#to either share their opinions on trans people on their racing blogs

[bi-harrymort]

Hi!

A few words about me and this blog.

[but before we go any further... even though this is a blog dedicated to Voldemort and Harrymort, I don't support Rowling or her views; hate and bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated here.]

I've been a fan of the Harry Potter series since I was a kid, but I've never interacted with the fandom actively - I never created any fanart, posts, fanfics etc., I only consumed and shared them. So, this is my first attempt at sharing my own theories and any other weird little thoughts I may have on the subject.

Even though I am open to different interpretations and opinions, I know that many may not share this view and may not want to follow me because of it (righfully so), so I'm going to write some of my hot (or maybe not so hot) takes that are my primary headcanons and/or interpratations of the text.

I'm not a fan of the movies. I think the changes made in them distort the characters, the plot and the overall story.

I don't believe Voldemort is insane and/or badly written. I may write a charcter analysis based on the books one day when I'll have the time and energy... and if anyone will be interested in reading it, of course.

At the same time I don't think that HP and its characters (including Voldemort) are great and with no faults. I love the concept of the series and the world created, but I will also be the first to critique it and point out its faults.

Lord Voldemort is Lord Voldemort. Confusing, I know. What I mean by that is that I don't like differentiating between Voldemort (the insane bad one) and Tom Riddle (the brilliant good one). Recently, I started to become disconnected from the trend in the fandom of treating Tom Riddle and Voldemort as separate entities. At the same time, I'm not gonna go around telling people to stop characterizing them, or thinking about them, in whatever way they like! It's just something that I became sensitive to and don't subscribe to anymore. 

Harrymort is the only pairing I am single-minded about. Any other ship (that doesn't involve Harry or Voldemort) I'm very neutral about.

I am a fan of female Harry, but only because of one particular fic - the Historical Importance of Runic War Warding in the British Isles by samvelg. It's my all-time favourite fanfic, and I have as much, if not more, headcanons and thoughts about this particular HP AU rather than the original HP. (At the same time, I am aware why genderbending is disliked by fandoms, and I do agree that many genderbent stories are not great. Many of them erase the lgbt+ represantation, which is what I am not at all about.)

I don't have a set gender identity headcanon for Harrymort (trans, cis, female, male, nonbinary... they are all very much appreciated).

However, my preferred sexuality headcanon for both Harry and Voldemort is either bisexual, pansexual or asexual.

I am firmly a bi-racial/having Indian ancestry Harry headcanon fan.

Recently I started falling in love with Arabic and Korean, and a headcanon of bi-racial/having some sort of other ancestry Voldemort has began to cristalize in my mind (kind of an another mirror with bi-racial Indian Harry headcanon). I've had this thought after reading this one post about how Harry is changed in fics but Voldemort stays always the same when it comes to ethnicity/race.

I have plenty of different AU ideas about this pairing (many modelled more as an AU of the Historical Importance AU) and would like to realise them at some point, but I'd like for my first posted work to be an original idea.

The reason I'm creating this account now is because Tomarrymort stories are some of the best I've ever read. No matter how much time passes, I always come back to them. I am a slow-burn hoe (slow burns and long fics are like… 90% of my fanfic consumption), and I appreciate the vast variety of themes and motifs that these stories are capable of getting into.

On a final note, I'd like to make a disclosure.

Any opinions I have are simply that - opinions. I don't think that they are the best or the most accurate or that they should be imposed on other people. Everyone has a right to like whatever they want to like, and to think whatever they want to think, as long as that does not evolve into attacking actual human beings.

It's fiction. It's fun. I appreciate people with different opinions so long as we stay mature and respectful to each other about exchanging them.

[ask-break-the-mold]

Ask BTM (Break The Mold) Master Post

This post includes basic AU info, blog owner info, disclaimers, and character info.

🖤 BTM (Break The Mold) is an Undertale AU that features many fundamental story changes and changes in the timeline. It is not connected to the AU multiverse, so the story is very focused in on one world.

Certain characters present in the source material are not present, dead, or take on less important roles than usual in the story. For example, Frisk doesn't exist,, Toriel and Asgore are deceased, and Sans is just a guy.

The name of the AU comes from a mechanic unique to this AU. Humans have the ability to use an ability called Mold Break, which changes the style of combat. For example, if you were to fight Elia, you would need to participate in a rhythm game rather than using bullet hell style combat.

🖤 Blog Owner Info:

My name is Sage, I'm 15 years old (Minor! Don't be weird!) and my pronouns are He/They!.

Tone tags not necessary unless your messages are very unclear.

Adults, please do not contact me in hopes of a friendship, I will not be open to it. If your age isn't listed, I will assume you are either under 13, or an adult.

My fandoms are MLP, Pokémon, and Undertale.

I've been doing art for 5 years.

This is not my main account. If I eventually feel comfortable, I will link my main here.

⚠️ DISCLAIMERS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS:

BTM focuses on themes of discrimination towards transgender individuals and individuals with disabilities, strenuous parental relationships, and the complexity of morality. I (the blog owner and writer) am trans and disabled, so this story is based off many of my own experiences, even though many of my characters do not share the same disabilities, gender identities, or ideals as me.

Some other less prevalent themes include suicide and self harm, specifically in the backstory of Chara. When present, posts with these themes will be appropriately censored and with a warning in place.

Themes not present in this blog, but that are present in the genocide route of this story (which will be written on another website with the link inserted here when in progress) include violence and manipulation. BTM is intended for people 13 and older. If any of the mentioned themes make you feel uncomfortable, do not interact with the blog and keep yourself safe <3

Character info

💛 Mirri

Age: 15 years old.

Pronouns: He/Him (They is fine as well, just not the most preferred)

Gender: "Uhhhh, guy."

Species: Born human, currently considered a cyborg due to intensive surgeries.

Soul Type: Justice

Mold Break Battle Style: Arcade style type fighting, with an emphasis on blocking and dodging.

Race: Mixed

Ethnicity: He considers himself a citizen of the underground and nothing else.

Relationships: He has a strained relationship with his moms, Allie and Elia. They're still loving, but things are tough right now. He's somewhat friendly with Sans, as Sans is the only one who will play video games with him willingly. He uses Alphys's timidity against her, and pressures her into giving him new features that will enhance his strength. He is rude to most monsters.

Personality: A pretty disagreeable guy, who isn't the most friendly. He's not the most mature, but is very opinionated and has a strong sense of what is right and wrong, even if his morals don't align with others. He is deeply troubled with feelings of powerlessness, due to being born very weak. Due to these insecurities, it takes effort to warm up to him, but once someone has gotten into his inner circle, he is easy to manipulate.

❤ Allie

Age: 38 years old.

Pronouns: She/Her

Gender: Trans Woman

Species: Human

Soul type: Determination

Mold Break Battle Style: A more high stakes and open borders bullet hell than the base game.

Race: East Asian

Ethnicity: Asian American

Relationships: She has been married to Elia for 17 years, and is the mother of Mirri. She tries to bond with Mirri, but can't seem to break down his walls. She is well respected by most monsters, but has failed to create any lasting friendships. After the loss of her mother in law, Toriel, she has been making more effort in her relationships.

Personality: Stern, serious, quiet. Her determination makes her hyperfixate on what she finds important. She tries to be emotionally expressive, but it's hard for her. She is troubled by her past, so she pours herself into work.

💙 Elia (or Élia)

Age: 37

Pronouns: She/They

Gender: "....girl."

Species: Human

Soul type: Patience

Mold Break Battle Style: Non traditional rhythm game style fighting. Less fighting, more trying to tire you out and overwhelm you.

Race: Pacific Islander

Ethnicity: Filipina American

Relationships: She is Allie's wife, and the mother of Mirri. She is a bit closer to Mirri than Allie is. She was very close to her mother, Toriel, before she passed. She has close bonds with many monsters.

Personality: Elia is sweet and motherly. She took after Toriel in many ways. She has an eerie energy to her, and has an eloquent way of speaking, which tends to unnerve whoever she is talking to- but only at first. She quickly proves trustable. She believes strongly in the importance of taking care of yourself and others.

❤ Chara

Age: 15

Pronouns: Mirror (Use your pronouns on them)

Gender: Unimportant

Species: Human

Soul Type: Determination

Mold Break Battle Style: Knife. Just knife.

Race: ?

Ethnicity: ?

Relationships: To be seen.

Personality: To be seen.

You may send asks to any character that canonically exists in this AU.

However, the focus will be on these main 4.

In this blog, Chara is a pacifist, so do not expect aggressive or murderous actions. This blog is not covering the genocide route of this story.

[andromedasummer]

since ive seen a few more radfems in the community and dont want them getting confidence in sharing poorly formed opinions that can and will pose a risk to the many trans people in the tumblr motorsport community, this is a reminder that my blog is for people who love racing and trans people and that any of you cryptoterfs crying about trans men and women while following sports dominated by cis men should fuck off.

[evanescentjasmine]

I’m going to talk about a little pet peeve of mine with regard to portrayal of poc in fic, TMA specifically since that’s what I mostly read and write for. 

I suppose I should first start by saying that, of course, poc are not a monolith, and I’m certain there are other poc who have many different views on this issue. And also this post is in no way meant to demonise, shame, or otherwise discourage people from writing poc in fic if they’re doing something differently. This is just a thing I’ve been noodling on for a while and have had several interesting conversations with friends about, and now that I think I’ve figured out why I have this pet peeve, I figured I’d gather my thoughts into a post.

As a result of the fact we have no canonical racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds for our main TMA cast, we’ve ended up with many diverse headcanons, and it’s absolutely lovely to see. I’m all for more diversity and I’m always delighted to see people’s headcanons. 

However, what often happens is I’ll be reading a fic and plodding along in a character’s PoV and get mention of their skin colour. And nothing else. I find this, personally, extremely jarring. In a short one-shot it makes sense, because you’re usually touching on one scenario and then dipping out. Likewise if the fic is in a different setting, is cracky, or is told from someone else’s PoV, that’s all fine. But if I’m reading a serious long-fic close in the poc’s head and...nothing? That’s just bizarre to me.

Your heritage, culture, religion, and background, all of those affect how you view the world, and how the world views you in return. How people treat you, how you carry yourself, what you’re conscious of, all of that shifts. And the weird thing is that many writers are aware of this when it comes to characters being ace or trans or neurodivergent—and I’m genuinely pleased by that, don’t get me wrong. Nothing has made my ace self happier than the casual aceness in TMA fics that often resonates so well with my experience. But just as gender, orientation, and neurodivergence change how a character interacts with their world, so do race, ethnicity, and religion. 

As a child, I spent a couple of years in England while my mother was getting her degree. Though I started using Arabic less and less, my mother still spoke to me almost exclusively in Arabic at home. We still ate romy cheese and molokhia and the right kind of rice, though we missed out on other things. She managed to get an Egyptian channel on TV somehow, which means I still grew up with different cultural touchstones and make pop-culture references that I can’t share with my non-Arabic-speaking friends. She also became friends with just about every Egyptian in her university, so for those years I had a bevy of unrelated Uncles and Aunties from cities all over Egypt, banding together to go on outings or celebrate our holidays.

As an adult who sometimes travels abroad solo, and as a fair-skinned Arab who’s fluent in English, usually in a Western country the most I’ll get is puzzled people trying to parse my accent and convinced someone in my family came from somewhere. When they hear my name, though, that shifts. I get things like surprise, passive-aggressive digs at my home region, weird questions, insistence I don’t look Egyptian (which, what does that even mean?) or the ever-popular, ever-irritating: Oh, your English is so good!

At airports, with my Egyptian passport, it’s less benign. I am very commonly taken aside for extra security, all of which I expect and am prepared for, and which always confuses foreign friends who insisted beforehand that surely they wouldn’t pull me aside. Unspoken is the fact I, y’know, don’t look like what they imagine a terrorist would. But I’m Arab and that’s how it goes, despite my, er, more “Western” leaning presentation. 

This would be an entirely different story if I were hijabi, or had darker skin, or a more pronounced accent. I am aware I’m absolutely awash with privilege. Likewise, it would be different if I had a non-Arab name and passport. 

So it’s slightly baffling to me as to why a Jon who is Pakistani or Indian or Arab and/or Black British would go through life the exact same way a white British character would. 

Now, I understand that race and ethnicity can be very fraught, and that many writers don’t want to step on toes or get things wrong or feel it isn’t their place to explore these things, and certainly I don’t think it’s a person’s place to explore The Struggles of X Background unless they also share said background. I’m not saying a fic should portray racism and microaggressions either (and if they do, please take care and tag them appropriately), but that past experiences of them would affect a character. A fic doesn’t have to be about the Arab Experience With Racism (™) to mention that, say, an Arab Jon headed to the airport in S3 for his world tour would have been very conscious to be as put together as he could, given the circumstances, and have all his things in order. 

And there’s so much more to us besides. What stories did your character grow up with? What language was spoken at home? Do they also speak it? If not, how do they feel about that? What are their comfort foods? Their family traditions? The things they do without thinking? The obscure pop-culture opinions they can’t even begin to explain? (Ask me about the crossover between Egyptian political comedy and cosmic horror sometime…)

I’m not saying you’ll always get it right. Hell, I’m not saying I always get it right either. I’m sure someone can read one of my fics and be like, “nope, this isn’t true to me!” And that’s okay. The important thing, for me, is trying.

Because here’s the thing. 

I want you to imagine reading a fic where I, a born and raised Egyptian, wrote white characters in, say, a suburb in the US as though they shared my personal experiences. It’s a multi-generational household, people of the same gender greet with a kiss on each cheek, lunch is the main meal, adults only move out when they get married, every older person they meet is Auntie or Uncle, every bathroom has a bidet, there’s a backdrop of Muslim assumptions and views of morality, and the characters discuss their Eid plans because, well, everyone celebrates Eid, obviously.

Weird, right? 

So why is this normal the other way around? 

Have you ever stopped to wonder why white (and often, especially American) experiences are considered the default? The universal inoffensive base on which the rest is built? 

Yes, I understand that writers are trying to be inoffensive and respectful of other backgrounds. But actually, I find the usual method of having the only difference be their skin colour or features pretty reductive. We’re more than just a paint job or a sprinkle of flavour to add on top of the default. Many of us have fundamentally different life experiences and ignoring this contributes to that assumption of your experience being universal. 

Yes, fic is supposed to be for fun and maybe you don’t want to have to think about all this, and I get that completely. I have all the respect in the world for writers who tag their TMA fics as an American AU, or who don’t mention anyone’s races. I get it. But when you have characters without a canonical race and you give them one, you’re making a decision, and I want you to think about it. 

Yes, this is a lot of research, but the internet is full of people talking about themselves and their experiences. Read their articles, read their blogs, read their twitter threads, watch their videos, see what they have to say and use it as a jumping-off point. I’m really fond of the Writing With Color blog, so if you’re not sure where to start I’d recommend giving them a look. 

Because writers outside of the Anglosphere already do this research in order to write in most fandoms. Writers of colour already put themselves in your shoes to write white characters. And frankly, given the amount of care that many white writers put into researching Britishisms, I don’t see why this can’t extend to other cultural differences as well.

[silvysartfulness]

I've gotten a whole bunch of new followers since I started making The Untamed content about a year ago, and I think it may be a good time to introduce myself and this blog to the newcomers.

Hi! ♥

I'm glad you find this chaotic mess entertaining enough to want to stick around!

That said, if you don't feel comfortable with who I am and/or what I post, just unfollow at any time, no explanations needed.

I'm Silvy, I'm a Fandom Old, 40+, and have been involved in online fandom since the late 90ies.

I'm neurodivergent, Aspie/ADHD and some spare change. I hyperfocus on things, and love to analyze fictional characters and tropes, especially things to do with the messiness and complexities of human nature and emotion. At the moment, as should be obvious, I live in the The Untamed universe, especially the Yi City corner. (You don't get emotions much messier and more complex than that!)

I have always been fascinated by ”villains” - the people who don't act like others do, who are different, and who hurt people, sometimes without meaning to. (Sometimes very much meaning to.)

I love redemption arcs. I've grown to realize there's a this recent phenomenon happening online where people claim certain fictional characters don't ”deserve” them. I think that's utter bullshit, and an extremely negative and destructive mindset to have. People should always have the chance to change and do better. Everyone makes mistakes. Some worse than others. But while no one ”deserves” forgiveness, unless it's freely given, everyone should have the chance to change, move on and be better.

I have always been fascinated by fiction as a medium to explore the messiness of humanity. Of how people hurt each other and heal each other and grow either way. The mess of who people end up loving, or hating, or - bittersweetly - both at once. In my opinion, that is the very purpose of fiction – the mirror held up to explore our own humanity, without suffering any of the negative consequences of reality. Yes, that includes the really problematic stuff. Yes, all the problematic stuff. Fiction is not reality.

I have 100% understanding for people who don't want to watch or read certain things – don't self-harm by engaging with content and creators that makes you angry and upset! I also have 0% patience with people demanding others conform to their particular standards of purity. It's everyone's responsibility to curate their own online experience. Haters will be blocked.

I'm queer (no, queer is not a slur.) Non-straight, asexual, married to another woman for 6 years now. I'd say a majority of my best friends are trans or otherwise non-cis. If you’re cis and find trans/non-binary/intersex/non-gender conforming etc people strange and frightening, by all means – stick around! I reblog quite a lot of trans-positive content. Maybe it'll offer insights! Any TERF-rhethoric will be blocked and shut down on sight, though. This is a safe space.

I'm Swedish. Socialism works. Just saying. 👍

These are simple facts – if any of the above is a dealbreaker, just click unfollow and everyone will probably be happier in the long run. :)

The less problematic stuff: I'm a professional illustrator, though currently on more or less permanent sick leave. Despite sometimes crippling social anxiety, I also ended up teaching art classes - Life Drawing and Concept Art - at the local university, and was often told I was one of their most popular and well-liked guest teachers. I'm self-taught as a writer, though I am a sponge when it comes to prose and language, so for any skills I have picked up over the years, I can only thank those whose works I have read throughout my life.

I like trying my hand at most creative crafts; painting, woodcarving, glasspainting, pewter pouring, looking to try out resins soon maybe..? I take tons upon tons of pictures. If you know me better, you have probably been exposed to my random ”Look at pretty thing X I saw today!” photo-assault. (It's a love language. ♥)

I used to study archaeology at university for years, before sidling over into a creative career as a museum-illustrator, and then onward to other projects from there. It's amazing what a 100.000+ year view on humanity will do for your sense of perspective! People are people. People have always been people. We are all one people - and diversity in culture, ethnicity and language is one of the most beautiful arts of our human race. Our differences and samenesses always to be equally celebrated. (Now if we could only get better at looking back and learn from previous civilizations' mistakes so we'd stop repeating them...)

I like cats. And betta fish. And purple roses (I used to collect purple rose cultivars, before I got too fatigued to be able to take care of my garden properly. Some still live! Rhapsody In Blue is a trooper, if you want a really hardy purple rose! They can even live in pots, if you don't have a garden.)

(See, I told you I could never resist a chance to share a photo...)

I am very, very forgetful. I got my neurodivergence diagnoses very late in life, and by then my brain was so burned out, it's permanently damaged. Fatigue, memory problems and concentration issues are things I always struggle with. If I ghost you, it's not because I'm upset or dislike you – I either missed your message, or forgot about it, or just didn’t know what to say. I'm sorry. I'm trying my best. ♥

I believe in kindness.

I try to be kind and understanding, and meet others with patience. It's taken me a lifetime fraught with generous amounts of trauma to learn to feel strong, comfortable and mostly at peace with myself, and I have very little interest in conflict or drama.

That's about it, Silvy all summed up.

Wishing all you a happy weekend!

[wolfstar-in-color]

Personal account: How IDs help us and how our learning process has been

Today in Wolfstar in Color, we close our week that’s been focused on disabilities, ID’s and accessibility (check our Monday fic rec list, our Tuesday post ‘what are ID’s’, our resources Wednesday with links to pages that help in the task, our Thursday post ‘how to do ID’s) with sharing a bit about how it’s been our learning process of making image descriptions. We really hope we find some new blogs, both from artists and fans, including and adding descriptions to their visual content, so our fandom gets flooded with them.

This personal recount is going to be focused in my experience (Moth) since I’m newer at this practice, and so some of you might find it easier to relate with that! I had all the fears, all the questions, and I think I’ve made more than one mistake in my descriptions. If you ever have questions, want to yell into the void, or want to find some motivation to keep doing image descriptions, you can always leave us an ask. Honestly, it would be lovely just to know more people are doing this.

The rest of the post is under a cut, since it’s kinda long - but I also offer some advise at the end based on my own experience, so I really invite y’all to read!

How Image descriptions help me

Doing Images description has helped me realize how much I rely on them when I’m low in spoons, and how helpful they can be to learn about the meaning and intent of an image in the creator’s perspective. Sometimes, when I’m very exhausted, I can’t process some stimuli too well (particularly videos), and video and image descriptions allow me to engage while also not needing to use my whole brain to understand what the artist/creator is trying to convey, nor getting sensory overload with sound in videos in my case. So yeah, please bring more images description into the internet. They really, really help a lot of people to participate in fandom.

What I’ve learnt from doing Image descriptions

Learning how to do Images descriptions has been fun and important for me to also take perspective about how to work for a more accessible internet for everyone. Internet is important for a lot of us, including those who are disabled and immunosuppressed, since engaging with the same intensity as before with the outside world in the middle of a pandemic is not always an option. But honestly, I think the pandemic has shown how relationships and engagement in spaces like fandom might be important to build opinion, practice solidarity, learn about perspective taking, and build resource networks and friendships for everyone.

Writing Images descriptions is a skill, without a doubt. As such, is something you have to grow into. This is still a new skill I’m trying to master. Yes, it takes time to read a bit and get used to how to go about certain characteristics, with what information to start with, how not to ‘tear apart’ the artwork  (I particularly struggle with symbols and sometimes, because of the scope of this blog, how to convey ethnicity, especially when a creator doesn’t have an explicit identity/ethnicity/race description in their blog/image). I still tend to start with ‘image of’ or other context descriptors that are not really needed. I still get very unsure about how I’m doing, but at the end of the day, the learning process can only be done by trying. The positive feedback and gentle correction don’t hurt either!

I’ve also discovered in the process that doing image descriptions is incredible entertaining for me - and it’s honestly an activity I enjoy since it allows me to sort of ‘disconnect’ my brain and just submerge myself in the work of artists. I think it has helped me to hone my own writing skills too. It’s not too different to try to bring into life a description of a scene in a fic, only that it’s more of an inter-textual experience, since you are also trying to convey the intentions of the artist, bring their work to life for other people, and that makes me incredibly happy, and makes the activity really rewarding.

Some personal tips when doing IDs

- Don’t do them in mass, if you are low on spoons. The last ones are going to suck. Don’t overdo and burn out, because it’s hard to come back from there. Be honest with yourself if you can’t do more.

- Find a pal that might be able to read your IDs and rant with you when you are struggling (thanks Theo!!). But if you are on your own, that’s fine too!

- Contact the artist, if they are still on tumblr or other social media, if you got any doubt with a part of the image. Do so after you do your research in basic stuff (clothing, for example), but don’t back up from the task just because you are not sure about something in the image! Most artists are going to be thrilled to help you, and it might be a nice way to bring some awareness too of the need of using descriptions in videos, gifs and images.

- Do IDs for images/videos/gifsets you love. I know a lot of the tips we’ve handed are about ‘keeping it short’ but honestly, the goal is to give an experience, so if you are like me and need lots of words, then allow yourself to do that! If you are passionate and give a long, poetic description, worthy of its own fic, it’s likely people will appreciate it (and to be honest, if you get inspired to write something inspired in the image? it’s a win-win situation!)

- Make the ‘ID time’ an special, ‘me’ time - for me, is very close to meditating, to be honest. Put some fun music. Make a playlist that fit the artwork. Let yourself get loose in not having to think about anything but the beautiful artwork you are enjoying for a few good minutes.

- Use resources!! wolfstar-in-color has been posting things that help a lot in the process of writing ID! use the guide to write skin tones from writing in color! use the pose reference from Adorka stock (the poses usually have name in the stock!)! Go dig on @blindbeta‘s posts, use the guides to draw wheelchairs to learn how to describe the different parts. And if stuck, go ask in wonderful blogs the details you need to learn to do an effective and respectful description. There are more resources to come in the blog, but there are amazing blogs for trans and queer issues, ethnic and racial diversity, history, clothing and art, that you can look for yourself too!

- Something I’m trying to do more now: offer the artists you know the IDs you’ve done so they put them with the artwork, instead of adding an image description that likely, will only be reblogged half of the time. Who knows, it might end up with you two striking a collab mode of working!

So with that, here in Wolfstar in Color, we invite you to help us fill the fandom with image descriptions of the beautiful fanart, fanvids, gifsets and other visual content we have! If you don’t feel too confident, you can always submit the link to the image and your description, if you want us to post it for you, but we honestly invite you to give it a try, use the resources we are providing, and work with us to make this fandom more accessible!

[cats-moss-gays]

@terflies

You’ve been all over my posts so I’m just going to consolidate into this one. I’m tired of scrolling past your long and quite frankly boring responses. This post will be divided into sections. If you’re going to respond please say something interesting. However I doubt either of us will ever change the other’s mind. These are kind of like closing statements and I doubt I’ll make anymore major responses because I’m trying to stay focused on offline things.

1. Unanswered Questions

There are some questions and statements in my reblogs that you conveniently ignored.

Definition of a woman? You responded with some generic bs that very clearly isn’t an answer. I’ll be more specific, what should the dictionary definition be? Any ideas?

If I don’t feel like a woman am I allowed to identify as one? You said you weren’t going to humour this question but it is applicable to me and many other gc women. I definitely don’t have any internal feeling of womanhood, or any gender. Does this mean I have to be agender? Is the female gender label restricted to a certain feeling? Or is there absolutely nothing that women have in common?

What is the feeling of womanhood? You kind of answered this but I have a follow up question. You say the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being perceived as a woman. If I feel indifferent to this does it mean I’m not a woman? Additionally, many women feel uncomfortable with being perceived as a woman because of the misogyny associated with the label, does this make them men?

2. Inaccurate Statements and Lies

I don’t believe any “TRAs” define women by gender roles

You may not but there are many who do. It’s also important to point out how deeply ingrained gender roles are in society; you can’t stop them by just saying your choices exist in a vacuum. I’m sure you think I’m just making this up for fun, so here are some examples ;)  x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

So this whole…thing is dishonest from the start. Gender does not replace sex.

In another post you said that laws should be based on gender instead of sex. So which is it, either gender isn’t replacing sex or it is. When feminists talk about sex based oppression they’re called terfs. When gay people say their attraction is based on sex they’re called transphobic. When people were saying that only females get cervical cancer, they were called violent transphobes. Gender is absolutely attempting to replace sex as the basis of legal protections, safe spaces, political movements, etc. Two of the top post on my blog are more extreme example of this. x - x

BONUS: You’re saying TERF rhetoric

3. The “Questions” Post

You seem very confused about how to define biological sex and to some extent I understand that but you have to stop playing dumb. There must be some way that doctors are able to identify the sex of a fetus before it’s even born in the vast majority of cases, right? And before you try to say I’m just ignoring the existence of intersex people or trying to deny science, I’ll point out that I have watched and read a lot of “sex is a spectrum” stuff. I understand that DSDs exist and that biology is complicated. Our disagreement is mostly not over the facts but over how to define them. I know that however I explain it you’ll pretend you don’t understand it, so instead I’ll just link you to some other sources that explain it more in depth. x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

A third sex—and many creatures have more than two—does not necessarily mean a third gamete. Mostly this question is a childish distraction, but if you were to use a strict, gamete-based definition of sex the answer would be “none”.

So all infertile people are a third sex? To be female you have to be able to bear children? And you call me regressive, yikes. This can be debunked with the same sources from above but I wanted to feature it in my post because I want people to know that you think there’s a third sex.

I made a quick little chart to compare all the things gender has been compared to! The difference is that while many are socially defined, gender is socially constructed. If someone never interacted with other humans, they would still have a skin color, have or not have specific abilities, have a sexual orientation, and be male or female. They would not have an observable gender identity.

1 - You refuse to humor my questions about being a woman who doesn’t feel like one, however this is not in bad faith; I do want to know what you think. Many gc/radfems, including myself, and many women in general do not have a specific feeling of gender. This is especially true for gnc women, who often feel a disconnect from the feminine gender role and subsequently, the feminine gender. The solution is to realize that there are no standards to conform to to be a woman, no clothes or interests or feelings, just the biological reality one is born with.

2 - You say “the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being called a woman” but what does that mean? It’s circular reasoning, a fallacy called begging the question. How do you know you are a woman? If I gave up being a terf on tumblr, how would you advise that I identify if I don’t think I feel like a woman? My current plan was to just pick the mogai flag with the prettiest colors, but I’m thinking maybe there’s more to it than that...

3 - See my explanation above. Sex is comparable to race or disability or sexuality; gender is not.

4 - You say genders are social classes. If they are indeed social classes, they are unnecessary ones that reinforce oppression. They are undefinable when not based on biological sex or gender roles. The other example of classes I can think of is wealth. Wealth classes have obvious divisions, you can’t just identify into more money. Gender has nothing that is shared by every woman, man, or nonbinary, so you can just identify in and out of classes. Additionally, if there are like 100 genders, are there 100 classes? 

4. The “Biological” Sex Post

Gender does not replace sex

Then why are TRAs trying to say sexuality, legal protections, bathrooms, spaces, political movements, etc should be based on gender instead of sex? You keep contradicting yourself; you should talk to your fellow trans activists because many would disagree. Also see my response in part two.

A number of points here aren’t factually wrong but simple (*simply) irrelevant

So you would agree that biological sex is important and that it is relevant to many conversations? Then why were people getting mad about this?

Or this?

On to the specific examples. This post is long enough already and I’m not going to spoon feed basic biology to you because you’ll probably just ignore it. I referenced a variety of sources earlier. I’ll just reference Invisible Women since it’s an amazing book.

1. This first point is, appropriately enough, true in isolation; it just doesn’t support Paradox Institute’s argument. Listing it leads the audience to believe that truth is on their side, but PI do nothing at all to justify that.

So nothing here is true? They’re just lying? Here are their sources btw.

2. Generally irrelevant, but not entirely biologically accurate, either. It isn’t that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are categories intrinsic to nature that produce small, motile and large, immotile gametes respectively; ‘male’ and ‘female’ are labels we assign (generally, but not always) according to gamete size.

So it’s not relevant that one sex has the ability to carry children or menstruation or get an abortion? It’s not like there’s any issues women face specifically for that, right? So we assign the labels male and female to gametes. If you want to play semantics, sure, we created the words, but the gametes themselves already existed. Not really sure what you’re trying to say here other than disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and moving some words around. Are you implying that the categorizations of gametes are subjective? Are you saying there’s a spectrum of gametes?? Are eggs just big sperm and sperm just small eggs??? Genuinely have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to prove here.

3. Whatever your opinion of evolutionary psychology, this does not preclude gender. (On the contrary, we ought to include gender in our understanding of cultural development with respect to sex.)

The only gender in history was gender roles, and both were tied to sex in most cases. Sex absolutely came before gender and is more integral to our existence. In any time before the last few decades, gender and sex were basically synonyms.

4. Entirely a straw argument. And, to the contrary, precision greater than two sex categories would be beneficial (i.e. specific sex characteristics, history, endocrinology etc.).

Obviously doctors don’t just diagnose based on sex, they factor in medical history and other traits. Precision is irrelevant because it still focuses on sex not gender. If it’s “entirely a straw argument” why did someone else reblog your response with this?

Speaking as a member of a medical family, the medical one fucking OFFENDS me.

Blood type HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. Or biological sex! Both are totally irrelevant! And medication dosage is determined by AGE and SIZE. A 25-year-old 160-pound person with a penis needs the exact same dose as a 25-year-old 160-pound person with a vagina. In fact, possibly LESS of a dose, if the person with a penis is 5’10” and the person with a vagina is 5’5”. (The taller person may be underweight.)

This is just. UGH. I could scream.

@prismatic-bell​ this is one of the funniest and dumbest replies I’ve ever gotten. First of all “member of a medical family” tf is that lmao. This reminds me of that post where the “medical worker” tra turned out to be a garbage collector guy. I have no idea why you brought up blood type when it is literally never mentioned in the original post. Strawman much? Fucking obviously blood type isn’t affected by sex, and you’re completely missing the point if you think gender has anything to do with this. Medication dosage is decided by age and size, yes, but also biological sex. This is like basic medical science, dumbass. Mandatory reading from Invisible Women as punishment for your stupidity crimes:

People called her a terf for this :)

5. How sports are best divided is a far broader question than this point implies. We could, for example, segregate sports by relevant physical attributes (as is already the case in some sports) rather than by sex or gender. This point also presupposes (but does not justify) that a woman having an advantage in women’s sports by dint of being trans is significantly greater than an advantage any woman might have by dint of her natural attributes (which, empirically, she does not) and hence would be unfair. That said, enforcement of “female” sports is already marred by racism and perisexism.

You agree sex and gender are different, yes? So then why should males be in female sports? You’re trying to distract me with that stuff about physical performance and whatever. Focus on the question at hand, should males be allowed into female sports? We cannot eradicate sex-segregated sports because female athletes will be even more systematically disadvantaged. If you were truly a feminist you’d understand that female sports are the result of the movement you claim to support. More Invisible Women facts plus some interesting info about the plough hypothesis:

6. Simply untrue. Excluding trans women from statistics about women on the basis that doing so would affect those statistics is arbitrary at best. Those statistics may change, but that does not mean they are unsuitable or inappropriate. The exclusion of any subset of women can be justified in exactly the same way.

Nope! Stop trying to use women of color and intersex women as justifications for why we should let men pretend to be women. You’ve seen the hundreds of receipts of trans women committing all sorts of male violence. Has anyone found anywhere near a comparable number of trans men doing similar things? They have not, even though if trans men were truly men they would be much more violent.

7. The majority of single-sex spaces are, functionally, just as much single-gender (owing to the traditional equivalence of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and to the majority of the population being cis. Trans people have been using spaces appropriate to their gender for decades, whereas concerns about them doing so are based on speculation and hypotheticals rather than fact. (Aided, as with a lot of bigotry, by bad and manipulated statistics.)

I’ve spoken about my opinions on the bathroom debate before. If a passing trans person uses the bathroom of their choice I don’t really care, but there have already been many examples of men making women uncomfortable in their bathrooms, or worse. Making all bathrooms gender neutral is by far the worst idea, but unfortunately that seems to be where we’re headed. More Invisible Women, just for fun:

8. This is the worst red herring, exploiting violent misogyny for the sake of argument. It is another straw argument, too, since—even ignoring trans-positive feminism in practice and assuming trans people act only in self-interest—trans people are concerned with addressing such injustice.

Sure, many trans people are supportive of feminism. But we can’t effectively dismantle the patriarchy if we can’t accurately describe the (sex-based) oppression involved. Women are routinely silenced when talking about our biology, even when there is no “transphobic” language involved. “Trans-positive feminism” also often reinforces misogyny by supporting sex work and porn, and by shutting down analysis of things like femininity and makeup because “some women like it.” See also from trans activists: misogyny racism homophobia + lesbophobia

9. Similar to (7) there is no consistent distinction between sex and gender across law. Even so, this is another red herring as it is possible to recognise both sex and gender in laws and policies. Some laws already do (at least functionally, if not explicitly).

You can deny it but the TRA train is leaving without you and they’ve been clear about their goals. As you’ve seen in this post, gender is intended to replace sex. Those who bring up sex-based issues are silenced as “terfs” who deserve the hatred thrown at them.

Sorry for making such a long post but I was on a roll so I just kept writing. I don’t expect @terflies​ to respond to all of this but I wanted an excuse to make some sort of masterpost that links to a lot of my other posts and can be used in the future. Online school is going pretty well and I’m trying to start some doing some hobbies that are better than tumblr blogging.

[xeno-aligned]

having a long dni just makes this place an echo chamber; it makes sense for like, pedos n shit but everything else is excessive

me: i don’t want these types of people to interact for my personal safety and wellbeing and the safety and wellbeing of my followers, as well as the wider MOGAI/LGBTIA+ community.

someone: but hoW WILL YOU LEARN????

tw for transphobia/transmisa, truscum/transmed/adnb rhetoric, suicide

seriously, anon. i don’t want to learn from people who want me and my community dead. yes, that’s what the people on my dni list want - just the other week i got an ask telling me to kill myself “if [i’m] not dysphoric”. as it turns out, i am dysphoric, but does that make me any better in their eyes? no, because all truscum and transmeds are transphobic, even if they’re trans themselves. 

why? because they’re against nondysphoric trans people, who are still, by definition, transgender. and i am by far not the only person to have someone tell me to kill myself because i’m mogai or support nondysphorics. i get anon hate all the time. i get people in the notes and replies of my posts telling me how disgusting i am. are these the kinds of people who i want to learn from? no!

i don’t want to hear the opinion of terfs. i don’t want to hear the opinion of truscum or transmeds or “actually dysphoric nonbinary” people. i don’t want to hear from john doe whose only knowledge of trans people is ru paul’s drag race and that being trans must be Pain And Suffering and if not they’re Not Really Trans. i don’t want to hear from others on my dni list either, like fascists, racists, aspec exclusionists, system gatekeepers, anti-semitics, islamophobes... is that unreasonable? sure isn’t! 

it’s not “excessive” to want safety. it’s not “excessive” to want to at least try to limit who can and cannot interact with this blog. yes, i’m sure there are people who are transmeds or whatever and still follow this blog for shits and giggles, and yes, aside from blocking (and reporting in some cases) there’s nothing i can really do about it, but i can at least try. 

i don’t care if we’re creating an echo chamber. do you know what a community is? its a place where like-minded people can come together, share ideas and resources, and learn from each other and teach each other. these are the kind of people i want to learn from. not truscum, not transmeds, not transphobes who send suicide baiting to strangers on the internet just because of their beliefs. is that so much to ask? i don’t think so.

[yesifonlyyouknew]

Happy new years tumblr.....hope you die slower than you already are

Ive waited and waited and waited to see if MAYBE Tumblr would see how bad things have turned out ever since they took away my, no our, porn aaannnnnnnddd possibly give it back....BUT NOPE.

Ive been with Tumblr ever since I was in middle school. I always loved the chain links of repost that would invite so many individual's to state their opinion either being funny or serious, everyone was invited to share.

I loved the body positivity that raced through these streams and the power of self loving tips that helped EVERYONE ranging from young, old, cis, trans, black, white...it was all beautiful...at least to me.

I loved the togetherness that we had guys, being able to just be us on a site or app with others just like us..intellectuals that came up with the COOLEST SHIT EVER

I loved the art, the beautiful beautiful art. Art of Yuri On Ice, animals, nature....THE NAKED HUMAN BODY (BECAUSE GOD DAMN TUMBLR YOU CANT GET THAT FROM STUPID TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM ONLY HERE TUMBLR ONLY HERE)

But most importantly I always always loved the porn....it brought people together (not like that) If you like furries but didnt want to be judgedn shit theres like 200+ blogs dedicated to furries with people who feel the saaame way. You wanted to see what audio porn is like #moaningmen was the go to man (soooooo hot)

You wanted to see some trans men or women get it on with out being refered to as some shit they DONT IDENTIFY WITH, Tumblr had you man. Tumblr had everything Facebook, twitter, Instagram...shit any social website didnt have.

So what are we intellectuals gonna do now you ask? Where are we gonna get just as much porn, news, funny memes, and self love all in one go?......I dont know guys. Tumblr brought so many people together, made everyone comfortable alone in their own little corner....because it wasnt a corner at all. You were just facing the wrong way (mediforically speaking) but once you turned around you realized that their where people just like you going through the exact same thing. You realized that you werent alone at all, that you had, well, a family and it was beautiful.

I really hate how tumblr ended, I really do. And I hate to leave what was once my home, my family.......my fap zone. But I cant be here anymore. This will be my last post (not like I ever really did but still) Good bye tumblr....good bye home....

[scifimagpie]

Solidarity and Other Dreams

One of the most subtle and painful things about the internet age - perhaps any age - is finding out that someone you admire has acted in a far less-than-admirable way. Reconciling that with continued affection can be tricky. For example, I've heard some mega-questionable things about Amanda Palmer, wife of Neil Gaiman - who has been thoroughly castigated ad nauseam in public and private. And so it goes for many celebrities and important figures around the general Leftist/leftist/liberal community. You can probably think of someone you like who's done or said something insensitive, ableist, transphobic, racist, homophobic, misogynist, or otherwise disappointing. Someone who didn't take a strong enough stance, or too strong a stance, or said something that made your skin crawl.

Have I been this person? Probably. I try to hunt down and deal with my own mistakes, relying on the trauma-survivor skills of micro-self analysis. I count my sins and errors and mistakes like pre-reformation Scrooge with his money. I do not forget or forgive myself. This is not necessarily a character strength, either, nor something I recommend to others.

And of course, many of us do that with others.

But recently, after ditching a friendship that was bad for me, I went to my "blocked users" list on Facebook and really had a look at this. I remembered most people on it. Some were casually encountered, but some had become friends - who had, at one point or another, said something I really, really didn't like.

And I considered...is it really worth keeping someone blocked if you can't remember the exact nature of their infraction?

What makes someone unsafe?

I've seen my share of panicky, touchy arguments on Facebook, including one where an activist I looked up to accused someone else of "gaslighting" them for having a different opinion about interpretations of a Steven Universe character's race. I've been in those arguments, too. (Not that one in particular, but similar situations.)

Part of the problem for those of us on the left is that calls for solidarity usually result in a backlash of people saying, "we have to work with those we don't like? But that means supporting abusers!" Well - sometimes it doesn't. It's tricky to talk about abuse, because those of us who've survived it in various ways tend to be extremely gun-shy - sometimes excessively or even unhealthily so.

And in the moment, it can be hard to tell if someone's comments about, say, a given woman or actress represent their feelings about All Of Womanity, or anything else.

Do we tolerate mistakes?

This is such a tricky problem. Obviously, as a white woman - even a queer, plump, neurodivergent, partially disabled one - I have a giant swath of privilege that affects how I'm coming at things. I'm cisgender, and I'm white, and even femme - all things that can, in certain circumstances, give me a free pass that would not be afforded to others. Obviously, kyriarchy - hierarchies and power that exist outside of patriarchy - is a thing that exists. Dealing with it sucks. Some people get forgiven for their screw-ups a lot more readily than others, and the people forgiven are usually white. The people who don't get away with things are usually black, or other people of colour; men also tend to get away with more than women. BUT - there are also times when we have to question whether conflicts or errors are as important as the general need to fight for our rights. And perhaps we need to be more honest about how dangerous or not-dangerous specific people are.

As one of my found-family siblings, Iskara, put it,

The left are collectivists and the right are individualists. We know this. But you can't use those traits to compete with others who have the same trait, you're pretty equal. So to establish a hierarchy within their respective groups, they use the opposite approach. The left will attack individuals who are below them to prove that they are the wokest. The right will attack entire groups of people who don't have the right values as individuals. Therefore, the right is willing to unite with people it disagrees with because those disagreements are part of the life of an individualist, but collectively they hate this other group more and they have that in common. Meanwhile the left is trying to figure out which single persons belong in or out of the collective which makes us far more likely to attack our allies over trivial matters, because we consider the purity of the person beside us to be a reflection on our own purity.

The hidden rules

The thing is - and trying to put this politely is difficult - white people who are queer tend to engage in this purity-testing a lot more often than others. Black people and people of colour, and those with multiple intersections of disability, are already used to forgiving others a lot or gritting their teeth and bearing things. As members of a visible majority in North America, we feel confident in our ability to reject others and replace them as need be. We're inherently comfortable, a lot of the time, in the belief that someone else will come around and fill the empty seat, because there are just so many white and queer people. This can be less true for transgender people, but the squabbles I've seen online suggest that the sense of white social complacency is still basically applicable.

This is not to excuse myself. When I was a teenager, and even in my early twenties, it seemed a lot more important to be strict about whom I interacted with, within the left, and how they perceived things. As much as micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions both matter, and as much as both can grind us down - those of us with the emotional resources and privilege to do so need to be aware of our padding. (That's not just a pun on my own weight, but hey! I can't resist a punchline.)

Forgiveness and calling in

Since our family expanded to a third person, our housemate and queer-platonic partner Kit, we've had a lot more small discussions about being offended and annoyed. Honestly, instead of making fights or tension worse, it tends to disperse them. Anyone who lives with someone else will be familiar with the struggle of doing dishes, making food, handling laundry, cleaning the house, dealing with work duties, and arranging transportation. But being clear yet tactful about one's feelings can handle conflict far better, and keep it from becoming "a thing."

The same is true of our long-running D&D group and some of my various friend groups. Learning to filter my communication to people, talk to them after the rush of emotions, and avoiding that ever-so-tempting duel of witticisms that is the Facebook philosophical fight, have all been really good for both myself and the people around me.

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves - what are we trying to accomplish? If the answer to that is "protection of people's human rights," then the only people really worth kicking out are trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), sex-work exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs), and people who have exhibited a pattern of abuse without repentance.

Everyone else? Well, maybe we need to be honest about our hurt feelings, cool off a bit, and try to talk stuff out in private.

Does that mean we need to forgive abusers?

Ooof. Even with a counselling degree and many years of sad-violin life experience, I don't know if I'm equipped to answer this one. Apart from saying, "it's a case-by-case basis, but worry about the people who aren't just rude, but really dangerous," I'm not sure what to recommend.

Maybe we just need to stop sanctifying and demonizing people, and present them - both celebrities and individuals - as complex people with tokens on both the good and bad sides of the scale.

I do think that there are cases where people can reform. I hate to be mealy-mouthed or seem indecisive, but if internal politics were easy to handle, the left wouldn't be falling apart like an improperly-chilled gelatin dessert.

Ultimately, all I can recommend are emotional self-validation, politeness, patience, and forgiveness with each other. We are stronger together, and since we, in multiple countries, have to fight to maintain our very existence, we need to defend each other's existence.

Maybe this means forgiving someone you're still mad at. Maybe this means going to apologize to someone. But with actual far-right activists, neo-nationalists, anti-choice activists, and violent racists and transphobes in the streets, and more active and internationally validated than ever, we simply can't afford the ephemeral and impossible luxury of complete ideological purity.

Does this mean allying with people we disagree with? Well, as long as they're not advocating for killing us...maybe yes. But again, my tired and beleaguered siblings and family, those of us who are white need to do the work on this. Reach out to others. Offer comfort. Give forgiveness - after you're done being mad. Sleep on things.

Nobody else is going to fight for our lives.

***Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime, housemate, and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. The mailing list * Books on Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram *  Facebook * Tumblr * Blog

[nicerumors]

I have found out a few lesbian blogs I follow think that trans women are men, with evidence such as "trans women are men and it shows when they talk" and screenshots of one trans woman saying really mean things with no context. There are so many logical fallacies used to back up hatred that I don't even want to go into it. I wish we could have a conversation about how being raised and treated as a girl versus a boy by society affects someone later in life (if the op really wants to talk about man and women gender expectations) without simplifying it to either "one trans woman was entitled because she has a penis and is a man so they all are" or "we are all the same and our differences (biological, ethnic, age, geographic) don't matter at all" (i.e. the "I don't see race/color" argument). It makes sense to want to talk to people with similar experiences to share stories, get help, commiserate, etc. It doesn't make sense to completely exclude people based on their differences. I have trans women friends. They are women. I don't normally talk to them about period stuff. Some are lesbians. We talk about dating issues in a het world. We share stories about sex, but I'm obviously not giving advice or my opinion on their experiences, because we have different realities. It's frustrating to talk about how we have the same "sexuality" (lesbian) but not necessarily the same sex organs (or even gender, i have an nb lesbian friend), and frankly our conversations are limited by English vocabulary that just isn't up to speed with current scientific research on genitalia, gender, sexuality, etc. That doesn't mean I don't want to hear or help my friends, I think it makes everyone more empathetic to hear stories different from their own. I have given tons of advice, however, to friends with periods. I tell everyone I know who has a period about the joys of my diva cup. Hell, a lot of my other friends, including cis men, have heard about it too lol. It's absolutely true that bodily functions and anatomy, especifically female bodies and functions, are treated as shameful and vulgar, and that is a disservice to everyone. Talking about female-bodied issues in a women's space isn't anti-trans. Including trans women in your definition of women and lesbians isn't anti-lesbian.

[violetosprey]

You always do break downs of EP's characters really in-depth, and I know there's not much on MOB yet, but with your analysis of Jack from TDDUP what's your opinions on the new info we've gotten about him and his aide from Patreon?

Okay before I start, Iwanted to be polite and ask the creator what his thoughts were on discussinginformation that has only been revealed on his Patreon account at themoment.  He answered on his blog herehow he felt about it.  Basically, as longas no spoiler images are used and no full scripting/dialogue is repeated back(he’d prefer more vague alluding to), then it was alright.  

However, since this isan anon ask, this an answer that has to be posted publicly.  If @electricpuke at any point requests that I delete this post because it abuseshis rules, I WILL comply and delete what I’ve said.

If anyone would liketo see spoilers for any of the ElectricPuke’s games (current or upcoming), oryou just love his work, please consider supporting the creator on his Patreon:

Link: https://www.patreon.com/EPGames

I know this asker is already following Puke on Patreon basedon what they’ve said.  I expect otherfollowers not currently following EP’s Patreon to be polite and never requestspoiler information on anything not already shared on Patreon (not like…anyonewould know what to specifically ask anyway :P)

With that settled minorPatreon spoilers (which ARE subject to change) below as well as connectionsbeing made to older Jack in TDDUPbelow

I’ll stop being stuffy now and say I’m actually very happy Igot this ask XD  Let’s start with theinformation everyone knows at least for young Jack in Mark of Belial and hisassistant Ashton.

Young Jack is a lot meaner than older Jack and actuallycomes off as more sadistic than older Jack. Older Jack is a lot more mellow and appears strict but still sociable toeven his students at the university he teaches at.  Older Jack is VERY dangerous though and oddlygoes about his… “hobbies” in an almost business-like manner.  Young Jack I’d say is more likely to speakhis mind a little more (but still has his gears turning, calculating hismoves).  We don’t know if he’s got a specificagenda while you’re working with him.  He’llrely on his wit to give you biting remarks whenever he’s dissatisfied though(which is quite frequently honestly). Young Jack I’d guess is…not really the social type XD  Someone asked me awhile back about mythoughts on young Jack when things were even earlier in development.  You can find what I said here(be warned, there are TDDUP spoilers for older Jack, but you might be able tojust skip over that segment).  In it, Iactually list a few questions that I was interested in seeing if they would beanswered in Mark of Belial.  One of thequestions was, “Does young Jack have any friends?”  Again, I don’t see him as the social type,and a highly intelligent person who’s hard to argue with when they belittle youis often too difficult for others to deal with. Now Ashton probably doesn’t count as a “friend,” but currently this isthe first person we’re seeing Jack in an amicable relationship with.

What everyone knows about Ashton from tumblr is things likehow he lacks self-confidence, likes horror, serial killer trivia, knives, andpsychology.  Generally, he also soundsrather studious and not the type that talks a lot unless it’s a subject he’svery versed in.  So right off the bat I’dsay it would make sense for this to be the type of person that young Jack wouldget along with.  Similar interests, not alot of back-talk, and Jack probably appreciates an aid who keeps to themselvesand stays focused on their work.  What Iwas a little puzzled by was why Ashton liked Jack of all people XD  Sure, Jack’s not a loud or annoying person(the kind Ashton hates), but remember Jack is a generally unfriendlyperson.  I would have even figured thatAshton would find Jack rather intimidating for his intellect and ability totear people down with words.  However,this became answered quite easily on Patreon (which is where the spoiler comesin).

As long as I’m…hopefully not a total idiot and misreadinginto anything, it’s actually hinted that Ashton is trans.  Jack is aware of this actually aggressivelydefends Ashton for who he is.  So ofcourse Ashton appreciates and respects Jack because he does not judge him forhis gender identity.

Now, it’s not actually surprising to me that something likebiological sex, race, or gender identity has no real bearing to Jack.  That seems to fit him honestly.  I don’t really take Jack as the type ofperson to really put much emphasis on judging a person by anything other thanone’s mind and personality.  He is apsychologist after all.  He’s moreinterested in what people are thinking rather than what they look like.  The rest probably just seems like details hehas to filter through (…but he can be forward if he DOES think you’rephysically attractive still :P).  Also, Ifeel like most of EP’s characters come off as pansexual anyway (both possiblyto provide more representation…and because it actually makes it easier for thegames to work for EVERYONE- some people hate if they’re locked into a certaingender, or if they can’t choose between the straight or gay route).

What I AM surprised about is just how quick Jack is todefend Ashton, in a rather threatening manner no less.  This isn’t just accepting Ashton, this isgoing out of his way to protect him.  It’salmost a softer side of Jack I wasn’t expecting to see (at least not soearly).  Older Jack is much better atbeing gentle.  This could mean a lot ofthings.  Jack may hold particular grudgesacting people with an unnecessary prejudice towards others for example.  It could also be that Jack has more sympathytowards his JUNIORS, than to most people. Especially if said juniors seem a bit “troubled.”  If you played TDDUP, you’ll know that olderJack has a student named Ellen who grew very attached to him.  It’s hinted at that he helped her out a bitwhen she was in a bad spot (I don’t quite remember how the dialogue went forthis, and I don’t ever think it’s specifically mentioned what kind of troubleEllen was going through).  And again, ifyou’ve played TDDUP, you’ll know that Ellen is…an intelligent and curious younglady but “not quite right.”  Ashton isprobably a heck of a lot more sane than Ellen is, but being trans woulddefinitely imply that he’s troubled by his own feelings, prejudice from others,and just trying to live the way he wants to.

I’ve gone back and forth for a while on whether or not Jackis a sociopath.  I’m still leaningtowards “yes.”  Don’t be fooled…he doessome awful, AWFUL things.  But at thesame time he’s capable of being gentle and holding back against hurting anyonehe cares about.  It’s so hard to tellwhat he’s thinking at times.  He’s veryinsightful and profound at times.  Jack is an incredibly gray character.

Sorry that’s all I have to say for now, but we are still inthe early stages of the game development. They’ll be much more to speculate in the future I’m sure :)

Also, I don’t want to touch on this too much because I’malways paranoid about offending anyone in the LGBT community, but yes I do likewe’re possibly getting just a little trans representation in the game(remember, these things are subject to change though).  It’s likely not going to be a huge deal, butit won’t be completely ignored either.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I have been reading and reblogging some of your posts and wanted to thank you for that detailed account. I have been out of fandom for a while, and antis really baffled me at first. But now I have a question: Could you talk some more about how current antis relate back to the LJ social justice scene and when the morph from debating fanworks to dissing people happened? Thank you!

I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!

I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.

Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.

To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?

From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent.  But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.

Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.

At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online.  Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.

Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none.  Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.

But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.

Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted.  And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.

The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance. Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts.  The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.

A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted. Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing. 

And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.

I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias.  People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses.  And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing!   Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.

However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced.  And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!

Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’.  There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*

Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club. People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’. People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.

This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance.  Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things.  Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.

One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.

So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people?  Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.

Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization.  And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved.  Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.

In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing.  If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person.  And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.

This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’

And that’s where we’re at today.

Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.

*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.

[shinmegamitensei2]

i was gonna sleep cus i’m tired as shit but then my brain started blaring some thoughts in my head so now i can’t sleep, so now you guys get to hear me ramble angrily about privilege and intersections of it on my blog instead

warning: this is extremely long and at points starts to sound like “pwease weave the poow twans men awone we did nofing wrong uwu” but i promise there’s a point somewhere in here about how we gotta start thinking about what we say has consequences

just... i get so angry when privilege is conflated to “if you have it, you have every single facet of it and you always benefit from it” when that’s really not the case at all, and to treat privilege as a single card that is separate from, and consequently unaffected by personal experience, other VISIBLE aspects of identity and individuality, and so forth is a really flawed way of thinking

the way i see most people explain or treat privilege is whether you have, say, a “privilege card” and the more you accumulate, the more privileged you are and thus the more benefits society offers you as a result of your status over another person (say, a white cis straight man is far more privileged than a black trans gay woman)

this is it, a simplification of privilege, easily digestible and easy enough to regurgitate to other people to get them to understand on an elementary level what it means to have privilege - when you have it, you have benefits over another person because society deems you better than another person

but then the conversation stops there. it stops, and this simplification becomes a hard and fast rule rather than the beginning of an educational moment, and suddenly we have concepts such as self-determination of your identity means you can gain and drop privileges as you change and determine WITHIN YOURSELF who you are, rather than what society deems you as

and therein lies the problem: how do you gain or lose privilege? how does the concept of passing privilege factor into all this? what does it mean to pass, or to not pass, and can privilege be bargained, can it only be half-gained or half-lost, can it change on a whim?

the only times i ever see this brought up, it’s by some asshat who’s got some shitty opinions or is trying to defend the privileged group wherein exchanges of power usually do not happen on the level i’m trying to discuss (re: race and a white person whose family is predominantly european-white, although there is a lot to be said about someone who is white but also comes from a mixed family and the way that privilege can also be bartered based on perceived appearance versus the reality) but what i really want to look into, specifically, is the bartering of privilege gained and lost through identification as trans, nonbinary, or another gender unrecognized by mainstream society

because, like... it’s here, i feel like, where passing privilege becomes its most prominent (as well as sexuality and the culture surrounding it that has crafted a persona, either influenced by or influencing [or both!!] by homophobic caricatures of the past and present) and where we need to start having discussions, serious discussions, about how one passes not only affects their privilege, but also that we cannot and should not treat people specifically based on what privileges or disprivileges we believe they should be experiencing in their day-to-day lives, because... it doesn’t work that way

there’s such a monumental difference between people at different stages of passing, and what information they have about them that is on the internet, or among their friends and family, or to their bosses and coworkers or if it gets leaked in ways they didn’t intend or want people to see or know

i AM going to use trans men in this example, being one myself, because i don’t intend to try and explain anything using experiences that don’t belong to myself so as to not misrepresent anyone, so i apologize that this comes off as being really whiny and “wahhh stop treating transmasc ppl badly” because a whole lot of trans masc and trans men adopt misogyny and absorb toxic masculinity in an attempt to become masculine, in a world where manliness is often defined by how much you can reject femininity and the constant attempts to redefine masculinity in a way that doesn’t allow male predators to adopt it solely to hurt women I’M GOING ON A TANGENT ANYWAY

there was a point i wanted to make here, and it was specifically on the idea that, like... you cannot ever, possibly, expect a trans man who is completely untransitioned and is seen, societally, as a woman, to own any amount of male privilege that makes any real difference where it matters aside from an online community wherein anonymity is valued, but also in said community where that information (that they are trans, whether or not they mention they are untransitioned) may be open and ENCOURAGED to be posted online for the sake of engaging in these conversations in the first place

as opposed to a trans man who is fully transitioned, has spent several years being accepted as a man, having absorbed ideas about masculinity that may make him indistinguishable from other men and nobody questions his status as a man, and all of this is STILL contingent on the fact that nobody knows or SHOULD know that he is trans, as once that information comes out on a platform where people feel empowered to challenge him (not only including the internet, but in real life, where it is common and encouraged for men to engage in violence, especially where bigotry is concerned)

as opposed to any trans men who may be in between, too! a man who is taking T, whose voice is changing over time and where his neighbors may catch onto what’s going on and grow suspicious; a man who takes strides to act masculine where he can, but who is stifled in an environment where he could be abused or killed purely on account of transphobia; a man who does not WANT to take the steps required for society to fully “recognize” him as a man, and so may never be able to fully participate in presenting the way he wants

this is all transphobia, full stop. not transmisandry or whatever weirdo terms ppl are coming up with these days, but there is a lot to be said in how transness AFFECTS male privilege, and how that male privilege may be adopted, absorbed, and enacted depending on the way that society recognizes men, maleness and masculinity

trans masculinity, and the state of being a trans man, is not an experience shared by every trans man. trans men are not all the same - some are trans nonbinary men, some transition, some do not, some adopt abusive techniques and toxicity that comes built into the system that tells us what being a man is and what being a woman is (although i could also argue that in a lot of ways, to be recognized as a man without having homophobia and transphobia and misogyny thrown at you constantly is to HAVE to participate in these systems, but alas)

there is a wide variety of difference in all of these people, and how they are recognized on a widescale manner that makes any shred of difference outside of this website - which begs another question! where does privilege travel? can it disappear or appear depending on where you are? where you go? can you have privilege on tumblr, but then have it vanish when you leave this website?

there’s a distortion, a way we talk about privilege and the privileged folk, that makes it so damn difficult to discuss the finer and more important details about privilege, intersection, and how privilege is not the same for everyone. it CANNOT be the same for everyone, because passing privilege is not yet another token given to people just to show that they have it! and privilege is not a set of cards and coins that come separately and totally irrelevant of each other!

a trans man is pelted by misogyny, homophobia, as well as transphobia when he does not pass. just as cis men are pelted with these ideas, so too are trans men. and yes, they are misguided. they hurt women and gay people more than they hurt men and straight people, this much should be obvious to anyone. but these things - they are STILL internalized, and how they are internalized changes depending on who is on the receiving end, and in many ways these things are markers and indicators of how to and how not to act for men

i wanted to keep going on about this point and i think i have more to say but my end point with all this is just that privilege changes power depending on where you are, who you are, and on a moment’s notice depending on what information people have a hold of, and i know i did a not-great job of explaining this but also i’m just venting so whatever

another thought occurred to me, about something i was thinking about earlier today, and it’s about how we talk about this concept, and how we approach privilege and privileged people and people whose privilege may variably change

obviously tumblr’s a bad place to be. it’s polarizing, because a lot of people use it as a place to vent, and there’s a lot of gross and nasty people here (including highly-privileged folk and fucking neo-nazis for fuck’s sake) and having long and meaningful conversations here is pointless because it’s drowned out by the obsession and need for having notes yet lacking a cohesive way to spread posts and all proper additions to that post without someone losing some form of context along the way

(that fucking, pewdiepiekin post goin around is one such example, since it’s apparently a joke that OP has but everyone’s treating it as fact, and like obviously it’s hard to tell sarcasm on this website given how much weird shit we’ve seen, but also that it’s FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to correct such a misunderstanding BECAUSE of the very nature of tumblr itself, go figure)

but that’s also why i think we gotta have this conversation, this like... talk that we can’t keep talking about shit the way we have been, especially in regards to social justice and conceptualizing it for the younger kids who USE this website, and like... we just gotta have a different way of approaching things now, because the more i watch idle chats where people gleefully and openly post screenshots of others making fun of them for minor shit or momentary fuck-ups that could be easily ignored because the person is still learning (ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE LIKE 14) and otherwise give themselves a free pass to become openly vicious and in the name of coping or to share amongst their friends how pathetic they view some people

like ok not to be a liberal and i’d rather not be classified as such because i don’t lick the boots of the privileged or pull any of that devil’s advocate shit but this extremely hostile environment we’ve cultivated and continually defend because we think this website creates ANY sort of meaningful difference in the world and anything we do on this website has any sort of meaningful impact that is beneficial to us while also openly encouraging behaviors that mitigate and deny growth and learning from mistakes is honestly kind of fucking scary

this is in no way saying giving a pass or go on behavior that directly spreads violence like saying slurs and whatnot, but we’re also so, so very fucking vicious, and at some point, no matter what reason you have for saying what you do, the consequence is that your words and intents get hijacked and used out of context in a manner that forms high hostility in the first place

and it’s so, so hard to talk about here too, without going “well if you hate men hurr durr it’s ur fault everything on this site sucks don’t openly say you hate your oppressors hurr durr!” like that’s such an easy trap to fall into but i don’t believe that either, even if i’ve grown distasteful of openly expressing “i hate cis men” (because they terrify me and could murder me at a moment’s notice, both for thinking i’m a woman and for finding out i am trans) or “i hate straight people” (because they fetishize my gayness and shit!) and etc

i’ve got so many reasons why i could express those thoughts, but should i do it, and on a regular basis, consequences follow. consequences that destroy my cultivated and intended reputation as someone who is open and friendly and kind, because it is difficult to really PROVE that to someone who may be on the fence from allowing themself to be deprogrammed from societal teachings and ingrained and taught transphobia and homophobia and misogyny and racism and so on so forth

and i know not everyone is like that. not everyone WANTS to teach and to provide the resources for that and to help deprogram people. most people just want to vent, most people want to escape from the daily abuse and fear and vent their frustrations. i get that. but then where do we go from there, when we have such an absolute volume of people doing and saying this exact thing, in such a degree that such a climate becomes normal to be reactionary and to react to any level of ignorance with anger, no matter who it comes from?

i’m being so, so vague here, and i really do not want it to come off as protection of the poor soft privileged or what the fuck ever, i genuinely do not. i guess i’m just describing a time in my life where i was like that, where i openly enjoyed mocking people that i thought were beyond reprieve and “saving” and getting into fights and it was such a nasty attitude to be in because it led to me throwing people out of my life, throwing caution to the wind, destroying my reputation online and getting put on places like r/tumblrinaction and potentially k.i/.w/i./f./a/./r./.m//s for my actions

living that way endangered me, and not just because of who i am. living that way destroyed me, and it destroyed my way of thinking, too. it destroyed my moral system, it encouraged me to dehumanize others. it encouraged me to find new ways to rationalize violence as a way of “vengeance” and “retribution” for the damages society dealt me, as if that was any rational and correct way of approaching this situation

anger has its place. anger has its place in destroying the system we have now and rebuilding a new one. but we need to understand that our actions, no matter how justified, still have consequences, sometimes extremely unintended, and even unwarranted that we didn’t deserve, and just... i dunno

there is no easy solution to this. i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by being nice to everyone all the time, just as much as i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by developing such a community-wide but aimless anger that we develop as hostile an environment as we have on this website

i don’t know what we need, but it can’t be this

[nojapcap]

Final Blog Post!

Throughout the semester, I have learned a lot from Survey of Communications.  One of the topics that interested me the most was how society has shifted television. The history of television alone is vast and complex, though there are a few important changes that should be noted. Firstly, there are 3 ages of television. The first age of television was known as over the air free tv, or the network age. This took place from 1946-1976. Television was ultimately run by “The Big Three” NBC, ABC, and CBS. The cable and satellite age was from 1976-2006. The creation of geostationary satellites and fiber optics changed how people watched television. HBO was created in 1976, and soon followed ESPN, Discovery, MTV, etc. The third age of television, or the Digital Internet Age, began in the early 2000’s. Although technically the internet began in 1969, this age of television specifically began when Reed Hastings created Netflix. Streaming platforms completely changed how people across the world watch tv. Applications like Netflix and Hulu allow for viewers to watch seasons of a show or even movies commercial free, for a small monthly subscription fee. No longer do people have to worry about making it home in time to catch a certain show, we now have television at our fingertips. The same show that comes on weekly at 7pm on a wednesday evening, could now be viewed on the train or at the gym. This third age caused a lot of problems for bigger television networks, forcing them to “play the game” by allowing shows on their networks to be shown on these streaming platforms.

I feel like shows from 30-40 years ago rarely showed other cultures, but when they did, they were typically stereotypical elements that were included. The first example that comes to mind is the movie Full Metal Jacket, which takes place during the Vietnam War. There is a scene where a Vietnamese prostitute comes up to one of the soldiers and solicits him, saying “me love you long time”.

https://youtu.be/-L6__oz2S8s

This is a phrase that has become famous and is automatically associated with Asian women. At the time, it didn’t seem like a problem but as we progress as a society things like this probably would not be acceptable to put on television today. This is not to say that there aren’t other stereotypical things that occur on television today or within the past few decades. We often see characters in television that are recurring. The sassy Black girl, the smart Asian, and so on. These roles are a direct reflection of how society used to, and still views other races and cultures. With that being said, however, I do notice more representation on television shows such as Blackish, which is about an African American family (portrayed in a good light).

Originally posted by supagirl

The parents are well off and educated, their children are smart. 30 years ago black characters were usually only used for comedic relief. There is another show called Fresh off The Boat, which is loosely based around Eddie Huang’s childhood.

Originally posted by joaquins-phoenixs

It depicts his younger life growing up in Florida, dealing with Chinese tradition with his parents, but his love for Hip Hop. Decades ago, an Asian kid loving hip hop would never be on television. Two  things that do not seem to go together at all, combine and create content for other kids who may feel like they cannot listen to specific types of music because their families do not agree or because society tells them that it is not for them. There is also another show called Bob Hearts Abishola, which is fairly new (I think it comes on ABC).

(Photo from Google)

I do not watch the show but I’ve seen the first episode and ultimately it is about a White man (Bob) that falls for an African nurse (Abishola). This is another common occurrence on television that we did not see 30-40 years ago. Interracial dating is widely accepted now but also frowned upon by many. Overall, society’s tolerance has grown tremendously, and we are still breaking barriers for other cultures and underrepresented demographics.

Another topic that interested me was how the transgender community has been portrayed within recent years. How The Transgender Community Has Been Portrayed Within Recent Years. Within the past 30 years, the way the transgender community has been portrayed in the media has shifted tremendously. Being transgender is something that many people have yet to agree with, but also many people do not fully comprehend its meaning. Recently, we have seen a lot of transgender people gain media attention. For example, Laverne Cox rose to fame from her role on Orange is The New Black, where she plays a transgender woman who used to be a fire fighter, doing hair in a maximum security women’s prison. This sparked controversy because many people do not understand how she would be in a woman’s prison if she was technically born a man.

Another example of Transgender representation is the show Pose, which follows the lives of several LGBTQ+ youth surviving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City in the 1980’s. I do watch the show and personally I found it very eye opening to see how much Trans people are and have been discriminated against unnecessarily. They are not allowed in many establishments because of how they may physically present themselves. But the trans community was able to find solace in another community known as Ballroom. This is where voguing and other similar dances originated. The LGBTQ+ community is also responsible for many of the slang terms we use today such as “shade” or “tea” “hunty” etc.  Many people tend to ignore or downplay the role that Trans people have played or attempt to shut them out of history, which is a trend that we have seen, especially in America. This comes from fear of what they are and how that threatens someone else’s life.  

Originally posted by mega-sploosh

Billy Porter, who is also on Pose, is a well-known advocate for the community. This year he wore a dress to the Met Gala, which caught a lot of buzz. This is another issue that I constantly see being discussed on social media, specifically Twitter. Many people do not agree with men wearing dresses, and often the hypothetical “What would you do if your son wanted to wear a dress or play with a doll?” comes up. Answers are usually follwed by homophobic and transphobic statements, though it just shows how ignorant some people can be. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but people who often answer the question with a “no” tend to be attacked for having some kind of homophobic vendetta. I think that people should be able to voice their opinions without being attacked, though there also needs to be a certain level of respect for both sides. Sometimes, I wonder if companies truly care about representation, or they realize that transgender politics are “popular” and profitable, which makes it easier to market. Not only in terms of the trans community but for racial/ethnic inclusion in television. A lot of it seems to be forced because producers know what will get them ratings, rather than truly caring about a story or a group of people whose stories need to be shared.

Overall, the class has taught be a lot about communication beyond other courses I’ve taken before. We’ve explored topics that were international and gave examples beyond America, for example, the Harajuku trend in Japan, or ethnocentrism. Overall I have learned that my version of what communication looks like is not necessarily correct, it is just one way. I have also learned that some cultures have other ways of communication that may be completely opposite from my own values and beliefs, this does not make either side wrong, just different. There is something I enjoy and appreciate about learning aspects of other cultures that may seem weird to me, but are completely normal in that culture. Communication is about learning and understanding why people do what they do, say what they say, and act the way they do. There are no right or wrong answers. And by studying why people communicate the way they do, we can learn a lot about ourselves as well. It helps put life into perspective, from a lense that is not necessarily your own.

[trans-girl-sonic]

Your blog is really funny. False accusations against artists being pedophiles, but also transforming everything and everything into homosexuals or trans, whether it's been canon or not. Hope to see more laughable postings in the future!

Teen Boat! Kindle Editionby Dave Roman  (Author), John Green  (Illustrator)3.8 out of 5 stars    24 customer reviews See all 3 formats and editionsKindle $9.99Read with Our Free App

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Length: 144 pages Age Level: 12 and up Grade Level: 7 and upAvailable on these devices Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

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Product detailsFile Size: 70468 KBPrint Length: 144 pagesPublisher: Clarion Books (May 8, 2012)Publication Date: May 8, 2012Sold by: Houghton Mifflin HarcourtLanguage: EnglishASIN: B005OC305GText-to-Speech: Not enabled  X-Ray:Not Enabled  Word Wise: Not EnabledLending: Not EnabledEnhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled  Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,065,292 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)#164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#293 in Books > Teens > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#1164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Social & Family Issues > Emotions & FeelingsWould you like to tell us about a lower price?Related media

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5.0 out of 5 starsPouring the Teen Angst on so Thick that You’re Going to Need a Bilge Pump IByFredTownWardVINE VOICEon November 6, 2015Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis prequel to Teen Boat! The Race for Boatlantis is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. The parodies are laid on thick and fast. About the only nit I can offer up is that this book is much more episodic than the second one, and some of the chapters work better than others.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTHIS BOOK IS HILARIOUSByElaine Ritteron December 31, 2013Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis is quite possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read in my entire life. I was laughing the entire way through, cover to cover. I’m actually not sure what target audience this book was aiming at, because there are definitely some off-color sexual jokes throughout. I don’t think I would recommend this book to children, but it’s perfect for teens and adults. I loved it so much I ordered a second copy for a White Elephant Christmas gift and it was a hit!!Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTeen BoatByJoseph R. Romanon June 11, 2012Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseJust love Dave Romans new book. I am a fan of his work.He writes really great stuff for kids to read.Hes a kid at heart,and he knows what kids like to read.Comment| 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsByAmazon Customeron June 28, 2016Format: Kindle Edition|Verified PurchaseAmazing book for speech and debate.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse4.0 out of 5 starsSaturday morning cartoon spoofByLivianiaVINE VOICEon June 5, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Collaborators Dave Roman and John Green originally published the TEEN BOAT! mini-comic through their own Cryptic Press. You can still visit the old websites associated with that version of the comic. TEEN BOAT! won an Ignatz Award and now it is available in a full color version with extra comics and other bonus material.

The art of TEEN BOAT! is clean with easy-to-distinguish and consistent character designs. The girls aren’t overly sexified either. They look like teen girls and their designs are stylized the same as the guys. The art doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but it is definitely not hideous. And believe me, you’d be surprised how many comics and graphic novels get published with awful art.

TEEN BOAT! first came onto my radar when I read the AV Club review praising its light parody of Saturday morning cartoons. After reading it myself, I cannot come up with a better description than that. TEEN BOAT! is an updated, self-aware Saturday morning cartoon that invites the reader to laugh at the ridiculous premise and plots and enjoy the story anyway.

The protagonist of TEEN BOAT! is actually named TEEN BOAT! He’s a high school student who can turn into a boat at will, but must turn into a boat when wet. He gets in and out of trouble, dates an Italian gondola, and runs for class president. Like most teen guys, he’s pretty self-absorbed. One of the running gags is how he doesn’t notice that his best friend is both into him and has shape-changing abilities of her own.

Older teens will probably find TEEN BOAT! too short and silly. But hey, I’m an adult and thought it was cute. TEEN BOAT! is probably best for tweens, especially ones that still enjoy the cheesiness of Saturday morning cartoons. There is some underage drinking and gambling, but it the protagonist does not partake and the behavior is punished.Read moreComment| 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse3.0 out of 5 starsNO WAY, JOSE!ByFrequent BuyerTOP 500 REVIEWERon June 2, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Beware!! This gal’s got her Mom-Review Hat On…

I actually requested this book to see what the team of Roman and Green were up to; and with a mind to finding out whether this might be the beginning of a series I could introduce to my 10 year-old son…

…BUT NO WAY, JOSE. I might let a ’d-mn’ slide but it’s not cool with this helicopter mom to have marijuana, drinking and smoking (cigarettes this time) mentioned like it’s no big deal. [Not to mention that ‘getting to second base’ would have to be explained.] Sooo, me in my-mom-hat will not be suggesting this book for Tweens.

Which leaves the question of who it would be good for. Here’s my opinion:

No - for adults. There was some funny stuff here, but not enough to make it worth the effort.

No - for Tweens. At least if you’re a mom like me. If your child is already rolling their own, they might enjoy it.

Yes - for guys 13-16 years, if they feel like a fun read that’s based on goofy humor.

Yes - possibly for girls 13 - 15 years if they like non-violent graphic novels. Romance is the focal point of the stories. And I particularly like the sections that dealt with where Teen Boat (that’s his name) fell in love with a gondola named Risatina.

Maybe - for guys older than 16, but honestly all of the things I thought were inappropriate for younger kids, is going to be too bland for mosts tastes at this age. I mean, no super cool artwork, and no ultra violence or women with extravagant 'attributes’...I’m divided on this one and not prepared to give it a definitive thumbs-down because there might be a guy out there that will be motivated to pick up more books if he starts on this one. However, that said TEEN BOAT is just got the wrong synergy going. On the one hand it’s childish but has inappropriate things for children, and one the other hand it’s not sophisticated enough for most Young Adults, which leaves it possibly right for that thin band in between: 13-15 year olds.

Pam T~putting away her MOM-hatRead more4 comments| 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuseSee all verified purchase reviews (newest first)Write a customer review

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3.0 out of 5 starsShallow and not-quite-funnyStock characters and situations pulled from Judy Blume and John Hughes. Heavy-handed metaphors for teen angst. It’s all part of the joke, right?Read morePublished 1 year ago by Irene Ringworm5.0 out of 5 starsA BOAT load of fun!!!!A great success! My Son LOVES It!!! He couldn’t put it down until he was done!! A MOST AWESOME BOOK…my sons says “I just like it a real lot!!”Published 1 year ago by I am a Children’s Librarian5.0 out of 5 starsIt’s very simpleTEEN! BOAT!! What more do you need? All the angst of being a teen … all the thrill of being a boat!Published on October 5, 2014 by Jennifer5.0 out of 5 starsWacky, silly funNot every book comes with a fool-proof litmus test, but this one certainly does. Just read the tag-line on the cover:

The angst of being a teen!Read morePublished on September 3, 2012 by Andrew C Wheeler4.0 out of 5 starsJoin the Adventure!This book immediately jumped out at me as I began reading because of the wonderful illustrations and vibrant colors, and the story didn’t disappoint.Read morePublished on July 21, 2012 by A. Lynn4.0 out of 5 starsFun parodyTeenBoat! is a one-trick pony. Whether or not you’re entertained will depend entirely on how much you like that trick.Read morePublished on July 18, 2012 by A. Reid5.0 out of 5 starsIf I’m any judge at all as to what teens will laugh at…This graphic short story collection is ridiculous, silly, and hilarious. It pokes fun at the genre, at the way teens are often portrayed, and yet, from my understanding of…Read morePublished on June 20, 2012 by Neal Reynolds2.0 out of 5 starsConcept Fail.Some things that are completely absurd can also be funny. This is not one of those cases.

The entire premise is ridiculous and simply doesn’t work.Read morePublished on June 13, 2012 by Hedera Femme1.0 out of 5 starsNot RecommendedI thought I was getting a fun, innocent little book. But no, it is not. The book is boring, plus there is profanity and mention of unmentionable things such as smoking, etc.Read morePublished on June 6, 2012 by AndreaSearch Customer Reviews

SearchSet up an Amazon GiveawayTeen Boat!Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon GiveawayThis item: Teen Boat!Set up a giveaway

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