#towards issues that actually deserve it

[acornered]

God once again pride month has become "queer infighting month" with this year's special: should we support mainstream companies carrying pride merch- and don't worry, we won't debate this with any good faith or nuance! Shut Up!!!

[whetstonefires]

Hey here's an angle on the Jiang family dynamic and its impact on Wei Wuxian that I haven't seen discussed:

Wei Wuxian grew up seeing Jiang Yanli routinely having her agency cut off and denied in both large (betrothal) and small ways. That were largely tied up in her gender, sure, but this was also a family containing Yu Ziyuan. A daughter in this household had every chance of having her gender treated as of secondary importance.

She just had to earn it.

The way Jiang Yanli was hemmed in and her potential as an independent actor dismissed was at least as strongly correlated with her failure to be a powerful sword cultivator.

So Wei Wuxian's total refusal to let anyone know that he'd lost access to his cultivation and his violent reactivity against being diminished or condescended to during his Sunshot-to-death period, when before he was pretty immune to being looked down on, could have a lot to do with having been presented with this clearly labeled diagram of how your personhood gets stripped away when you are, by the standards of your society, disabled.

[skunkes]

i have soooo much more i cld say abt him, and have explored more thru other doodles, but quick summary of talon's whole deal, which is subject to change still as he's only almost 2 yrs old as an oc

[faaun]

i feel rly sad and conflicted abt one of my best friends on earth but idk who to ask for advice bc i usually would have consulted her in this situation lmao

[jitteryjive]

i need to remake my cup bros ref… both cup and human designs… it’s been almost a year(?) and i’ve developed the headcanons and i would like to share with the class!!! (i wrote thirty tags. Please help me)

[yourleastfavoriteplaguerat]

tagged for spoilers

oh great so you're telling me that a young girl neglected by her parents and drugged to the gills since childhood goes into the fucking wilderness and runs out of those meds and is in a stressful situation and starts hallucinating/having delusions/being a vessel for some entity??? and all she does is do some silly little rituals and do group therapy techniques and everyone starts feeding into her delusions and then they kill & eat someone in her name when she's like decomfuckingposing in the attic and then she's gaslit into thinking she was involved, that she was at fault, because her off the lifelong meds psychosis "started" all of this and now she's their jesus even though she told them that if she died they should eat her all she ever wanted to do was fucking help them to give them hope and now she's elevated into something not-lottie, she's twisted into a prophet, she's not their teammate or another teenage girl she's the messiah and all of this is her fault

then they get rescued and she's shipped off to a psych ward and shock therapied and no one checks in on her and who gives a fuck really, they're out of the wilderness, lottie can't do anything for them anymore, and she becomes the scapegoat for all of their fucked up deeds and desires and she's already gaslit to hell and back over this

then she starts a silly little commune full of other 'broken' people just vibing and having a home and safety and she's helping people like she always wanted to do before the yellowjackets took her good intentions and warped them and told her that she warped them and then one of her friends is going to kill themselves so she takes her and brings her to the commune to try and heal her, to help her, to undo the damage she never meant to wrought, and then boom all of her alive old teammates are here dragging their own shit and trauma with them acting like she's the devil incarnate to shoulder their guilt and now she's hearing about their various crimes and triggered into a psychotic break when she was doing good before this and now that friend she tried to save is dead and she's in another fucking mental institution because no one wants to deal with lottie even though she's the 'monster' they created (lowkey in their minds) and now the silly little commune's fucked and her followers are probably wondering if any of it was ever real and all lottie wanted to do was help to provide hope all she did was care

oh but sure, she's the problem

like what the actual fuck?

[flowery-king]

Idk what type of denial I'm in but the defanged au is a fucking Philip redemption au what was I on to be constantly reassuring people it's not a redemption plot lmao open your EYES Flowery

[synthshenanigans]

there’s one on here currently and they’re bringing back up old controversy (jashshipping)

Yeaa I saw that. They also seem to post a bunch of CJ related things, so I might make the daily photos one since there isn't one for just CJ screenshots/photos

[ming-sik]

ok im talking to a brick fucking wall here but in case anyones actually curious the "are cishet aro men lgbt" poll is very much taken out of context and ive seen a lot of ppl, who have heard secondhand that there are people who dont think aroallo people are inherently lgbt, who did not see the original conversation.

which to be crystal crystal clear was this post, heres the conversation being discussed

notice that this guy never says hes aromantic and he specifically says that hes "not really at a point he can get into something serious" meaning that he 1) is not saying he never wants a romantic relationship he just doesnt want one right now and 2) refers to a romantic relationship as "something serious" bc he like most cishet people sees a relationship as inherently the most serious type of relationship.

additionally the reason people are upset at the guy is that although its only spelled out in the continuation where the girl explicitly says that he's asking for this despite her telling him she wants a romantic relationship if she's going to sleep with someone which is actually her setting a boundary, "exclusive obvi" in the first part most people have seen means that he is not proposing this as a thing that any given person may or may not be okay with, he is assuming without asking that she's willing to be relegated to a status he himself says is "less serious". the fact is that most cishet men are not actually friends with their fwbs and in most cases it's a code for "girl i expect all the duties of a girlfriend from with none of the care im obligated to give a girlfriend". it is the freelance contractor of het relationships.

and like is it not more disrespectful to imply that people who don't want to commit to treating someone theyre fucking as well as they think a romantic partner would expect of them are aromantic??? why would being an emotionally neglectful dickhead make you aromantic??? aromantic people are people who are not romantically attracted to other people, that's it. they are fully capable of respecting peoples' boundaries and treating their friends/sexual partners/qprs/etc as well as someone else would treat a romantic partner. like do yall not think people are wrong when they say aros are just creeps who want to use people for sex and then dip on them? why is the stance here "actually that is true but it's good actually".

the reason the poll was made in the first place was that someone got irritated that people were trying to argue that this specific shitty guy was actually aromantic and the girl was arophobic for setting a healthy boundary between her and a guy who was expecting an unhealthy relationship of her! random misogynists were the people who decided to bring aromantic people into this when they were not originally mentioned in the slightest! if you want to blame anyone, blame them for saying that emotionally abusive equals aromantic!

[cak31ssuperi04]

Clears throat. Sora for the character ask game

<3 Starboy <3

[caruliaa]

bad decision maker (me)

[jetstargf]

okay goodnight. stop saying gerard is st joan reincarnated i’m abt to start maiming people.

[transandrobroism]

i am not being needlessly alarmist when i say that popular feminism has become extremely radfem-esque and that the normalisation of negative stereotypes towards men needs to be resisted. like. i clearly remember when feminists were derided as "man-hating feminazis" and the main counter-argument to that went something like "we don't hate men, feminism is for everyone, patriarchy harms men too and our goal is to dismantle that oppressive system, this will benefit everyone including men, men can and should be feminists because feminism is a movement for gender equality"

in fact the major rebuttal to men forming "men's rights" movements was always that the issues these groups identified were the negative impacts of the patriarchy on men. they didn't need a separate group because feminism was for everyone and feminist thought and theorising already accounted for the ways patriarchy harms men. which is true! many of the societal issues faced by men stem from white supremacist patriarchy and restrictive gender roles and traditionally feminism has given thought and time to those issues. feminism is for everyone and it is concerned with men's struggles under patriarchy alongside women's.

but somewhere in the last few decades that attitude fell by the wayside and now popular online feminism is this radfem-flavored "all men are bad forever" thing. now mocking, belittling, or hating men is #feminist #praxis. it's feminist to make jokes about #killallmen. it's feminist to view masculinity as inherently bad and dangerous. it's feminist to talk about the men in your life like they're animals who need to be house trained, or emotionally stunted children who need to be babied and distracted.

it's this idea of flipping patriarchy on its head and saying that actually women are the Superior Gender, women deserve to run the world and make all the decisions, and actually it's men who are the Inferior Gender who can't be trusted or left unsupervised.

these attitudes will always have the most severe negative impact on marginalised men. i don't know how we got here but it's past time we circled back around to "feminism is for everyone".

[ayin-me-yesh]

I think one of the reasons non-Palestinian gentiles think Palestine is "complicated" is because they don't understand what combating antisemitism actually looks like.

Like if you view combating antisemitism as generically "supporting Jews" or seeing Jews as innately "good" or even innately "victims" then Palestine seems "complicated" because what's happening there is so obviously horrendous, but if you don't support it or see Israel as the "good guy" or the "victim" you're antisemitic, right?

And I don't think this is an antisemitism specific issue either. People have a hard time with combating Islamophobia or racism in the same way. Like, you'll get similar discomfort around the protests in Iran about the mandatory hijab or when white Americans are confronted with a right wing Black American or when there's calls to support trans people Ghana who are being persecuted by the state.

I think the irony is when there's calls for "nuance" around Palestine, "nuance" means pretending that carpet bombing civilians in an open air prison of your own design is morally grey, rather than that marginalisation is about power structures and victims can become victimisers when the power dynamic leans in their favour. That bigotry is not about applying the label of "bad" to universally "good" people, but about seeing groups of people as monolithic stereotypes who can never be fully human and are less deserving of basic rights and dignity.

It's not really that Palestine is complicated so much as oppression and persecution are complicated - both towards Jews and Palestinians - and require understanding context and power structures.

In the context of Palestine, Palestinians are facing and have faced dispossessions, violence, and injustice on an astronomical scale at the hands of the Israeli state and Zionist paramilitary groups and settlers. And that is not because those colonisers are Jewish, but because colonises are colonisers and colonialism is innately violence and unjust. There's your nuance.

[arabian-batboy]

I really find it interesting how Zionists have no issues constantly using words like "Islamic" or "Islamist" or "jihadist" to describe the people they're killing without any fear of being accused of Islamophobia or that they're being bigots.

Because they know that we live in a world where anything or anyone remotely "Muslim" are automatically portrayed as inherently evil and deserving of death, especially in the US and other Western countries where Israel gets most of its support from them. So therefore, no one can be mad at them for killing all of these people, right? After all, they're only killing scary radical "Islamists" and "jihadists," NOT innocent people.

Meanwhile you would never hear any pro-Palestine people calling IDF soldiers "Jewists" or "Jewish extremists," even when they're literally branding the star of David onto Palestinians' faces and houses, instead we have to be very careful to not associate Judaism with Israel's crimes and are obligated to write a long essay about how we in fact do NOT want to kill every Jew in the world before we're allowed to show a shred of sympathy toward the thousands of Palestinian civilians being murdered as we are speaking.

Yet somehow that's not enough and they still hit us with the "when you say Zionists you actually mean Jews!" all while ignoring how they themselves aren't putting any effort into not demonizing Islam and Muslims with their words, because demonizing Islam and Muslims isn't an issue to them and the only way they can justify all the killing they're doing.

[keefechambers]

I wanna be blunt about this ongoing James somerton suicide threat issue but I don't want to connect it to my IRL Twitter to comment on the dogshit takes I'm seeing there or the good and well meaning but maybe too kind takes I'm seeing here.

Obviously, I hope that this is a false alarm cry for help fake threat. Yes, it would reinforce that Somerton is a self-centered egomaniac who can't handle consequences but that's preferable to dead.

But I work in local news and let me tell you something. I've covered half a dozen family annihilating murder suicides and heard hundreds of men making suicide threats over police scanners and a huge swath of these don't happen because they're depressed or because people are mean to them on the Internet. They're punishment. A person with an enormous amount of entitlement towards people around them gets backed into a corner and they punish the people closest to them by killing themselves or threatening to kill themselves.

No one wants to talk about this feature of suicide because...you want to help people who are struggling and guide them away from this path and being blunt about the fact that sometimes people die of suicide as a consequence of their own shittiness towards the world does not really help actively suicidal people. But suicide rates are higher in men not just because they have higher rates of untreated mental illness (a societal issue we must address for the sake of all) but because some people, often men, use suicide (but more often the threat of suicide) as a tool of abuse and control.

I'm not saying somerton is like, an icky abuser bad guy, he's just a run of the mill grifter scumbag, but his actions in the past show a clear pattern of escalating behavior that aligns with this.

Somerton gets called out -> somerton alleges physical threats of violence against himself and his fans rally around him supportively -> Harry calls somerton out in a bigger way -> Somerton says he's hospitalized but there are inconsistencies with the story but no one wants to talk about that because you wanna be nice-ish about a guy who just tried to kill himself and now he's trying to be framed as tragic but it doesn't really stick -> somerton apologizes again but his apology is rightly called out for lies and manipulative framing as well as his continuing attempts to profit off the community he betrayed -> James posts a suicide note publicly putting the onus of his own suicide on the loss of his friend Nick who he repeatedly threw under the bus and now everyone is rallying to say nice-ish shit and wring their hands in concern over poor james -> indefinitely repeat this vicious cycle forever until he actually does die or finally gives up and gets real, intensive therapy and a day job.

Thats not to say anyone's concern is misplaced, it's 100% better for him to be a living scumbag than a dead one. He deserves the chance to grow and learn and have a life outside of youtube.

But you don't have to portray this as the action of a sad depressed man who got bullied off the Internet. It's manipulation, whether he intended to go through with it or not and whether someone intervened or not. Not denying that internet bullying is a thing, I'm sure there were some people who were shitty directly to James but he made the choice to not unplug from this and to try and keep being a public figure rather than taking care of himself. He could have deleted Twitter, blocked anyone who was an asshole, gone to therapy and tried to move on with his life but if he'd deleted his channel he'd have lost monetization... Can't have that, right? So he posts some apology videos so his channel stays active and then complains about how ruinous this is while never trying to take real accountability.

But the reality is that people would have forgotten about him so quickly and maybe his job prospects would've been impacted but...that's on him, and that's for him to figure out but it's not actually life ruining. He chose to continue to engage knowing he'd get backlash and hate and he'd feel worse and worse and things would never get better without the time and space for people to forget.

He made the choice to make a public spectacle of his own alleged suicide. That is the action of someone who wants to put the weight of their suicide on someone else's shoulders and is morally wrong. He can be held to account for that, alive or dead.