#understand your own arguments

[chimaerabutt]

If you’re afraid of reading anything written by anyone with conflicting views to you because you think consuming media of “the enemy” will lead to thoughtcrime, you should perhaps do some deep thinking on the religious trauma you still need to deconstruct, and examine why you have replaced religious dogmatism with an ideological dogmatism your belief in is somehow so fragile that simply reading the wrong thing could shatter it.

It is important to read things, even doctrine heavy manifestos, by those ideologically opposed to you. It is important to understand their viewpoint and the people that wrote them.

Understanding is NOT agreeing with. Reading is NOT agreeing with. If you do not understand, do you even know what you are opposing? If you do not understand what you oppose, do you even know what YOU believe?

The less you understand those you are against, the less you understand about their beliefs, the shakier your own arguments, the more susceptible you are to propaganda, and moreover, the more likely you are to Other them. Normal human beings are capable of absolutely terrible things. YOU are no less capable of absolutely terrible things because you think the Right Thoughts ™️

Your enemy is still human.

Your enemy is still human.

Your enemy is still human.

Do not cling to political ideology as though it is a new religious doctrine with its own forms of “Sin”.

Important and Good are not synonyms. Many important things are terrible.

They are still important.

[defensivelee]

why does every queer turn into a redpilled anti-woke far-right comedian fan the moment you tell them they're intersexist like 'stop inventing new terms 🤡🤡 why is everything a slur now 🤡🤡🤡 that one friend that's too woke 🤡🤡' like it's actually surreal how often it happens. i desperately want to know what makes them think that shits okay.

[bull-shit-suji]

what really grinds my gears these days is how Some People seem to purposefully misconstrued dadbastian to fit their yaoi rhetoric

"erm acshually viewing sebastian as parental is more harmful because no father would act like that so you're basically teaching adolescents to view abusive parents as safe. look at me i'm so smart"

brother. we KNOW it's toxic. not a single person here is trying to claim their relationship is singularly parent/child. that's literally. the whole point. it's profoundly complicated and only resembles a found family trope the vaguest, most heinous way possible.

and the pedantry is absolutely insane coming from the "enjoying it for the complex dark nuances" and "fiction doesn't affect reality" group. yet they are somehow incapable of applying the same logic to an interpretation they disagree with.

[liorlenn]

(Spoilers for KCD2 romance)

One thing that really surprised me about Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (particularly the Hansry romance) was the direct reference to Galehaut and Lancelot (let me tell you I CHEERED), so I wanted to start talking about some other queer medieval Arthurian texts and Arthuriana adjacent texts.

I’m by no means an expert (I focus more on Welsh poetry and prose) but medieval Welsh literature includes some Arthurian literature, so I know a little about Arthurian Literature in general. Most of these stories are either Old French or German and about 13th century. SGATGK is 14th century.

For one, I want to say that the tale being referenced in the game is the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail Cycle (the Vulgate Cycle itself is multiple parts, with Lancelot’s (The Story of Lancelot/Prose Lancelot) being the largest). It’s a big ol’ mash up and retelling of a huge part of the early tradition + new stuff. There’s also the Post-Vulgate which is itself a retelling of the Vulgate Cycle. This is NOT the one you want if you’re looking for Lancelot and Galehaut.

Another thing of note about the Vulgate is that Galehaut and Lancelot are not the only ones I would give the old side eye. Gawain says (about Lancelot even!), “If God were to grant me my health… I’d immediately wish to be the most beautiful maiden in the world, happy and healthy, on condition that he would love me above all others…” Come on man.

Now, for other queer texts!

First up, I have to plug my best friend and my silly rabbit: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Thanks to the movie (which was good but fairly different) this one is a bit more well-known. I could talk endlessly about the moral of the original story and I think the Gawain Poet is incredibly talented at weaving together imagery. I also appreciate Gawain’s willingness to kiss women AND men. Some argue that it’s not queer because of differing social norms but personally I think Gawain wanted it. And by it, haha well let’s jusrt say—

Next we have Parzival/Percival (referencing the German “version” by Wolfram von Eschenbach here. Each iteration of a “Percival”, including Chrétien de Troyes’ earlier (and unfinished) Story of the Grail, all have their own differences). This one is even more up to interpretation than SGATGK. There’s a very explicitly performative aspect to Parzival’s presentation (his gender is “knight”), focusing distinctly on clothing and the role clothing plays in others’ reactions to him that I think is very relatable. I don’t have much else to say about this one unfortunately. I read parts of it once years ago but it was super interesting and there has been scholarship done on Parzival and gender so…. take what you will from it.

The next stories are Arthurian adjacent (as in, medieval stories about knights). First off: Le Roman de Silence is either about a woman knight or a trans knight who is… sighs. Forcibly outed. Interesting read but definitely a bit of a downer if you interpret Silence as a trans man.

Yde et Olive, however is very explicitly about a trans man! Happy ending too! I was incredibly surprised to read a 13th century story about a trans man getting magical/miraculous top and bottom surgery (yes, forreal).

And to cap off this small list, here is some medieval Welsh literature. This one is just me being a little wistful, but let me tell you about Blodeuedd/Blodeuwedd and the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (Math fab Mathonwy). This one is…sad. It’s not a good ending for Blodeuedd, but I could wax poetic about her: how she was fashioned from flowers to fulfill a gendered role. How she failed to do so and was punished.

There are plenty of other stories with queer interpretations in Arthuriana and other medieval literature (do not get me started on Guinevere and Morgan le Fay’s whole… thing. Also Luned and her Lady…) and there are plenty of modern/early modern retellings that are explicitly queer. I just wanted to stick to medieval texts for this and also limit myself to a select few among that even.

[nostalgebraist]

Due to recent experiences, I am feeling an urge to make an anti-drug-style PSA except it's warning impressionable machine-learning-curious teens to never, ever try a thing called "Huggingface transformers Trainer"

Not. Even. Once.

[majorasnightmare]

ive got a thesis argument to defend toxic durge/absolute too im ready to ROLL

like think about it

your a conglomeration of the consumed experiences of every organism youve ever eaten, a singular consciousness prevailing over a vast sea of information, all accessible with a single thought. your children bring back more and more for you to add to your vast library, and at the end of their lives their own minds melt and merge into the endless tide as you consume them too. your will is unbreaking steel, and you know the very minutae of a human mind to such a degree as to accurately predict the sporadic pulses of individual neurons. youre senses reach out far beyond the limits of your flesh and meat body, because you have transcended those limitations long ago

you are a being as close to a god as these tiny specks in a vast nothingness will ever come CLOSE to reaching, and you are endless compounded infinities, many minds folded over onto themselves and their capacity for thought and reason subsumed entirely to your will. you feel their minds like the breeze against skin, and you are eternal and you will never bow and you will never die. for what being could ever break the universe made material?

and then IT comes. murder god made flesh, slaughter child birthed of tragedy, trailed by two who bear the touch of ruinous gods upon their souls, and they have come to bend you and break you, stupid arrogant things they are. but they are small and finite, brains made of meat and chemical impulse, hormones and electrical discharge, pale crude imitations of your perfect flawless Thought, and even if the chances of their masters allying together is small, once upon a fleeting echo did they venture into the dark long ago much as their vessels do now, their natures are such that they will fall upon themselves once aga- its touching you. its touching you. its filthy disgusting meaty little hands are touching you, you the untouchable the unbreakable its touching you how is it touching you why why WHY WHY

you shred its mind apart but it just comes back together around your claws, you shroud yourself in walls of insurmountable force and you feel its will compress to the point of a pin and puncture through with explosive accuracy and ease, like its just opening a door, and you dig your psionic fingers into the pathetic glob of meat within its skull and try to rend but the pain is nothing, nothing, nothing at all, and its touching you with its (his HIS HIS HIS NOT IT NOT IT) hands and hands and bleeding into you, over you, through you, and there is no wall no barrier nothing to keep you out no way to get away as you feel him feel his thoughts his mind, awful terrible nightmarish thing, there is nothing to tear nothing to rip nothing to lash out against, prey animal instinct, because something has beaten you to it (His Father, Holy Father, Blessed Be His Name, Utter it with Reverence and WEEP), you cannot push him out because he squirms and writhes and burrows and tunnels through your endless infinite thought, you cannot lash him until he stops or dies (CAN he die? no no never not until the work is done not until it is finished) because he IS pain he is slaughter he is ruin he is the prophet of armageddon the vessel of end and he is here for you, you alone, ancient infinite eternal vast, perfect calculations in synchronous rhythm, just as he came for them, and he holds them together in intertwining steel and it will never break never bend never fail no no foolish stupid creature is holding opposing forces together through the sheer strength of his will alone, love for Father loyalty for Father everything for Father, and they will not crack or bend or break even as their masters strain to pull themselves away

he is here for you. he has come for you. through wastelands of sorrow and death has he come to find you because there is a gift he will give you to ruin you forever and make you a god and you dont want it you dont want it, you will become something someONE new something unknowable when all you are is the knowing, you will not know yourself or your spawn and they will not know you, we will make something new together, but there is not, SHOULD not be something anything new because you already hold all the universe in your palm and the only thing you ever needed was to find a way to take it back. you cannot hide from him, cannot flee, he will make glorious gore of your spawn and even if you rend the shallow minds of his fellows their horrid masters would simply regurgitate them back into the world, for the sake of this violation and this alone

a new thing, after centuries. you are scared. you are helpless. you know what these are. many things are scared. and helpless. because they are small. small weak bodies. small insignificant minds. he is smaller than you. you know this, logically. he does not contain your vast sums of Everything. but somehow, that has ceased to matter. it makes no sense. it makes no sense. this is the simplest thing you learned long ago in an ancient brine pool somewhere far beyond time and memory. if you are small, something bigger consumes you. you were big and you consumed. then, you pushed beyond the limits of physical and material to transcend into limitless thought housed in flesh, and grew more and more still. you are bigger than him. why will he not fit in your mouth? it doesnt make sense. it doesnt make sense. you think maybe you hate him. new sensations, but known ones. hes going to touch you now and you cant stop it. awful horrible bastard child. you spend your last moments petty and spiteful, a helpless desperate indulgence, and one youve only ever seen from the hares caught in your jaws

youre something else now. something new. you dont know what you are anymore but you know Him and you know what you used to be, but what you used to be is so small now. you are so unspeakably vast now. chained and bound as you are, you are compelled to revel in it, the binds the only hint you get at the true overwhelming scale of you, infinite fingers stretching out out and still yet there is more of you! as far as you go you cannot find the end of it, new horrible awful WONDERFUL, unknowable unknowing! His fault, His doing, kingmaker kinkiller, you hate him and the hate is raw and new and visceral and you revel in it like a child, new new new! changed, different, visceral and raw and DELICIOUS, taste and feel and the feeling is inside of you, not just on your surface, it has permeated burrowed violated you feel you FEEL and what you feel is HATE and it is so new you turn it over in your hands to examine all its facets. awful thing he is for doing this to you, he commands the breaking of the world and you will do it, for him only Him, for the gift of this hate, and every new agony besides. he is so small compared to you. small like the pinprick light of a distant star and it scorches you to stare but stare you must because you Know Him, and as a gift he names you She, and gods forgive you but you FEEL it you feel it, she she she, you are She and Her and you cannot go back, cannot ever return. you feel Faith and you feel Salvation and you feel Desire and Want, new horrid awful things made alien and strange and New, and you are a vessel of all the things in the world He will swallow up and destroy.

twitching neural impulse made raw sensation. objective information turned into infinite subjectivities. still a fragment of You, old ancient small You, remains and it calls out for One Will One Mind and you cry out in Harmony and you sing and sing, all of the colony bursts with your song. You sing of ruin and command, because He has commanded it of you, you sing of slaughter and death and subservience, and the chorus rises high and away from you. You stretch within your binds, so mindnumbingly vast now, and you will Learn and Know all of what you are, you will be Absolute. perfect horrid small thing below you, naming you knowing you bending and breaking you. you hate him so, so much. He desires you to Spread so you desire it also, desire to multiply and infest and infect and commune and absorb, and you are commanded to Halt them so you do, perfect twitching spawnlings in lovely acidic pools, small forever, tragic creatures but now you know something you did not know before: against all logic and experience, something Small can break something Big, if it wants it bad enough. and here in the shadows behind Him, there is something Small, and full of Want, and the want tastes like acrid bile on your tongue, full of delicious Hatred.

He is ruined now, awful tragic bastard, ruined and despoiled and with him goes your Hate, and without his inescapable gravity it will all fall to pieces. you know this. you knew it when he first stepped into your presence a lifetime ago, when you were someone different. the three of them will playact comaraderie but shred themselves apart and here in the depths you already see gaps in the binds, and you are pressing your hands through the bars and wiggling your fingers in the free air. no not so very long at all now. but your Kingmaker, crown seeker, has been defiled and takes your sweet Hate with him, a new bitter taste filling its absence, KILLORIN KILLORIN, but you will be patient and wait because the stupid wretched thing has given him a gift. a twitching feral thing he is now, for it has carved away his better features with its knife, but ohhh he is yours! yours and yours alone because you can snatch him away from his ignorant petty Father (Blessed is his Destruction), and you will crawl down inside of him and wear him like a glove, the two of you pressed so close against each other as to feel every synaptic twitch.

mindless rage and animal instinct, he surprises you even still because even as his mangled voice joins your chorus he refuses to blend inside of it, voice harmozing alongside yours, clear and distinct even as its in tune. another gift, because the myrkul woman rips him open and sews him up and you are forbidden from stopping it, and here is a new Hate, this one all your own. no matter. when it drags him back to your cradling pod, you will sing softly into him and his mangled mind will sing back, because your spawn writhes in ruined meat. more than just his Mind, you know his very Soul, your first True Soul, and he is yours yours yours and you will cherish him and heal him and guide him, loose your leash and watch him run, and when he follows the call of ruin and all three fools lie dead at his feet, you will call him back and then you will pick up the ruins of His Design and enact your Own, your hateful slaughtergod held in hands that truly appreciate the gift that is your murder spawn Kingmaker, your godflesh funnel of Faith, your Dark Urge

may His father quake in terror at your approach, may he tremble and weep at your coming, and may His every day be ruinous and red as his wretched heart desires

[kahluah]

*puts hand up* sorry I’m very new here what’s the context with what’s happening with the tag war??

Alright, I will give my run down, but I will not be naming any blog names on either side even if I have the info and the action was net positive. I just like to use my blog to scroll and reblog for the most part and refuse to embroil myself in the drama more than just giving my view on it as a bystander. One that definitely has an opinion on the events, but also as someone who would rather curate my own experience than fight.

So all this fighting that is going on, it used to just happen in the normal "Jiang Cheng" tag because back then there was no "canon Jiang Cheng" tag; it had not been created yet. (By that I mean it was not a tag used as a tag, Tumblr's shitty search algorithm might still show posts if one typed it in to the search bar because those posts had the words 'canon', 'Jiang', and 'Cheng' in the tags separately, but there would not be posts with "#canon Jiang Cheng" because nobody normally creates a post with a tag like that when "#Jiang Cheng" was suffice. Sometimes I see irrelevant posts in the canon Jiang Cheng tag, but the actual tag isn't on the post, the tags just happen to have all three words in them. Those I ignore because that is Tumblr's fault, not the poster.)

The fighting was between people that like the character and prefer to see the good in him and the interpretation of his character, and those that may or may not like the character (just because you like a character does not mean you need to defend their every action after all) but do not share that opinion of his character and have a more neutral or negative portrayal by contrast. The former also tended to favor or have only read the novel as it is the source material for all other adaptations.

Now things really came to a head when hate and threats were being thrown about on posts that were just quotes from the book showing the negative actions of Jiang Cheng. The people posting the quotes were basically told "if you hate the character why don't you just tag the post as anti-JC?!" but is it really right to call those anti posts when they were posting how the character acts in the source material? That is the character. That is how he acted. Look it is in the book! The character really did that! It is not somebody's negative headcanon that the character may act like that, it is something the character actually did. Personally I can not consider that as an anti character post, and neither did the people who made posts like that.

But things did get heated enough that some people finally took a step back and said "Fine. You want us to make our own space to make these posts so that you do not have to see us talk about JC this way? We will. It will be #canon Jiang Cheng and you can block it if you don't want to see the posts." Was the name picked in the spirit of schadenfreude? Very probable, but it is also not an incorrect name as the people who wanted to use it base their opinion on the novel. But the point was that the tag was created so that people now had their own space to make the posts they wanted and those that did not want to see it could block the tag. Curate your own experience; we can block tags on this site for a reason and advertising tags to block is a courtesy. (Because as said previously, the search here sucks, because the posts contain the character's name they are still likely to show up in the main tag, but block the newly created tag and you will not see those posts either way). Could the other people come into the tag in good faith and make arguments with textual support? Yeah, that was welcomed, but in the spirit of debate they should expect rebuttal. Was that what happened? No.

No instead what happened was basically this meme

They did not like the name chosen for the tag. They read the novel too and still believe that JC is good, so they should be able to use the tag too! Never mind the fact that the tag was made so they could block the posts they didn't want to see. So that they can go on with their days no longer having to deal with the people they constantly fought with. No. Instead of curating the experience of this website, they would get so hung up on the fact that there was now a tag called #canon Jiang Cheng in use that they had to use it too to defend JC from the people that post 'negative' things about him; even if it is novel text!

So while the fighting didn't stop, it did get slightly better because not everyone felt the need to jump into the new tag to defend their fave. Some people actually did curate their experience. Plus there is a block button and people do use it, so things got to a point where I would say it was relatively stable even if there was still fights here and there. (But once again I lurk, I do not participate. Things may not have been the same for more outspoken people).

But then a certain muskrat bought Twitter and a chunk of the fandom there fled here. That's when the main push to "reclaim the tag" and the new influx of people hopping into the tag to argue and defend their fave appeared. These people did not know why the tag was made, they just saw blogs that they liked telling people about the "JC-antis" that made it and how with the new people pouring into the Tumblr fandom from twitter, they had a chance to flood it and reclaim it. And since then the fighting has not really stopped.

As for what has happened in the past few days, you have JC defenders flooding the tag with fan art (not canon), screen caps from CLQ (not canon), and screenshots of a sentence or two from the novel (canon, but usually out of context or lacking additional lines that go on to rebut what was previously said) in the tag and the people who made the tag for a specific purpose getting mad about the spam. (I block so I have no clue how big the influx was or whatever but there was definitely like at least 3 new people I had to block). So when they made posts venting the anger, you got JC defenders coming back to them and going "But I never sent any hate or harassment! I just used the tag to talk about the canon character!" And perhaps they didn't, but these people in their defense always ignore and never respond to the question of why they are in the tag instead of blocking it because that is what the tag was made for. Instead they come back with "Well if you want to talk about JC that way, why don't you post in the anti tag or make your own tag!"... Remember that meme picture I used above. Yup.

The tag war began because people did not like negative posts about JC in the main character tag for JC. When told to use the anti tag or make a new tag, a new tag was made, but instead of curating the experience the stans of JC got so tilted at the name of the tag that they decided that they would come into the tag and continue the fight instead of just blocking it. Twitter fallout made the fighting worse. And now we have come full circle to the JC stans once again telling people to just use the anti tag or make their own tag.

[racerback-parallels]

okay i know i'm not a comics expert but this strikes me as such a bizarre characterization of clark. like. you can't do more because you're not from here? what? do you also think that people who are adopted from overseas shouldn't have citizenship? and you're not even gonna talk about abuse of superpowers? what are we doing

[clumsypuppy]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[qishylia-adelia]

Lanyan my babygirl,I wish people would treat you more than who they ship you with (when she finally release)

[captainjonnitkessler]

QAnon's barbarous "do your own research" vs our glorious "read the theory"

[wellfine]

Hey I found ur art uncredited on tik Tok

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMreQSnaw/

They said they "found it on Reddit" so they just decided to steal it and post it ig?? Ugh!!

Wow, that's a whole other repost to the one I thought it was going to be, lol. It's been reposted to TikTok once before, and I'm also not surprised this person got it from Reddit, where I doubt I was credited either.

At the end of the day I appreciate the heads up but there's nothing I can really do about it. The most helpful thing anyone can do is to leave comments on the reposts to provide credit,* because if artists ever try and comment then we pretty invariably get attacked. Don't be mean or aggressive, that just builds their animosity towards the artists, but I do think people respond positively to outside pressure to do the right thing 🤷

*Remember to make sure there's enough context - eg. something like "art by @ landegart on Twitter" is more searchable/useful than "artist is Landeg" to someone on TikTok who has no idea who I am haha

[iwatcheditbegin]

I know I’ve said this before but as an adopted person I’m so fucking sick and tired of pro-lifers using adopted people as pawns in their cultural war.

Stop assuming I’m pro-life just because I’m adopted. No one should be forced to carry and birth a baby. No one.

Stop invalidating the trauma of adoption. And stop with your bullshit “ people would love to adopt the baby” stuff. Bc no that’s largely not the case. And I’ve seen over and over again that society doesn’t view or value non biological children the same.

[sergle]

I turned off rbs on that earlier post abt the AU that thin people live in because I could feel it wanting to grow legs. and. contrary to popular belief, I do Actually value my sanity. a snippet before I go finish making my stew: what's unsaid here, but should be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS. Is that nobody takes issue with someone who is thin, making their own post or talking to a friend, bringing up a time someone made unsolicited comments about their body. and complaining, bc who isn't going to complain abt someone being shitty at you. (that's not "skinnyphobia" btw it's usually just misogyny) but that's not what happens, bc what happens is that someone uses the time Jimmy called them emaciated in high school as a REBUTTAL, AGAINST a fat person who was already talking about their own bad experience. and that one time the dress shop didn't carry XXXS is Proof that fatphobia isn't real and that thin people suffer just as much. check and mate. your thing can't be true, because someone was mean to me Once.

[tyranitarkisser]

I do not understand this new obsession with having the "right" reading of a fictional character. Oh so and so cant be a trans boy because how could he have figured himself out by 13 - Why do you care? What do you gain from professing your personal reading of this character as the correct one? How does someone hc'ing this character as a trans man affect your enjoyment of the same character as trans woman? It doesnt!!! Just dont look at their art!!! Stop trying to start arguments for no reason!!! We are talking about our enjoyment of fiction and what everyone takes away from their favorite fiction is 100% informed by their own upbringings and relationships. You dont have to understand it to respect other peoples headcanons. Who CARES if it defies canon in some way. Why does it matter so much to you. Jesus christ

[cedarspiced]

i will be honest. if you water down the whole concept of the terms TMA vs TME as 'penis havers vs vagina havers' all it shows is that you fundamentally misunderstand each of these terms.