znuggles

[znuggles]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

(read more "AI" opinions in this subsequent post)

[znuggles]

uh hey that person you just reblogged from used to be in our discord server but we had to kick them out because they admitted to watching t*m and j*rry... that show features violence and as such glorifies it.... when we confronted them all they said was "wtf its a show about a cat and a mouse"... if you dont believe me theres a whole callout post that features their name age and street address so you can go to their house and check... anyways you should unfollow them before people start thinking you like problematic media too :/ just trying to help

[znuggles]

This just in

[znuggles]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[znuggles]

"xyz DNI" blocking people is YOUR job, sorry. You cannot ask the world to simply move around you, you have to take control of your online experience or you will be fucking miserable forever. Most people don't read your bio/pinned/carrd before touching the posts that cross their dash anyways.

Also maybe worry less about if someone who likes something you hate clicks on your tumblr post. I promise it is not that fucking serious.

Also-also if you have this DNI because your friends/moots said or implied you have to otherwise you're somehow Bad and/or will be punished by them if you don't, that's kind of fucked and maybe you need less controlling friends.

[znuggles]

Proshippers: This person started yelling at me for drawing and writing stuff they don't like... I just want to be left alone so I can do the things I like

Antis: IT'S A DISGUSTING SIN AND IT SHOULDN'T EXIST, YOU SHOULD KILL YOURSELF SO YOU WON'T EVER MAKE ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!

Neutrals, for some fucking reason: I can see both sides of the argument, so I won't be taking any sides

Proship is, and has always been, at its core: don't harass people and all fiction deserves to exist. If you're grossed out by something but you don't harass people over it, congratulations you're a proshipper!

[znuggles]

Running back into the room with "AND ANOTHER THING"

In regards to the "not anti, not proship, but a third thing":

Many neutrals will openly interact with antis who are aggressive against pro-shippers, all in the name of "well, I don't care about the discourse, so I don't care that they're antis"

I need you to understand that the flaw with this is that it frames the anti mindset as an acceptable viewpoint to have. It isn't.

Imagine if I said "I don't care about the arguments between librarians and Moms For Liberty, and I think they just need to calm down. I support neither! Just stop fighting!" and then exchanged friendly emails with M4L members. This would be utterly ridiculous, wouldn't it? It would mean that I find their beliefs to be valid opinions to hold, and not dangerous rhetoric that, taken to its logical conclusion, would result in mass censorship.

This is even worse in the case of people who "used to be" pro-ship/pro-fiction, presumably knowing how bad this can get and how it affects people IN REAL LIFE, who still chose to go "neutral" and start interacting with antis. You know what they do, you know how they doxx and stalk and threaten people, and you know how they've caused a lot of mentally vulnerable people to take their own lives, and you're going to give them ANY kind of voice in fandom?

To be "neutral" tells me you don't give a single shit about the people who are being targeted over stupid fandom bullshit that was practically never an issue pre-2015. And the few times that it was... well, that's actually why AO3 exists now.

You want the discourse to stop? The only way that's going to happen at this point is if you snuff out as much interaction with fancops as possible. Avoid interacting with them directly as much as possible, do not reblog their posts or their art no matter how innocuous it is, do not allow them into your fandom spaces. Exclude them from fandom entirely, methodically ostracize them. Block, block, block, and block some more. Doing this will mean we only have to deal with the most extreme of cases that involve mass-brigading and block evading.

That's still a tall order of course, but I can guarantee you fandom spaces will improve in quality if you refuse to make a space for fancops at the table.

Sorry. I'm tired of pretending "neutrals" are anything other than Fancop-Lite.

[znuggles]

weird take but i feel like social media not only ruined the minds of young people with social media such as tiktok comment sections / ‘popular’ opinions on tiktok but even to go so far as pinterest, instagram, etc. i see proship stuff all the time on pinterest and its good! but the entire comments are completely filled with ‘ew yuck’ / when someone asks what proship actually means antis / randos respond with ‘it means you support pedos’. like dude. people have watered down the term so much it has literally impacted fandoms that were FOUNDED on proshipping. like death note, black butler, killing stalking, mha, etc. not only on pinterest but most platforms too. i feel like most fandoms are literally losing their ‘culture’ of where they came from. purity culture literally only extends a giving hand to those fandoms who it deems as ‘Good Guy’ and not ‘Bad Guy’. and it makes me sick and tired of having to explain 938579x times of what the actual definition of something is to people who are SO dense. along with that pinterest has people not only going after proships but even as far as ARTWORK references. i cannot tell you the amount of times i see weirdos complain about an anatomically correct male or female drawn on pinterest and the comments are swarmed with ‘oh!’, ‘um i dont think this should be allowed’, or even ‘kids are on this app 💀’. like by god forbid a 13 yr old see an anatomical correct drawing and have a melt down. people need thicker skin. like there are actual issues going on in the world and antis are FROTHING at the site of ‘what ifs’ if a kid sees a drawing / ship / video / even a fucking emoji combination. sorry for the long / rlly weird take, i saw a post that reminded me to say something but i got off track 🙄 ily guys stay safe and drink water :3!

[znuggles]

People LOVE to viciously attack anybody who even understands the definition of the word "pedophile"

God help you if you, even as a neutral/third party, point out the *objective scientific fact* that "Pedophilia" has a very specific medical and psychological definition. God help you if some moral puritan is going ballistic in your mentions and calling a fictional ship between two 17-18 year old anime characters "pedo shit", and you rightfully explain to them that pedophilia only ever applies to real adults feeling sexual attraction to real PREPUBESCENT (under 12 years old) children. Nothing will prepare you for the apocalyptic crashout when they immediately start accusing you of being a child-raping pedophile yourself just because you know what words mean.

Obviously the fact that you can read words and understand their meaning makes you a disgusting child-touching pedophile!

And don't even get me started on their whole "DON'T BRING UP EPHEBOPHILIA THAT'S NOT A REAL THING! EPHEBOPHILIA IS JUST WHAT PEDOPHILES CALL THEMSELVES TO HIDE THE FACT THAT THEY'RE PEDOPHILES! ALL EPHEBOPHILIA IS JUST PEDOPHILIA IN DISGUISE!!1!" thing.

And if you (again, rightfully) explain to them that there is a VERY IMPORTANT difference between ephebophilia and pedophilia, because there is an extremely important difference between a 17 year old and a 4 year old, they will start foaming at the mouth and hurling every single vile slur and false accusation at you that their tiny little cottage cheese brains can think up.

Regressive, anti-intellectual, anti-science authoritarians just simply cannot comprehend the fact that somebody can know the definition of words. They are literally incapable of understanding that "person who knows what the word 'pedophile' means" and "actual pedophile who molests actual children" are two completely different things. I have never seen such an astounding lack of critical thought (or ANY level of thought) in my entire life.

And it frustrates me to no end that the "call your target a pedophile" card is such a common tactic employed by very very stupid people. Because no matter what, it's such a thought-stopping bombshell that's guaranteed to instantly shut down any and all intelligent conversation about an extremely important topic. The pedophile card is the favourite weapon of far-right conservatives, republicans, MAGAists and neonazis, and they throw it around at every queer person in sight specifically because it's an instant conversation-ender. They don't need to make intelligent arguments, they don't need to ever think for themselves, they don't need to provide sources or evidence to prove any of their insane claims. Just call your target/victim a pedophile! It's an instant win button that is beloved by uneducated, hateful bigots and wannabe cops.

And antis refuse to understand this.

Nothing to add here, just support.

[znuggles]

Sooo so so sick and tired of the holier than thou "proship and antiship are both dumb" "I'm so over shipping discourse" "I'm a secret third thing (adult with a job)" circle jerk bullshit I keep seeing on this site

First of all, most of these people don't even see what's actually going on here. It doesn't stop at what fandom ships are good or bad.

And where do they get off thinking it's just some dumb internet tumblr drama? Do you know that people who exist online also exist in real life? And the ideas that they express or act on online (like wanting to censor fiction, thinking they're the authority on what can be written about, sending death and rape threats to people who write fiction in a way they don't like) also carry over into real life?

Real life where we're in a fucking puritan nightmare of a media literacy crisis. You can really look around you at the world we live in and think a thing like censorship is just an issue that exists in cyber space?

[znuggles]

i really, truly, deeply hate the discourse of 'you need to justify your dark media interest with #trauma reasons'.

not because using heavy themes in art is not a super valid way to deal with and explore ones trauma, but

you should never have to disclose any personal details - trauma or otherwise, unless you want to, and certainly not to somehow be 'allowed' to engage in darker content

it is often not a one-to-one thing, where you want to read the exact thing that happened to you, but perhaps some other heavy subject, even if trauma is the reason you like dark shit.

fuck all that.

anyway, all that to say: im feeling like shit today, 'cuz my damned mystery allergies are acting up, have been all week, and ive been sleeping horribly, am super stressed at work these weeks, and can't for the life of me figure out what the hell i causing my symptoms - if they even are allergies???

so.

im gonna go write my frustrations out on my poor blorbos. they're gonna be so hurt, they'll forever be changed, and will never resemble their canon shelves.

[znuggles]

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[znuggles]

hello! hope you’re having a pleasant day whenever you read this! you’ve probably been asked this before, but do you have any tips for writing dubcon for the first time? this is actually for an original piece, not for fanfiction, but i just have no idea where to even start. i’ve read some but now am staring at a blank page sort of clueless haha even though i have a rough scene blocked out. sorry if this is too vague of an ask!! thank you for reading regardless of whether or not you decide to respond!!

hi! thank you for the ask and hope you’re having a pleasant day as well!

tips for writing dubcon that I personally use

trigger warning’s applied

internal conflict the character goes through can be one of the main factors that separate dubcon from non-con; in most dubcon works, the protagonist is unsure, not in a position or condition where they can outright consent or say no (or in some scenarios, the protagonist doesn’t want to get intimate with the antagonist, but is coerced into getting intimate with them anyway).

personally, while writing dubcon, I like to emphasize the vulnerability of my protagonist. while at the same time I’ll make sure that there are also some aspects / some glimpses that indicate some parts of my protagonist may begin to yield and enjoy the sex during the act.

that being said, although a part of my protagonist may later find themself enjoying it, I’ll always keep their vulnerability — in the sense that the one who holds all power and authority over them is the antagonist, and my protagonist has little to no control over what happens to them.

which also leads back to this internal conflict. something about “character A does not want to sleep with character B, but they can’t really say no, and during the sex, a part of character A starts yearning for character B, and character A is upset (or even outright disgusted) with themself for how they yearn for character B”.

that being said, one thing I’ll always keep in mind is that “orgasm does not necessarily mean the atmosphere shifts from non-con to dubcon”. you can write a dark non-con fic where your protagonist reaches an orgasm, and it will not mean your work now falls under the “dubcon” category just because the victim reaches their climax. your work is not “dubcon” if your protagonist cries and begs for the antagonist to stop the entire time before said protagonist eventually reaches an orgasm. my point is, orgasm is not a deciding factor whether a work is dubcon or if it’s non-con, because orgasm is a natural response of a person’s body to sexual stimulation, your character can have an orgasm against their will (this also applies to character getting an erection; it can be against their will, so erection alone does not decide if your work is non-con or if it’s dubcon).

basically, these are keys to dubcon that I personally use: uncertainty, vulnerability, power imbalance (also worth mentioning that these are just key points that can make a work fall under dubcon category, but works that contain these topics are not necessarily dubcon or non-con just because they feature these topics).

I hope this helps, and happy writing!

[znuggles]

isn’t it problematic to write non-con or dark fics?

isn't it problematic to make horror or slasher movies?

the answer to both of the questions above is no.

it is, however, problematic to judge a person based on something that is entirely fiction.

[znuggles]

MASTER POST OF PROSHIP RESOURCES!!! <3<3

this is just for links (bc i just have No Way of formatting this properly), so for more in-depth stuffs and credits, head to the google doc, or the carrd !! :3c

Fiction ≠ Reality

Violent media -

Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What You Look at and When

Video Game Violence Use Among “Vulnerable” Populations: The Impact of Violent Games on Delinquency and Bullying Among Children with Clinically Elevated Depression or Attention Deficit Symptoms

Extreme metal music and anger processing

On the Morality of Immoral Fiction: Reading Newgate Novels, 1830–1848

How gamers manage aggression: Situating skills in collaborative computer games

Examining desensitization using facial electromyography:Violent videogames, gender, and affective responding

'Bad' video game behavior increases players' moral sensitivity

Fiction and Morality: Investigating the Associations Between Reading Exposure, Empathy, Morality, and Moral Judgment

Comfortably Numb or Just Yet Another Movie? Media Violence Exposure Does Not Reduce Viewer Empathy for Victims of Real Violence Among Primarily Hispanic Viewers

Fantasy Crime: The Criminalisation of Fantasy Material Under Australia's Child Abuse Material Legislation

Being able to distinguish fiction from reality -

Effects of context on judgments concerning the reality status of novel entities

Children’s Causal Learning from Fiction: Assessing the Proximity Between Real and Fictional Worlds

Reality/Fiction Distinction and Fiction/Fiction Distinction during Sentence Comprehension

Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain’s Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction

How does the brain tell the real from imagined?

Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella: The Neural Response When Telling Apart What is Real from What is Fictional in the Context of Our Reality

loli/shota/kodocon -

If I like lolicon, does it mean I’m a pedophile? A therapist’s view

Virtual Child Pornography, Human Trafficking and Japanese Law: Pop Culture, Harm and Legal Restrains

Lolicon: The Reality of ‘Virtual Child Pornography’ in Japan

Report: cartoon paedophilia harmless

‘The Lolicon Guy:’ Some Observations on Researching Unpopular Topics in Japan

Robot Ghosts And Wired Dreams Japanese Science Fiction From Origins To Anime [pg 227-228]

Australia's "child abuse material' legislation, internet regulation and the juridification of the imaginationjuridification of the imagination [pg 14-15]

Multiple Orientations as Animating Misdelivery: Theoretical Considerations on Sexuality Attracted to Nijigen (Two-Dimensional) Objects

Positive Impact on Mental Health

Art therapy -

The effectiveness of art therapy for anxiety in adults: A systematic review of randomised and non-randomised controlled trials

Efficacy of Art Therapy in Individuals With Personality Disorders Cluster B/C: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Effectiveness of Art Therapy With Adult Clients in 2018 - What Progress Has Been Made?

Benefits of Art Therapy in People Diagnosed With Personality Disorders: A Quantitative Survey

The Effectiveness of Art Therapy in the Treatment of Traumatized Adults: A Systematic Review on Art Therapy and Trauma

The clinical effectiveness and current practice of art therapy for trauma

Writing therapy -

Optimizing the perceived benefits and health outcomes of writing about traumatic life events

Expressive writing and post-traumatic stress disorder: Effects on trauma symptoms, mood states, and cortisol reactivity

Focused expressive writing as self-help for stress and trauma

Putting Stress into Words: The Impact of Writing on Physiological, Absentee, and Self-Reported Emotional Well-Being Measures

The writing cure: How expressive writing promotes health and emotional well-being

Effects of Writing About Traumatic Experiences: The Necessity for Narrative Structuring

Scriptotherapy: The effects of writing about traumatic events

Emotional and physical benefits of expressive writing

Emotional and Cognitive Processing in Sexual Assault Survivors' Narratives

Finding happiness in negative emotions: An experimental test of a novel expressive writing paradigm

An everyday activity as treatment for depression: The benefits of expressive writing for people diagnosed with major depressive disorder

Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process

Effects of expressive writing on sexual dysfunction, depression, and PTSD in women with a history of childhood sexual abuse: Results from a randomized clinical trial

Written Emotional Disclosure: Testing Whether Social Disclosure Matters

Written emotional disclosure: A controlled study of the benefits of expressive writing homework in outpatient psychotherapy

Misc -

Emotional disclosure about traumas and its relation to health: Effects of previous disclosure and trauma severity

Treating complex trauma in adolescents: A phase-based integrative approach for play therapists

Emotional expression and physical health: Revising traumatic memories or fostering self-regulation?

Disclosure of Sexual Victimization: The Effects of Pennebaker's Emotional Disclosure Paradigm on Physical and Psychological Distress

Kink/Porn/Fantasies

Sexual fantasies -

A Critical Microethnographic Examination of Power Exchange, Role Idenity and Agency with Black BDSM Practitioners

Women's Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations

History, culture and practice of puppy play

What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?

The Psychology of Kink: a Survey Study into the Relationships of Trauma and Attachment Style with BDSM Interests

Punishing Sexual Fantasy

Women's Erotic Rape Fantasies

Sexual Fantasy and Adult Attunement: Differentiating Preying from Playing

What Is So Appealing About Being Spanked, Flogged, Dominated, or Restrained? Answers from Practitioners of Sexual Masochism/Submission

Dark Fantasies, Part 1 - With Dr. Ian Kerner

Why Do Women Have Rape Fantasies

The 7 Most Common Sexual Fantasies and What to Do About Them

Sexual Fantasies

Pornography -

The Effects of Exposure to Virtual Child Pornography on Viewer Cognitions and Attitudes Toward Deviant Sexual Behavior

American Identities and Consumption of Japanese Homoerotica

The differentiation between consumers of hentai pornography and human pornography

Pornography Use and Holistic Sexual Functioning: A Systematic Review of Recent Research

Claiming Public Health Crisis to Regulate Sexual Outlets: A Critique of the State of Utah's Declaration on Pornography

Pornography and Sexual Dysfunction: Is There Any Relationship?

Reading and Living Yaoi: Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women's Sexual Subculture in Japan

Women's Consumption of Pornograpy: Pleasure, Contestation, and Empowerment

Pornography and Sexual Violence

The Sunny Side of Smut

Other -

Fantasy Sexual Material Use by People with Attractions to Children

Fictosexuality, Fictoromance, and Fictophilia: A Qualitative Study of Love and Desire for Fictional Characters

Exploring the Ownership of Child-Like Sex Dolls

Are Sex and Pornograpy Addiction Valid Disorders? Adding a Leisure Science Perspecive to the Sexological Critique

Littles: Affects and Aesthetics in Sexual Age-Play

An Exploratory Study of a New Kink Activity: "Pup Play"

Jaws Effect

The Jaws Effect: How movie narratives are used to influence policy responses to shark bites in Western Australia

The Shark Attacks That Were the Inspiration for Jaws

The Great White Hope (written by Peter Benchley, writer of Jaws)

The Jaws Myth [not a study BUT is an interesting read and provides some links to articles and studies]

Slenderman Stabbings

Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon

Jury in Slender Man case finds Anissa Weier was mentally ill, will not go to prison

2nd teen in 'Slender Man' stabbing case to remain in institutional care for 40 years

Negative effects of online harassment

How stressful is online victimization? Effects of victim's personality and properties of the incident

Prevalence, Psychological Impact, and Coping of Cyberbully Victims Among College Students

Offline Consequences of Online Victimization

The Relative Importance of Online Victimization in Understanding Depression, Delinquency, and Substance Use

Internet trolling and everyday sadism: Parallel effects on pain perception and moral judgement

The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

When Online Harassment is Perceived as Justified

Violence on Reddit Support Forums Unique to r/NoFap

"It Makes Me, A Minor, Uncomfortable" Media and Morality in Anti-Shippers' Policing of Online Fandom

[znuggles]

i dont have to worry that my kinks are desensitising me to real abuse, bc every time i hear abt an irl abuse case i am filled with so much disgust, anger and horror that it can shut my brain off. it could be an exact scenario ive seen in smut before, or that i might enjoy if fictional, but the sole fact of knowing it happened irl changes my reaction completely. crazy right?

[znuggles]

hell yeah brother