@el-shab-hussein

Why do Americans call the settlers "Pilgrims"? Was there actually a large population that saw settling the Americas as some sort of religious mission, or is it just part of the mythos?

Personally I think Thanksgiving as a modern holiday is in pretty poor taste regardless as the core tradition is from what I understand pretty much pure genocide apologetics (in an explicit, purposeful way that is not true of many other calendar holidays), but I think that a good step to improving the situation would be to flush out any needless mystique, if that is what it is.

so i've been writing up a lot of sdmi meta lately, sometimes pretty scathingly and sometimes with a lot of praise, and man it is a real whiplash to go from 'sdmi did a fantastic job showing how a marginalized person--a villain, even--being body-shamed even one time is Fucked, and a major signal that the person who does it is abusive and about to do him serious harm,' to

'so people in the show constantly make unnecessary, derogatory, degrading comments about the abuser's body. he is an extremely marginalized person who has been dehumanized from birth for having that body, up to and including being considered legal property; he has been tortured in a pressure cooker of abuse targeted at his minority status for a quarter of his life. this is Quirky and Witty and Whimsical, no one has a problem with it, and we are going to just skate right on by that without ever even acknowledging that he's oppressed. moving along now'

like, in pericky's case it's interesting to explore how ricky does say some genuinely extremely shitty, bigoted things to pericles that are presumably part of why he snaps and hits him, but he's doing that in the context of being abused, and pericles is reacting to it in the context of abusing him. ricky's not a great person and does not spend his time around great people, but he's trying to stand up for himself with the verbal and emotional vocabulary he has available. the person he's trying to draw on for the strength and the beliefs to do that with--the language to do that with--is his only real example of someone in pericles' life who has never, ever bowed to him.

......aaaaaaaand she's super fucking racist. and is the one who makes the bulk of the body-shaming comments about pericles in the show. so no wonder ricky turned around and incorporated that into trying to imitate her.

but see, she also has a reason to be racist/ableist to pericles: he preyed on and traumatized her and the people she loved, and ruined all their lives (and tbh, my personal read is that he was probably pretty emotionally abusive to her when she was a teenager). like, sure, that's a lot less of an immediate reason not to take someone to task over being shitty about their abuser than Currently Being Abused the way ricky is. cassidy's a grown adult who's had two decades of distance from him to heal, and has had plenty of opportunity in the meantime to unpack that hey! your abuser was one (1) shitty person from this extremely vulnerable demographic of people who have otherwise never done jack shit to you! maybe don't do things like call them 'it' and threaten to put them down because you're mad at that one guy! just a thought.

but still, she had a reason, right? right.

and when marcie uses the fact that he's much smaller and weaker than her to grab him and threaten to break his neck; tortures him in a way that can only be done to him because of the kind of body that he has; and intentionally calls him the wrong species to compare him to a nonsapient animal, with the connotation of preparing him to be cooked and eaten ('one wrong move and i pluck this ugly little chicken').... well shit, dude, you can't exactly hold that against her under the circumstances, can you? just, like, gestures at EVERYTHING that's happened, including the fact that he'd just spent god knows how long torturing her by keeping her trapped in a box, and she's a teenage girl who's doing this to hold the line with the knowledge that she's about to die violently. which she does. at pericles' orders. like, jesus, that's not exactly a situation to lecture someone about Problematic Language.

after all: she had a reason. right?

right.

this is something i see over and over, especially in sci-fi/fantasy settings where it's easy for the writers to make up their own social contexts, exaggerate Bad Things to the extreme, or both.

on the one side of this equation you have the hatebait: a minority character who's written to be Super Evil and Monstrous and Hateable, who says slurs and kicks babies into traffic and often as not is a sexual predator--the worst of the worst, and you'd never defend someone like that, would you? they deserve any bad thing that happens to them, don't they? anything they say they don't like about their situation (god forbid want to change) must just be an excuse, a sob story, maybe outright hypocritical given how they treat other people, right?

awesome, glad we've got that out of the way. now we can move on to the part where you cheer for brutal violence targeted at that minority, or at least go 'well, that's rough i guess, but they're a Really Bad Guy, so....'

(one of my least favorite examples of this ever is the trope where the villain in their True Form(tm) is physically small, weak, disabled, and/or Really Really Old, and when they're defeated they're stripped down to that state to hurt/humiliate/imprison/kill them. and/or watch horrific things happen to their body as a direct result of being removed from the source of their size/youth/power/basic fucking life support. it is DEEPLY distressing and i hate it so much.)

it is really fucking upsetting how well this works. i tend to get really invested in characters like this.

so we have our object of 'justified' bigotry, hatred, and violence. but then you have the other half of the equation:

the person who Always Has a Reason.

there's been a lot said about the appeal of bodice-ripper fantasies: they're popular in large part because in a sex-negative society women are shamed for their sexuality and for wanting sex, and there's catharsis for some people in stories about being Allowed to cut loose and enjoy it because you had no choice in the matter. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(in real life they can and will, because society is shit about survivors and hates us. but that's real life; this is the safety of your own fantasy to work things through, with no voices spouting bullshit at you except the ones you're allowing to talk for the express purpose of telling them to shut up.)

so there's that. and somewhere there is an excellent post about SPN, and similarly full-of-whump shows marketed to the same demographic of men, being maybe the same thing for those men in a different way: if Every Possible Terrible Gutwrenching Devastating Loss and Trauma and Torture happens to you, then surely it won't make you any less of a man if you cry and break down, show weakness and pain. nobody can blame you for that, right?

(i don't know where that post went. if anyone has the link to pass on i'll add it here, because it is a Really Good Post and worth reading.)

all well and good so far. understandable.

and then you get to the person who Always Has a Reason. and what they Always Have a Reason for is bigotry, hatred, and violence toward minorities. or representations of real-life minorities with a hasty oppression-swap fantasy AU slapped on.

they oppressed the character's people. they tortured them. they murdered their family. they genocided their planet. they're abusing them. they raped them. they ruined their life. maybe the character is a kid who's young and in over their head and going through enough shit already, and can't really be held up to the standards of an adult who's not currently experiencing War Crimes.

you wouldn't begrudge them defending themself, right? you wouldn't begrudge them hating their tormentors and lashing out at them when they get the chance, and savoring it when they land a blow (no matter how low)? you wouldn't expect them to be a hundred percent progressive and politically correct and careful of their language in the face of that?

nobody could blame them for that, right? right.

right.

(funnily enough: it doesn't go the other way. the minority hatebait is always a hundred percent responsible for any shitty thing they do in retaliation for what they're subjected to, or attempt they make to stop it. often as not, their actions mean that whatever injustice they were yammering about should be dismissed for everyone suffering under it, because this guy used it as an Excuse and that's why you can't have nice things (basic rights).)

anyway, yeah, this is. a Thing and i see it a Lot. and it does really chap me how extreme and totally unaddressed it is in sdmi, because if you don't let the framing get away with hatebait and Always Having a Reason, then pericles makes for a really really complex and compelling exploration of someone who's been dealt a shit hand and suffered terribly also happening to be the miserable, hateful old cunt who wrecked generations of your family because they desperately needed help and didn't get it.

((Starter fore @remnantsouls ))

Charlie winced when of course, she felt no pulse from the body she was checking. Poor guy bled out before she could get to them...

She sighed as she stood, holding onto herself.

Alright, don't give up now, Charlie. The moment you do, whatever survivor there is is done for for sure!

She jogged forward, eyes briefly scanning the bodies as she passed.

There has to be someone, someone she could help. Someone she could give at least another year!

Someone that-!

She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw an inky black trail among the crimson. And she felt her blood go ice cold.

An unfortunate truth was, an average of ten percent of victims of these genocides were Hellborn. Those that could not afford to live in the other Rings, or even in Hellborn only settlements like Imp City. Either the Exorcists couldn't tell the difference, or didn't care. Perhaps a mixture of both.

Demons are demons, after all...

And it looks like she might find another example of this statistic...

Uneasily, she followed the trail into the alley...

"... Oh my god...!"

Another fun bit about the Exterminations? Most Exorcists were notorious for playing with their food. Not just in chasing their targets, but finding increasingly cruel ways to end their lives.

And taking literally an arm and a leg from them...?!

Charlie rushed to the incubus's side, hurriedly checking his pulse.

Still alive...!

"Ca-Can you hear me?! I- H-Hold on-!"

She took out the kit she was carrying, bandages and guaze being snatched up as she hoped the empathic link with her goat bois would bring them here.

She started with the shoulder, putting the gauze over the bloody socket and hurriedly winding the bandage over it while being careful maneuvering his remaining arm out of the way.

If it weren't for the threat of the blood loss, she would have cleaned the wound first. Infections were a bitch down here. But right now she had to do something about the bleeding.

She hoped her hands were steadier than she felt...

Why in all the worlds there are is the Collector basically just a weirder, darker, quirkier version of Avatar Aang?

Think about it. Creative, highly energetic kid from a highly traditionalist culture associated with the sky that fancies itself as observers and gatherers of information but who wants to break free from all of this “duty” in order to go out and play with other beings, with this desire for freedom resulting in them being sealed away for centuries if not millennia. Then they get woken up and are instantly caught up in the machinations of a genocidal Emperor and eventually look for companionship in rare beings left over from before they were imprisoned.

@disregardcanon @niconebula @sepublic

Think about it, my lord. Her kingdom is a fragmented monster colony, her people are thieves and criminals, and- well... What does a Donna compare to the Royals you court? Regent of Monsters, Queen of the Narrows- would you really have such a riminal as her as your queen?

"Why do you CARE? I don't even know you.

I'VE COMMITED GENOCIDE. I ORIGINALLY USERPED MY THRONE BECAUSE I WAS MAD I THAT I DIDN'T GET WHAT I WANTED.

I' am not above her.

You sound as though all my other lovers are royals. I'm only courting one royal out of all of them.

Speaking of horrible implications, I got a moment of fridge logic after going to bed after finishing the hork bajir chronicles last night. The Yeerks aren’t know for respecting the ecological stability of planets they take over, and the Arn created the Hork-Bajir to manage the trees to preserve the right balance of gases in the atmosphere, with them believing that without the Hork-Bajir tending to the trees that the planet would lose a breathable atmosphere. After the Yeerk takeover, that planet is biologically dead. There’s no returning. And the Arn…well, they made sure they weren’t useful Yeerk hosts. They’re gone too. (Unless the Andalites did a refugee mission? Doesn’t sound like them tbh.)

That’s at least one actual genocide to the Yeerks then.

idk i wish people would talk more about papua when it comes to occupied nations.

free papua.

Well, it seems this video is relevant as ever:

(Although of course it's not just the porn they're trying to get rid of now. And, frankly, never was...)

"But palestinians are homophobic and transphobic and would kill you why are you supporting them?"

Listen. Every single person in palestine could hate me personally and want me dead. Every. Single. One. And I would still support them bc:

That's just fucking racist to assume that every single person in palestine is homo/transphobic just bc its an arab country and it completely ignores the existance of queer palestinians

A country that has been stuck in a constant state of aparteid and been attacked and crushed by israel since 1948 is not a place where good social progress would happen

Even if those points are invalid, that still does not justify a fucking genocide. Men women and children are being slaughtered and again, every single one could hate me personally and I wouldn't support their genocide bc that is just fucked up and evil

i've said it before, but the more i think about it the more i pin down exactly what the biggest fundamental issue is with lorien legacies, and that is that it tries to mix its metaphors while also pretending to be an explicit recreation of Certain Real World Dynamics where you really need to know what the fuck you are saying.

like, fantasy metaphors don't always have to be a 1:1 for real world historical events. you need to very carefully examine the real-world components of what you're portraying--what you're saying--with said metaphors, respectively and in the context of each other, that's true. they can even shed some interesting light on each other--the situation with the cêpans on lorien before the war is an interesting inversion of ableism as a structure on earth, and it's interesting to examine how non-fantasy, non-inverted ableism nests into that. and setrákus' whole thing could be a good commentary on Certain Parts of the transhumanist movement that need addressing, and on cultural appropriation, and on how scratch an ableist and you'll find a racist and vice versa, because Fascists is the Same. and the care involved in this process, of course, goes many times over when the thing you're tackling is a heavy subject like genocide.

but if you're drawing a straight, explicit-or-borderline-explicit line directly between your fantasy metaphor and real-world history? hooooly fuck you need to be SO on top of recreating that history as accurately as you can. you do NOT want to fuck up your commentary on What Happened Irl by erasing the contributing factors, putting blame in the wrong places, or perpetuating lies about what was happening in order to justify or perpetuate it or cover it up. if your villains are a ham-handed metaphor for manifest destiny YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT MANIFEST DESTINY IS, HOW IT HAPPENED, ITS AFTERMATH, AND ITS GOALS.

LL doesn't just drop the ball here, it spikes the ball so hard it noclips into the backrooms. even if they had had an ounce of self-awareness about the fantasy dynamic they were creating with lorien, mogadore, and by extension earth, they absolutely should not have brought real-world history into it to make their goofy evil cartoon aliens Deep. it's fascinating to pick apart as a trainwreck but jeeeeeeesus, man.

Seeing this makes me quite sad

STOP PROMOTING A SERIES THAT MAKES FUN OF SEXUAL ABUSE

AND DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE!

Being an antizionist Jew, very much not the only one around, and seeing goyim talk about how allegedly antizionists just mean “zionist” to say “Jew”, is sure fucking something.

Also, no matter if you’re a goy or if you’re Jewish, *this* is equating zionism and Judaism. Fuck you.

Zionist does not mean Jew and zionist is not a fucking “certain kind of Jew”. Zionism is an ideology that must have. no. place. No matter who carries it, and we very much do remember goyische zionists.

_

Edit: tankies fuck off, you are not any better just because it’s different genocides and empires you support.

i think a lot about how vex got off pretty much scott free at the end of s11. everyone was just like oh it was vex all along man we knew you were no good. shame on you. finger wags and all that. like dude just got turned into an ice cube for a minute and then banished again, that was pretty much it.

such wasted potential here. he deserved a slow, painful death after causing so much suffering to both zane and the people of the never realm. he deserved to be "betrayed" by zane. stabbed with an icicle through the heart. he needed karma to come GET HIM.

I reblog a lot of political posts on here so I guess it's only natural I'd make one myself at some point. Anyways... (*deep breath*)

While Genocide Joe absolutely deserve to have his approval ratings plummet for ongoing support of the IDF's brutal invasion of Gaza, I worry about what this means for the elections this year.

I worry about how many people realize that refusing to vote blue at all in November to protest a genocide could lead to another one in their own country over an angrier Trump.

Palestinian lives matter, do not get me wrong. Do not stop talking about Palestine. But we all know Trump's not going to fix it. He's going to endorse it.

Just like how he'll endorse America becoming its worst possible self at this point.

I don't know if it will get as bad as Gaza, but I know that I have a lot of friends who mean so much to me that could be put in serious danger if the government doubles down on rolling back basic human rights. Especially internet privacy and protection for queer people.

I know it's sickening to see another POTUS endorse another attack on an Arab country with all the horrific casualties it entails, but listen.

I watched the last one endorse turning the country into a living nightmare with influence still felt today, wondering if my friends--my only real friends at the time--would make it if he got another term.

It's not a perfect solution I know. But unless you guys are ready to storm the White House for different reasons this year, and you have a plan to keep this kind of scenario from ever happening again, you need to vote in the Democrat primaries and/or vote Democrat in the November elections.

And yes,

Palestine still matters.

But so does the trans community.

So does the gay community.

So does the ace community.

So does the black community.

So does America's own muslim and arab communities.

So does every community living in America under threat.

Hi! I don't know if you've followed the debate on twitter these last few days (if you haven't, feel free to ignore this ask, I don't want to drag you into stuff) about whether themes of slavery can be depicted in fictional settings. I'd be curious to have your opinion because you have very based takes on the topic of fanfiction

Boy. I have been at a wedding so I have NOT been following, but a friend dug that one up for me, and boy. Isn't that something.

Okay, do I think that slavery can be depicted in fictional settings?

I'm gonna start this with a caveat of saying that I'm white, and as far as I know my family tree doesn't include any enslaved people. So slavery is an atrocity, but not a personal one for me any more than I feel personally about all atrocities, and your opinion on this subject might be different based on your experience, and that's completely fair. This is just the opinion of someone who thinks about content warnings and representation and exchange rules sometimes, and honestly if you want to take my answer as me saying "i'm white, anything I say after this doesn't really matter" that's a fair read of the situation. End post.

But further, the siren song of being asked a question:

My general stance is that there are very few things that can't be depicted in fictional settions, but there are a lot of things that should be depicted with care and research. And I consider major archive warnings to be one of these things. (I'm on the team that says that in an ideal world we would have a major archive warning for racism or slavery.) I don't think that there are any topics that are inherently off-limits for fiction.

If you're interested in writing professionally, there's a workshop called Writing The Other that does intros into writing topics that you don't share experiences with, and they do a really good job of breaking down the ways that you can analyze your work for cliches and stereotypes and other weaknesses, and ways that you can research to avoid them. It's an excellent workshop and I really recommend it— they even do scholarships, which is how I got to join! I consider them the industry standard of the question of "can I write about this", and as I remember it their basic answer is that the more outside of your experience a thing is, the more research you have to do to make sure you don't mess it up, and the more central to your story a thing is, the more you want to make sure that you don't mess it up. So sometimes you do hit topics and you go "am I the right person to tell this story, should I leave this topic to someone who knows it more personally, who's studied this". But that doesn't mean that you can't tell the story, it just means that to do it well, you have to put the work in. And that no one is obliged to trust you on the surface of things to have put the work in. I am probably going to trust an author who I know is disabled to have written disability well, for example, more than an ablebodied author. But there are authors out there that I know do their research and I pretty much trust them to deal with any topic carefully, if they want to take it on. A lot of the time, the more sensative a topic you are touching, the more you need a relationship of trust between author and reader, and sometimes you have to earn that trust carefully.

And boy is there fiction out there that deals with sensitive topics in ways that does not earn that trust. I have read things that I find highly distasteful. I have read published work that chooses to deal with real life atrocities in ways that I find wildly uncomfortable and I do not tend to recommend those books or authors.

I have also read nuanced and insightful explorations of horrific things, including slavery, including domestic violence, including racism, in ways that I felt enriched my understanding of the world and the people around me. I've read books that carefully touched on things like childhood sexual abuse and police violence and involuntary commitment, and that didn't make the story not a life-affirming and joyful experience, because the stories were able to take these things and make healing and catharsis out of them. Simply hearing that a story deals with a topic does not tell you if it's a story to recommend to others. We all live lives that sometimes touch on terrible things, and I think that trying to police who can tell stories about bad things leads into bad things like making people prove that they've suffered enough to write or shit like "are you black enough for this story", and I don't want that in my writing community. I have literally seen the bad end for going down that road, check out "helicopter discourse," and I'm against that.

I'm against that enough that I'm willing to endure people who do not share an experience writing badly about terrible things as the price we have to pay to allow people who have personal stake in the situation to be able to explore sensitive topics without harassment. Especially with fanfiction, we're dealing with amateur writers, so unfortunately most of the time when you have a subject come up the default assumption is going to be that it's dealt with badly. But I personally fall on the side that it's worth five people writing it badly to allow the one person who's personally impacted to write about it as much or as little as they want. My personal bugbear is terminal illness in children, that's my trauma, but I would personally rather have people write horrible tearjerker fic about aging down their characters and killing them off and it's so sad, even though I don't want that, rather than to say that that topic is off-limits to people.

On the topic specifically of slavery, this fandom, as many fandoms do, has a habit of including slavery and human trafficing as themes in their writing. A lot of the time this is not done well. We have a lot of baby writers who are deliberately writing the saddest thing they can think of or writing unjust societies for their guys to rebel against. This is not what I would say is a strength of the writing in the fandom, taken as a whole. And some people do their research and do it well! I've read great fics that pull from history in an informed way and do interesting things with it! But not everybody, good lord.

But saying that because a lot of people deal badly with slavery nobody should deal with slavery is not a path forward that I'm personally in support of. Do I think it should be tagged? Absolutely. Nobody should hit that unawares. But a lot of societies through human history practiced slavery of one kind or another! If you are drawing from roman history for your gladiator au, most of those guys were not there of their own free will. Tropes like fae folklore includes themes of posession and ownership, because that was the background radiation to the lives of the people who told these stories in the first place. There are a lot of tropes where these topics are going to arise, and I don't think that's inherently bad (though I personally would certainly feel a lot more comfortable with pulling on classical and medieval history for these stories rather than 1800s America, for example). And like, you can absolutely try your best to steer around these topics! That's an option! But honestly if you're doing something historic or historic-inspired, I'm not sure if it's more respectful to write a fantasy past in which greek history did not include slavery. That's whitewashing of history by definition. So if you want to avoid that, you're left with most of human history off-limits to write about, because of the atrocities? And I don't think that's ideal.

And like, I think with fanfiction you kind of just have to accept as background radiation that there are going to be a lot of people dealing with topics that they are not equipped to deal with. That's just how it goes. These are people writing with minimal research, experience, and editing, cause we're all here for fun, not professional development. You're gonna have people mishandle things. And that's why I think tagging is really really important, so that you can see the tags on a fic and go "oh I do not trust them with that topic" and navigate away, or filter the topic entirely. I have my touchpoints that I steer away from, and I have 100% clicked away from stories in horror going "oh no no no no no that's not good." But I don't think people should all be banned from writing about these things because some people do it badly.

Note: that doesn't mean that like, we shouldn't have conversations about how maybe if you put the minecraft men in your story where hybrid trafficing is a metaphor for the underground railroad, you should do that Carefully. We can still strive to do better. I have Seen Things and there is room to improve. There's room for discussion about people using slavery for cheap angst, in the same way that I've talked about the treatment of disability used for angst, and I've seen people talk about the agency allowed female characters, and the list goes on.

And that doesn't mean that I'm not going to 100% respect it if I get a DNW in an exchange where someone has said they don't want slavery or hybrid racism. People should be able to opt out of these topics (entirely! even if they're dealt with well!) and nobody has to read things they don't want to.

So in essense, when it comes to writing sensitive topics like slavery I'm going to do my best to think about what I'm doing and do my research— and I have written slavery and human-trafficing-type-deals before, I like gladiator aus and classical-inspired fantasy— and I'm going to tag so that anyone who doesn't trust me— and nobody has to trust me— can navigate away. But when it comes to policing what other people are writing, I don't think it does anyone any good to post callouts on twitter. At most I'm going to warn a friend that a certain fic deals with a topic badly. That's my viewpoint.