yeah-how-about-nope

[yeah-how-about-nope]

now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself

[yeah-how-about-nope]

I am needlessly riled by all the posts and humans' inherent goodness.

Humans are *neutral*, man. That's why improving society really needs to look like making doing the right thing the path of least resistance.

A majority of people sit right around the tall bit of some sort of bell curve with "does selfish shit that could hurt others by default, is generous under the right circumstance" is one side of the peak and "is generous by default, will do selfish shit that could hurt others under the right circumstances" on the other.

You can observe it any day by observing people under stress (eg: bad traffic, busy supermarket, an unexpectedly un/pleasant interaction with a stranger who is very different to you) - and in yourself in circumstances you find particularly stressful.

[yeah-how-about-nope]

Nooo don’t respond to an unreasonable societal standard by pivoting hard in the exact opposite direction creating a different yet equally unreasonable standard you’re so sexy haha

[yeah-how-about-nope]

[yeah-how-about-nope]

STOP! before you decide you are irretrievably doomed, try one of the following options:

transition

bdsm

iron supplements

[yeah-how-about-nope]

You're all aware that ordinary fan art drawn by humans falls under the same "this is identical to our copyrighted characters" claim that Disney is using to sue midjourney, right? You know that in the eyes of the Mouse the only difference between you and midjourney is a matter of scale, right?

[yeah-how-about-nope]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[yeah-how-about-nope]

I think mostly what young fandom types (and I guess younger people in general) who are very very invested in the idea that “20 is still basically a minor” need to understand is that the feeling of “I’m just a child pretending to be an adult, and everyone else around me is a REAL adult” is DEEPLY universal (and won’t stop, ever, by the way, sorry!) and also is not, like, praxis.

Believe me, I get it, but the self-infantilization needs to stop, especially when you’re trying to engage in conversations about actual children and the harms they can face. Yes, it is scary to wake up and realize you’re 22 and you still feel like you’re 15, but it happens to all of us. You’re an adult. You have to deal with it.

[yeah-how-about-nope]

⬆️ UPDATE ⬆️

HEY GUYS!!

GUYS!!!

FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!

ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!

We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.

As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:

Spain - 38.72%

Finland - 30.31%

Ireland - 24.86%

Netherlands - 24.15%

Germany - 23.54%

Belgium - 23.09%

So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!

[yeah-how-about-nope]

[yeah-how-about-nope]

The only truly effective way to avoid internalizing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience is to inoculate yourself against them by learning how to recognize them when you see them, which includes learning their history, their tropes, and their overall characteristics. It also includes learning information literacy and strengthening your critical thinking skills. Trying to avoid encountering them at all does nothing to inoculate you, which leaves you vulnerable to internalizing them from an unexpected source. You cannot give in to lazy/reactionary thinking on this one.

(In case you need it: here are resources.)

[yeah-how-about-nope]

I don’t think I can stress enough how many people on here need a hobby like 95% of what people refer to as jobless behavior is actually just hobbyless behavior. Take up watercolors or tabletop or join a hiking group or something you probably won’t feel as much of an incessant need to freak out on the internet every day

[yeah-how-about-nope]

Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.

Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do to feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.

[yeah-how-about-nope]

every time I mention how many days sober I am I appreciate people congratulating me and telling me to keep up the good work. it is nice. but I also wish that milestones in addiction recovery weren’t still so pinned to length of sobriety/abstinence

yeah yeah I’m 50 days sober who cares. how about the fact that, when I do drink, it tends to be nipped in the bud after two days nowadays instead of weeks or months? how about the fact that drinking has been condensed to a six pack because I’m at the end of my tether, instead of browning out every night? how about my friend who has decided to stop drinking alone, and is actually sticking to that? recovery doesn’t always look like sobriety and I wish it was more normal to talk about that. yknow. when addiction is normal to talk about at all

[yeah-how-about-nope]

"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

[yeah-how-about-nope]

even if you did with 100% accuracy only use the word "degenerate" to refer to child molesters, you would still be implicitly espousing a fascist theory of social/biological devolution!

[yeah-how-about-nope]

i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.