebecca custody battle storyline. For one thing, it's tedious as hell. Also, I don't believe Ben would support Michael in that bullshit. Ben is all about balance and everything in moderation. There's no way he would be like, "We know these 2 women are good mothers, but because they're no longer a couple, that makes me and Michael more qualified to have custody of JR." Like, no. When Hunter's mother came back, he was all set to send Hunter back to her without a custody battle before learning how she abused Hunter. Him supporting Michael in the fight for Jenny Rebecca makes no sense.

The way the show resolved Ted's self-esteem problems sucked. They literally made him have to have cosmetic surgery to have any confidence. It would've made more sense for Ted to have overall better mental health and realize his self-worth after becoming sober and having therapy. It would've been a much healthier message for society, too.

The show making Drew Boyd gay was stupid. The guy is obviously bisexual. He says he has sex with a million women as well as men. He also says he's attracted to and loves his female fiancee while he's having an affair with Emmett. He's not gay. Making him, as well as Hunter and Lindsay, binary sexualities is bi erasure and is straight up nonsensical.

Michael is often an asshole in season 5, and I hate how judgemental his character becomes. Yes, it's good that Michael doesn't bend over backward to defend Brian as much when Brian would never do the same for him. Especially since Michael often shielded Brian from criticism from others when Brian's choices frequently went against Michael's own values. A moment I especially hate is when Michael and Brian are fighting in the empty Babylon when Brian is trying to convince Michael to drop the custody battle for JR, because it'll fuck over Lindsay (which Brian is totally right about). Michael says that Brian needs to grow up because Brian doesn't want a monogamous relationship, to get married, or to have children. It's fucking bullshit. Brian is not childish for not wanting those things. Brian calls Michael out on being a judgemental, sanctimonious, twat. Michael used to defend Brian for having different desires for his life because Brian's wants are 100% valid. When Michael gets married, moves to the suburbs, and has JR/fosters Hunter, he becomes this dick who thinks that if you don't have the same priorities as him, you're immature. That's a horrible belief and a total change from the accepting person he used to be.

There could have been a much better ending to Ted revenge fucking the guy (Troy) who pity fucked Ted as a Pride "gift" in season 2. Ted's initial plan to tell Troy he's Ted's pity fuck now is awesome, and Ted falling for him is 100% on brand for Ted's character. Troy continuing to be an asshole and them breaking up, despite both genuinely liking each other in the show, makes me a little sad. I have an idea for a much better end for them. Troy immediately boasts to Ted about his hobby of sleeping with "losers" as a joke in the show and that he did it to someone in Ted's building (not realizing it was actually Ted himself). Instead of what the show did, as Troy and Ted spent more time together, Troy could have seen how well Ted treated people. It could've made Troy realize that what he used to do was really shitty. We could've even seen Troy run into one of his pity fucks earlier on his own and apologize, saying that he was horrible, lead the guy on, was sorry, and hoped the guy found someone who saw how great he was. Troy could've expressed to Ted that being with him made Troy want to be a better person (because Ted does that for essentially everyone in his life by being so supportive and kind, especially after getting sober). It would've been amazing for that final night at Babylon to go a different way. Emmett could still come up to ask if Ted had dumped Troy yet, only to realize Ted had fallen for him. Then, instead of what the show did, all of them could've seen Troy apologize to the random guy he wronged who came up to him about Troy ditching him. It would've been great if Troy said after that that he wished he could find the guy he did the same thing to in Ted's building so he could apologize to that guy too, and that Ted had inspired him to take accountability. The gang could see Ted admit that he was Troy's pity fuck there. Troy could sincerely apologize in front of everyone and say he'd understand if Ted never wanted to see him again and/or if all of Ted's friends hated him. The gang could give Ted and Troy their blessing, and Ted and Troy could end up together. After all, Ted's friend group forgave people for MUCH worse behavior (i.e. Blake nearly killing Ted).

What are your Queer as Folk unpopular opinions? Tag me in your post or put them in a reblog if you do this. Here is PART TWO:

[secretariatess]

Okay, gonna be a little spicy.

Well I wouldn’t identify with fourth or third wave feminism, I think the conservative movement has made me more of a feminist than any liberal.

I get a lot of it might be pushback from the damage later stages of feminism has caused, especially against men, but I think the movement has gone overboard, allowing for sexist ideals to be considered “right,” and “the natural way.”  I know I haven’t been on board with the rather conservative view of husband leading, wife following, but they’ve started going beyond even that.

I have seen them say stuff like, “Women need men, men want women,” or insinuate that we only have what we have because of men.  Men and women aren’t equal because they aren’t the same.  The woman’s contribution to society is just to have the children.  Some of the more extreme stuff goes into things that Andrew Tate pushes, where men can have as many women as they want, but women should remain virgins for one guy because men and women are different.

Conservatives have devalued women to the point where women are capable of one thing- their contribution to the family.  And then they place men up high, as having value to both family and the overwhelming majority of society.  But I’m supposed to believe conservatives have the best interest of women at heart?  (Yes, I know, “the family is important to society!”- but that sounds rather hollow when they turn around and praise men for building everything and demanding to know what women did in order to own the feminists.)

if you insist that women really only have one job in the world, and promote the idea that with exception of mothering, men do everything better, you leave the impression that women are easily replaceable.  Once the wombs without women takes off, why keep women around?  Really, the only thing is that “men want women.”  Men couldn’t possibly need women.  Women bring nothing more to the table than the ability to become a mother, and make sure the man is taken care of. 

I know conservatives would say they aren’t erasing women, they’re just trying to bring back the natural ways and all that, but being conservative doesn’t make you immune to slippery slopes.  I fear that the sexist movements aren’t going to be the fringe conservatives much longer (the very fact that people came out defending Crowder for how he treated his wife I think shines a light on how big this problem actually is).

Here’s the thing: Women need men, and men need women.  For the sake of society.  Taking the roles of reproduction out of it, both genders are needed for society.  Both genders created society. 

Like, I don’t think I articulated this the best, and I feel like there’s so much to say to about this, but the bottom line for me is that how conservatives view women has made me more a feminist than anything else.  And just because conservatives fight a movement that is actively erasing women doesn’t mean that they themselves aren’t setting themselves up for their own kind of erasure.

[jakowskis]

@buffetpallascat doing a good ol' days reply because i had enough thoughts on this to warrant some meta, in my typical rambling fashion. hope you don't regret engaging by the time im done dfhkdsf

for starters, you're very welcome, i'm glad you enjoy the post :D

as for your question - i meant moreso that it was typical of the fandom, although it was also very much influenced by societal trends of the time, too. fandom's always had a rocky history with women, especially women who supposedly 'get in the way of "slash" couples', but the way fandom misogyny is performed has changed; i see more willful erasure of female characters these days than flat out blatant misogyny. in tw fan content from the 00s, i've seen gwen hatefully AND casually called some pretty horrible things that i rarely see fictional or real women called nowadays, simply because standards have changed. hell, one of the comms i linked, the twgenre finders one, there was several entries requesting fic where gwen experiences, like, bodily harm? not in a whump-y way, they actually wanted to recreationally read fic about her getting physically injured and suffering, out of some bizarre sense of malice towards her. simply because she 'gets in the way of janto'. and i can't even fathom that existing nowadays. pretty much everyone outside of weird little 12 year olds knows that's not acceptable. not to mention it's just weird.

interestingly i've also noticed a lottttt of change in how the fandom... reacted to and treated janto as a couple back in the day, versus now. people in 2006 were not normal about gay people. we know fandom's history with fetishizing gay men, and it was even worse in 2006 with an exceptionally rare canon gay couple being received by a jarringly hetero-but-'slash'-obsessed fanbase.

i mean, i don't wanna generalize. i saw a poll recently about how fandom is not mainly composed of straight women, contrary to popular belief, at least anymore, and i guess the question is, was it ever? i have seen a lot of the people involved in fandom in the 00s identify themselves as straight, but was that partially because of the culture of that era? have any of those people since come out as some type of queer? maybe, for some of them, that was them exploring their queerness in a safe environment, when the culture around being gay in real life was a lot different.... the same way modern fandom culture continues to be for those of us who aren't in accepting homes. if they were 20smth year olds in the 2010s/2020s, rather than the 2000s, would they still identify as straight?

not sure. but i've made a habit of going on the profiles of old lj accounts, and i'll sometimes wind up going through the journals and the personal posts of authors i respect, etc etc. a significant amount of mid 00s fic writers were straight women in their 30s - 40s, many married, some with kids. very different demographic to modern fandom. very different climate they lived in vs the one we're in.

(although, bonus note, i also once found a thread of bisexuals in 2006 praising torchwood's depiction of bisexuality, and that made me exceptionally happy. but also maybe a little sad, because torchwood's my personal fav bi rep, too, in 2023, and the fact that we've had nothing better in seventeen years is a bit of a bummer. but i digress.)

anyway, this is all to say, i've seen some insanely fetishy shit about jack and ianto that rubbed me exceptionally wrong. that gross dehumanizing, severely homophobic place where it's like... ahh, ok, so you don't see them as people, you see them as sexy dolls you can mash together. but, ofc, that's how i view it as a bisexual person in 2023 who's been on tumblr far too long. they didn't see any problem with it. they might've even seen it as progressive. how can you be homophobic when you're obsessed with the little gay people on ur screen? but it's the opposite end of the 'homophobes reducing gay ppl down to what they do in their beds' trope, and it comes across as dated and icky now.

i mean, i consume a lot of older media, i know how to turn off my 21st century sensibilities and remind myself things used to be different, but it's honestly an impressive difference. there's some fantastic fics from that era of the fandom, in fact most of my favorite fics are from that era, but i often get quite a bit of culture shock reading things. particularly, i'm always impressed by people in the 2000s, an extremely biphobic era, applying their impressive period-typical 'bisexuals aren't real' beliefs to The Bisexual Show. torchwood's rep's not perfect (again, a product of its era), but i've seen a fantastic amount of gay!ianto and straight!owen, because bisexual men don't exist, obviously, and jack's not bisexual, he's the amazing slutty space man, except he's mostly gay because all that matters is janto. and i don't even really see explorations of gwen or tosh's bisexuality at all, because, again, women who?

i found a comm a while back, i didn't include it on my list because it wasn't torchwood-exclusive and didn't have much content in the tw tag, but it was a lgbtfest, and contained fics about the team and their relationships with their bisexuality, and it was really intriguing to me to see queerness as understood by regular people in 2007/2008, y'know, not by gay writers or activists or films. i have no way of knowing if any of them were speaking from any personal place, but it was just interesting, because none of the fics i read in that comm had that same brand of tone-deaf sex-focused homophobia to them, they were progressive for the time, but it was still apparent to me that they were written by people with a mid to late 00s understanding of being gay, and i do think it's interesting, that substantial difference.

got a bit off topic, but now that i mentioned the initial fandom being overwhelmingly composed of women, i can also add that i think internalized misogyny factored hugely into the fandom's disdain for gwen. the 'strong female' trope doesn't just annoy straight men, it also annoys a lot of women (though not consciously) - not because they're opposed to well-written women, but because society tells us certain things that'd be admirable and complex and sympathetic out of a male hero are unacceptable out of a female one. it's the double standard. jack does some awful shit, but i rarely see him criticized. i've straight up seen fans go "jack's kind of a bastard, but it's ok because he's hot", which is fine in jest, i've joked about shit like that with characters, but it's not so cute when those same people turn around and condemn gwen for her actions. hell, or owen. i've literally seen someone say they'd like owen more if he was more conventionally attractive. like, ok, you're clearly just here for the janto eye candy. you haven't brought any substantial critical thinking skills. pls take ur shallow ass and leave. but back to gwen - she was held to a standard none of the other characters are held to. they picked on her for the stupidest shit. and her worse sin, the infidelity, it's bad, sure, but i've seen countless male characters who cheat on their partners who are beloved by their fandoms. it's just fucking gross. i fucking hate hypocrites.

dude, yknow what?? i've even seen fucking tosh bashing. WHO THE FUCK HATES TOSH????

ok im done. sorry for my babbling. but yeah, i think it's a fascinating thing. i love how humans change and develop with the times and how we can map the changes and how they affect media, and it's fun to observe in fandom because it's there, too, but no one's looking so i get to feel like a little scientist fdskjfds. ok i will cease with the excessive babbling now

[hasquetzorkukudoneanythingwrong]

About my version of Tezcatlipoca

Contains some LB7 spoilers

So if you've been following me for a bit, you've probably seen that I have a sorta "redesign" of Tezcatlipoca.

(Art by @/chaldeamage-neo)

Well, I wanted to make this post to kinda clarify that this isn't really a redesign.

For all intents and purposes, it might as well be. But within my own lore for the story, it isn't really. As some of you may know, the Mesoamerican gods in Fate are a symbiotic alien life form that takes human hosts to manifest. They've taken many different hosts through the ages, as is implied in Quetz's profile, that she wears a face she's never worn before. So, with that being said, for my own stories, this isn't actually a full-on redesign, but instead is Tezcatlipoca taking a different host. Most people would just redesign a character who's design they don't like and that's valid, but me personally, I decided to take advantage of that interesting bit of lore and use it for my own design. This also kinda goes with my sorta "philosophy" with redesigns. Cause sometimes the only problem people have is that a character is too pale (Tezca is a decent example) but I personally always thought that if you were gonna do it, go all the way. Like, there's elements of the original design you can see in my version, but that's more cause his character is the same, so he'd have those still. But otherwise he's pretty different, appearance wise.

(Pics by @/the8thsphynx, @/pixystixxxdraws, and @/yukisetsura)

Like seeing him here, he's clearly more different then just "the original design but dark skinned" and like, there isn't technically anything wrong with other people doing that. Tho sometimes it looks off, like you can tell the design was made with those skin tones and/or hair color in mind, so it feels better to start over. But again, that's just me personally.

So back to the main point, as I said this isn't a full on replacement of that Canon design. In-universe, Daybit still summoned a Tezcatlipoca with the blonde hair and blue eyes as such. But my OC Nota, summoned this one instead. I will say, there are Definitely other parts I wanna do away with wholesale tho (like whatever the hell they're doing with the other Tezcatlipoca gods) but this isn't a full on erasure of that original design.

But yeah, that's the post, hope everything is clear. See yall later.

[crossguild]

genuinely can't imagine what difference knowing lovelace is an alien would've made to the outcome of the mutiny on mw and jacobi's part. like, presumably at that point that still wasn't anything that would've been shared with minkowski, and jacobi was definitely not going to NOT blow up hilbert, and maxwell would still be convinced that minkowski wouldn't shoot, and would have given jacobi the go-ahead, and mk was not gonna back down on... anything...

then jacobi being like 'the WORST i have EVER been betrayed is when my boss didn't share this one piece of information that would totally have made a difference even though i don't know what difference that would have been, that he was very explicitly told not to share with me by our sadistic boss who throws people out windows. that is the worst thing that anyone has ever done to another person. finding out kepler is not 100% in control all the time is the worst betrayal i have ever exerienced' which, that and also the episode no complaints and also his 'i trust kepler with my life moment' all implies that he's actually very content with his job the other 99% of the time that he's spent in it considering he expected a workiversary celebration which no normal human in a horrible corporate job does

and it's pretty clear from the canon that jacobi knows exactly what corporate espionage entails, given that he was a-okay with doing it for six years and also had no problem with having information withheld from him as long as things work out in his favor, and he had no problem at all with mind control or stripping people of their autonomy as long as it wasn't happening to him...

and minkowski was like hey you know how in the riddle of the orion the lesson is that you always have a choice to make, and you're accountable for that choice? you could also have decided not to blow up hilbert. that wasn't even like, an explicit order or anything? it was just an option you had that you as an individual decided to take because kepler left that decision to you? that you're responsible for?

and the narrative was like yah kepler is a dick who is a corporate spy/fixer and by dint of his job he is a Bad Guy in our narrative, but jacobi COULD have been portrayed as a genuine victim of all of that but he very much was not, and was instead an active and enthusiastic participant who enjoyed being enabled by his job as a corporate espionage guy

yet i have to read multiple essays about what a poor abused victim jacobi is because he got real mad about (checks notes) his corporate spy/fixer boss doing exactly what a spy/fixer boss always does and what he has always done and which has only suddenly become a problem for jacobi because jacobi feels guilty for what happened but he refuses to acknowledge or own up to it so he blames the only other person he has a modicum of influence over while they're being held as prisoners of war.

and even in blaming kepler he didn't say 'we' could have used that information, he says well maxwell would've been able to do something with it, which is not necessarily true (they'll never know cause she's dead! so he tells himself that and can use it as fuel in his 'mad at kepler') but which is kinda sweet that he has that much faith in his team, except when that faith becomes 'they can literally do the impossible and any failure to do so is someone's fault but it sure isn't mine, when bad things happen as a result of my actions it's no one's fault but i might get unfairly blamed for it'

i like the characters of w359 because none of them are strictly good or bad and they all make bad calls and fuck up and hurt others, and that complexity makes them very nuanced and realistic. i like jacobi a lot! I'm just also aware that he's The Worst. and erasure of him being the worst makes him a MUCH less interesting character