#wretched text

[cavewretch]

love the chemistry between any characters cellbit and roier play . the david tennant and catherine tate of minecraft roleplay

[comradekatara]

ily king on god we’re gonna get u a razor

[ash-and-starlight]

modern au and esen’s honkers are haunting the instagram feed

[couthbbg]

x / x . x . x . x . x . x . x . x

[craycraybluejay]

yeah yeah you hate me I'm an evil disgusting perverted manwhore we have each other blocked everywhere blah blah but I know you still jerk off to me and I know it makes you hate yourself a bit because you don't have the strength to accept the darker parts of your desire. but you can't help yourself and I take pleasure in the knowledge.

[galecgun]

It took Nappa and Vegeta a year to get to Earth and they did that like it was completely normal for them. Routine. How much more time did they spend just… in stasis, alone, getting from one place to another?

I think he’s around 27 (earth years old) here, but between some details about this scene and the way he acted during the fight on Earth I have to assume there were long stretches of time where nothing happened to him at all, and that’s a lot of why he’s got this sort of arrested development about him.

That and all the trauma

[communistkenobi]

i don’t know if you have seen the TOS movies so i will try to be as vague about this as possible so to not spoil them for you. i think a large portion (or at least a portion) of the issues presented in TOS are because starfleet sucks, to put it in the best words. this is not including the issues and harm it has done on real people, im talking about the in-universe starfleet and how it presents itself and its rules (example: colonization (encouraging its captains to colonize, encouraging its captains to make other planets and civilizations join their “american” federation)). a larger and more prominent explanation is how its, as described in VI, a “homosapiens-only club”. the klingon who says this also goes on to say that the federation is racist. and this is shown after both kirk and spock say they believe that the federation is peaceful. and obviously they think that because that’s what it presents itself as to it’s employees. another example is in TSFS when a higher authority from the federation tells kirk that he doesn’t believe in vulcan rituals, therefore, if kirk does this ritual, he will be fired. i know this is shown in the show as well but the more obvious examples are from the movies; to me it feels like they’re outright saying it in the films

i know this is not how it was intended to be perceived but this is what the show presents it as. i could be missing something or misunderstanding but this is how i see it, and from what i’ve heard, this is talked about in ds9

also starfleet coincidentally decides that the dark skinned aliens are enemies (this is more of a writing choice and the writers (and character designers) are at fault for this but it presents itself as an obvious issue, in universe, in V & VI)

I’ve seen the first four movies! My recall on canon and the intricacies of starfleet etc are not so precise, so I appreciate the context and some of that sounds familiar. I’m assuming you’re responding to my bitching about the politics of tos and how disconnected it is (in my view) with the fandom’s perception of tos as a progressive cultural text. 

I think those examples are good highlights of a lot of the in-universe problems with Starfleet. To go a step further, I think even absent Starfleet’s racist or discriminatory history in-universe, the show itself (at least tos, I haven’t seen the others) operates on a colonial imaginary, by which I mean, its basic narrative premises and assumptions are colonial (and therefore racist) in character.

Like okay, the premise of tos is that the Enterprise, as an ambassador of Starfleet/the Federation, is seeking out new alien life to study. The Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise crew from interfering with the development of any alien culture or people while they do this, so the research they collect needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. I think this is the first point at which people balk at the charge that tos is colonial - the Enterprise’s mission is premised on non-interference, and I think when people hear ‘colonial’ as a descriptor they (understandably, obviously) assume it is describing active conquest, genocide, and dispossession. Even setting aside all the times where Kirk does directly interfere with the “development” of a people or culture (usually because they’ve “stagnated” culturally, because a culture without conflict cannot evolve or “develop” beyond its current presumed capacity - he is pretty explicitly imposing his own values onto another culture in order to force them to change in a particular way), or the times when the Enterprise is actually looking to extract resources from a given planet or people, I’m not exactly making this claim, or rather, that’s not the only thing I’m describing when calling tos colonial.

Its presentation of scientific discovery and inquiry is anthropological - the “object” of analysis is alien/foreign culture, meaning that when the Enterprise crew comes into contact with a new being or person, this person is always read first and foremost through the level of (the Enterprise’s understanding of) culture. Their behaviour, beliefs, dress, way of speaking, appearance, and so on are always reflective of (and represent a microcosm of) their culture as a whole, and more importantly, that their racial or phenotypic characteristics define the boundaries of their culture, ie, culture is interpreted, navigated, and bound racially. Because of this, Kirk and Co are never really interacting with individuals, they are interacting with components of a (foreign, exotic, fundamentally different) culture. And when they interact with these cultures, they very frequently measure them using a universalized scale of development - they have an evolutionary view of culture, ie, that all cultures go from savage to rational, primitive to advanced, economically marginal to economically dominant (ie, to capitalism). And the metrics they are judging these cultures by are fundamentally Western ones, always emphasising to the audience that the final destination of all cultures (that are worthy of advancing beyond their current limited/“primitive” stages) is a culture identical to the Federation, a culture that can itself engage in this anthropological mission to catalogue all life as fitting within a universal set of practices and racial similarities they call “culture.”

This is a western, colonial understanding of culture - racially and spatially homogenous people comprise the organs of a social totality, ie, a society, which can then be analysed as an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” by the scientists in order to extract information from them to produce and advance state (ie Federation) knowledge. The Enterprise crew are allowed to be individuals, are allowed to be subjects with a capacity for reason, contradiction, emotion, compassion, and even moments of savagery or violence, without those things being assigned to their “race” or “culture” as a whole, but the people they interact with are only components of a whole which are “discovered” by the Enterprise as opportunities to expand and refine the Federation’s body of knowledge.

And on the flip side you have the Klingons, which you brought up - a “race” that is uniformly savage, backward, violent, and dangerous. In the episode Day of the Dove, where Klingons board the Enterprise along with an alien cloud that makes everyone very aggressive and racist (this show is insane lol), the Enterprise crew begins acting violent and racist, but the Klingons don’t change. They aren’t more violent than before (because they already were fundamentally violent and racist), and they don’t become less violent when the cloud eventually leaves (because they are never able to emerge from their violence and savagery as a social condition or external imposition - they simply are that way). Klingons are racially, behaviourally, psychologically, and culturally homogenous, universally violent and immune to reason, and their racial characteristics are both physical manifestations of this universal violence as well as the origin of it. The writers and creators of tos are consciously invoking the orientalist idea of the “Mongolian horde,” representing both the American fear of Soviet global takeover as well as blatantly racist fears about “asiatics” (a word used in the show, particularly in The Omega Glory where a fear of racialised communist takeover is made explicit) dominating the world.

This is colonial thinking! Like, fundamentally, at its core, this is colonial white supremacist thinking. Now this is not the fault of tos as an individual show, this is a problem with western science in general, and I am not expecting a television show to navigate its way outside of this current colonial paradigm of scientific knowledge. I’m also not expecting an average person watching this to pick out all the intricacies of this and link it to the colonial history of Europe or the colonial history of western science. But this base premise of Star Trek is why the show is fundamentally colonial - even if the crew never intervened in any alien conflict, never extracted any material resources from other people, and even if the Federation did not have all these explicitly racist practices that you outlined, this would still be colonial logic and colonial thinking. The show has a fundamentally colonial imagination when it comes to exploration, discovery, and culture.

And so my problem, which is maybe where I need to adjust expectations for tumblr fandom, is when people call this show socialist or durably progressive in any way. This is not because socialist societies can’t be colonial or can’t be racist, obviously they can be those things, but because people are bundling “post-racist, post-bigotry, post-discrimination” in their labelling of tos as “socialist media.” When I hear someone call a piece of media socialist I am also bringing my own assumptions into those things, ie, I am expecting this claim to be actually reflective of the politics within the show to some degree. There can of course be debates about the exact nature and quality of those socialistic politics (see conversations about the politics of Disco Elysium, a contemporary canonical example of actual “socialist art”), but I’m at least expecting there to by a whiff of them in there! And I don’t think tos stands up to basic scrutiny in this regard. I genuinely do not even buy that it’s progressive, for reasons I’ve outlined above. Again that’s a genre problem, I think all sci-fi has to contend with this, but tos is certainly not a progressive exception to the political norms of sci-fi as a genre. 

And THIS IS OBVIOUSLY not me saying you can’t like tos or that you’re racist for doing so, I deeply enjoy the show on its own terms, and its politics (good and bad) are part of that enjoyment. I’m also someone who is in university & complicit in all of these colonial scientific assumptions and practices, I’m not positioning myself as morally superior in this discussion. But when people package their enjoyment of the show with their analysis of it as socialist, as progressive, I think that is pretty fucking stupid and leads to a lot of handwaving of its fundamentally racist narrative premises. Hence my bitching 

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

so what's wrong w this guy anyway

[canonkiller]

sulking again

one day, you'll look back on this and laugh

(im okay. just getting it out of my system. you know how it is)

[uncriticalbunny]

this fandom is full of racist and idiotic asshats and the only people i see who call this shit out are sydcarmy shippers.

@currymanganese made a post about the fandom wiki entry on sydney and carmy's relationship, which you can only guess how accurate it is. here's a link to sydney's 'the bear' wiki page as it currently appears.

this is a snippet of sydney's wonderful personality and characterization.

However, she is bad at accepting 'no' or being told not right now. Her perfectionist nature does not allow her to let go of things, either. This often causes her to push for too much, too far, too fast, and then suffer the negative consequences because she did not understand why she was being told not to do something and would not let it go or wait. In times of stress, or rebounding from being treated poorly herself, she forgets her dream of making the kitchen environment safe and can abusively lash out with the worst of them. She resents that her business and administrative skills are often more highly valued at "The Bear" than her chef and cooking skills, though she excels in those areas. She tends to come across to others as young, anxious, and very insecure, wanting a lot of reassurance, until she finds her comfortable regiment and standardized process for completing a task, which allows her talent to come through. She often feels like a fish out of water with the rest of the staff, who are older, poorer, lack formal training, and have long-established ties, but is determined to make it work if it means learning under Carmy and having some control over the kitchen she works in.

this is a snippet of sydney's season 1 section.

Sydney becomes fixated on perfecting the risotto and becomes more aggrieved with every rejection. After being told her latest version is "tremendous", yet still cannot be offered on the dinner menu, Sydney, in a minor act of petty rebellion, serves the dish to a customer. With this act, Sydney is responsible for shoving The Beef down the road to its destruction. The customer, it turns out, is a famous food critic. He writes a glowing review of The Beef, and raves about risotto. The restaurant goes viral. Carmy is peeved, because the reason he wouldn't put the dish on the menu, besides it not being ready, is because risotto is very labor intensive. They do not have the staff to make it during dinner service. Additionally, the high brow dish does not fit the fast casual nature of a sandwich shop's menu. Richie rags on Sydney with suspicion, believing she knew the customer was a critic and gave him her dish to force them to put it on the menu, and to gain herself fame. The restaurant going viral coincides with Sydney's latest innovation push to use ordering tablets and accept online to go orders. Once again going too much, too fast, they begin using the new system before they're ready. Sydney makes a fatal error with the new technology by failing to set up website parameters. As a result, the second the system is turned on, the tiny restaurant is flooded with hundreds upon hundreds of to-go orders, all due for pick up shortly and even more coming in every second. In person, customers are asking for the famous risotto…which is not on the menu. Carmy explodes at Sydney and demands she get out of the way before she keeps making the catastrophe worse, Sydney, who doesn't handle feelings of rejection or inadequacy well, spirals. She lashes out at the staff, and engages in a vicious fight with Richie, who never wanted the tablet system. After saying some truly cruel things about him as a father, Sydney stabs him, whether on purpose or on accident is uncertain, and then immediately resigns amidst the chaos.

"With this act, Sydney is responsible for shoving The Beef down the road to its destruction." IJBOL

and oh look, in season 2, sydney reconnects with claire and goes to al-anon with carmy.

Throughout the process, Sydney reconnects with Claire, who is now a resident in emergency medicine. Sydney attends Al-Anon meetings along with Carmy, discussing her search for fun.

awww sydney faces a setback when ebra stops attending culinary school and sees claire as a threat. sounds about right.

As the opening of The Bear approaches, Sydney continues to work on the menu with Tina's help. She faces a setback when Ebra stops attending culinary school. Sydney also begins to see Claire as a threat to Carmy's focus. Despite these challenges, Sydney remains committed to her role in the restaurant and prepares for the soft opening.

even better, richie alone successfully handles the situation at the soft open. she and carmy even reconcile!

During the soft opening, Sydney feels the pressure to impress her father. She runs the kitchen while Richie takes charge of the front of house. Issues arise, such as running out of forks and Carmy getting trapped in the walk-in fridge. However, Richie successfully handles the situation and takes over expediting. Sydney feels fulfilled after impressing her father, and she and Carmy reconcile.

this page is full of misogynoir and shitty, incorrect OPINIONS about sydney adamu. are these things not supposed to be objective? and yet they make sydney out to be an incompetent, jealous, hysterical, aggressive overstepper. we see this frequently on social media sites when sydney is discussed. and no one ever wants to draw attention to this for some reason. where's the news and media? the hit tweets? the constant posts complaining about this issue?

all people ever want to talk about is how sydcarmy is terrible and how shippers have terrible comprehension of the show. yet this garbage slips by all the time. maybe it's because the same people focusing all their energy on shippers hold those very same opinions, but i think a lot of people simply have tunnel vision and simply do not gaf about sydney.

it's fucking exhausting watching the general fandom treat syd as less than human and have zero understanding of her character. it's like yelling into the void. and i would very much like to know how this garbage wiki can be corrected.

[cavewretch]

actually ridiculous how much qroier is wretch blorbo bait. oh he's secretly incredibly strong and smart and skilled but hides it with humor? oh he's tasked with taking care of children and doesn't know what he's doing but cares So Much and does his best? oh he's queer? oh he's incredibly in tune with everything happening around him socially and can strategically manipulate the situation to be better for him & his friends, but the actions he takes to do so are seemingly just chaotic and funny? oh he's in immense pain but very few people can even tell bc he's impossible to read? fucking. DÉJAME EN PAZ

[morethanwonderful]

Which MXTX Character do You Most Want to Study Like a Little Bug?

Full Bracket

(Bonus match theme: The last guy you want to run into at the family reunion)

[pawthko]

the worst part about watching all of naruto for the first time in 2023 is sitting on my paws and not looking at any fan content for like 1927363829 episodes until I’m done with the whole thing I’m not strong enough for this I’m teetering

[cicerobussytransplant]

the obsession with productivity is so funny. person ensouled with that milanese air that needs to ask: quanto hai fatturato questo quadrimestre economico amo?

[nektaarr]

Mary Shelley - „Frankenstein“

[featherymainffins]

Now this might be because I have issues but is it just me or does Slay The Princess feel like an allegory for a relationship?