It's so interesting and so exceedingly frustrating how agab is being utilized now within the queer community as a way to isolate and sort nonbinary and genderqueer folks into binary boxes that determine their moral purity levels, and their authority to do and write and exist.

The way nonbinary writers are being put under accusation of fetishizing gay men while their AGAB is continually brought up in a way that feels like queer-space-approved misgendering.

The way feminist circles that are supposedly trans-inclusive will use the word AFAB in a way that implicitly but intentionally isolates nonbinary people who aren't AFAB from joining. It's for women*.

The way the language is already flawed and leaves out intersex folks from the conversations while focusing on a binary of sex that isn't truthful.

The constant obsessing over whether someone is AFAB or AMAB and whether or not that gives them the privilege to join, do, write, or be present in certain spaces really really concerns me. How are we supposed to dismantle a binary system of gender if we can't even move past forcibly assigning and focusing on people's genders assigned at birth?

I’ve seen some say that carmen was trying to use the thought of claire to calm down which obviously didn’t work so he thought of sydney, but I’ve also seen the scene read in the color of claire causing his stress in the first place, again ending in sydney quieting everything down. when you consider how disconnected he was during his night with claire, I’m more with the second choice, but both ultimately lead to syd being the answer all along.

Today i am in a wee bit of pain. If i watched skizzs 3l pov today and made weird bad takes about him on tumblr dot com would yall forgive me

I find it kind of silly that so many of those "time based life rule" sayings are like ~deep serious guidelines~ of some sort, but then there's that one other Well Known Rule that's just like "hrmm can I eat something off of the ground or not"

Gonna write briefly about “The Rehearsal” on my succ blog bc why not. But I think it truly is brilliant, in hindsight of the finale, that the show turned out to actually be an effective criticism of itself, of reality tv as a genre (even and maybe especially the shows that are framed as being helpful for their participants), the use of child actors, and even, to a certain extent, Nathan Fielder’s own brand of comedy. All of that is 100% intentional - they could’ve shown anything they wanted and deliberately showed things that would make us deeply uncomfortable for ethical reasons, and deliberately highlighted the ways in which participants may have felt pressured into participating and how the presence of cameras impacts behaviour.

I’ve already seen the claim that the finale’s big twist is that it’s a “scripted narrative” and I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s pretty clear that Nathan and the team had an idea of where they wanted the show to go, but all the people they featured were real people. They didn’t script so much as… well, manipulate what happened by introducing certain elements, as all reality shows do. While they might have had a general sense of where they wanted the show’s “arc” to go, they were reliant on the participants behaving in certain ways or raising certain issues to dictate just how they went about achieving that arc. The brilliance here is making it fairly obvious to the audience what they’re doing, whereas most reality shows will try to hide it.

(And this premise is built into the pitch! We all expected to get a show about Nathan running these little rehearsals, and that idea is built on the premise that human behaviour is predictable and manipulable, if you control enough variables. And then we watched this exact premise play out entirely differently - and in a way that was much darker - from how we expected.)

There are so many more things to unpack about the show, obviously, but personally I just keep coming back to the fact that they made a reality tv show to say “hey, maybe even ‘helpful’ reality tv is somewhat unethical because these people are being helped for our own voyeuristic benefit, and those motivations will determine how producers approach the participants and the arcs they deliberately try to set up, even if we don’t see that on our screens.” It’s a bold move but I think they pulled it off well

to me the funniest thing about making a warrior cats ultrakill au is that you don't really have to change a lot to make the characters and story fit into the warrior cats universe. being able to enter cat hell without dying was literally a major plot point for one of the arcs, so having some random kitty go and fuck shit up over there is totally believable as far as im aware.

What was the beta s2 villain design? I haven’t heard or seen abt that one n im curious

,,,,Bombshell my bbygirl,.

no but thinking of violante's manic state following her murder of ruven and that sick game of association-replacement played by gortash where he acts just like ruven did, picks up some of his behaviours and mannerisms and speech patterns he specifically used with violante and that he knows of well bc he observed and studied them interact, so that he can fill up the now empty spot left by ruven's death.

not for nothing that roger and jeff are wearing completely identical suits for vicki's wedding down to the same pearl stick pin and it's roger that is distinguished with the accessory and the visual emphasis. that roger wears the pocket square and jeff goes plain without one, without a boutonnière (as feels the most probable and appropriate; they both wear boutonnières in roger's prophetic dream of the wedding). that not only is he wearing the handkerchief, but it's folded in such a way as so take as much space as possible – straying from accepted formality of a neat TV fold, occupying more room on the screen, drawing more attention, pointing among other things to his heart in bright white.

as frustrating and lonely and isolating as it was being single for 21 years thinking about it now it was the best thing for me. ive never been heartbroken and i dont have relationship trauma and most importantly all my mental issues come from within me and not bc some guy caused them

it's almost like the only option is dividing things further black and white then just going hardcore to an extreme.

like.

i spent all day yesterday cutting off friends and blogs of people i love in my native community because of the excessive call for violence as the answer to decolonization, maintaining nuance but only for one side and saying fuck all to everything and everyone else.

but then today.

the number of jewish friends and blogs i've had to unfollow because people are doubling down on "hamas bombed a fucking hospital" when there's clear evidence that isn't true and it's propaganda to perpetuate cycles of violence?

fucking horrifying.

./

Do you ever listen to someone speak and marvel at how smooth, free-flowing, and free of pauses it is?

Because I sure do. I can’t do that.

Maybe that’s why I feel like most people’s speech is insincere even when it isn’t… because it sounds like how I would recite or read a script. That explains why I view people who aren’t native English speakers, have a heavy accent, and take long pauses to think of the words they need to say as being more trustworthy… because my cadence is similar to theirs; and we both stumble over words.

Thinking many a thought about how SSE consistently invalidate their own systems and claim they’re “Updating them” when they’re. actually just. regressing them??

(Vagueing the fact that appaarently horses will now hit “peak performance” at lvl 13, invalidating the two last levels, lvl 14 and 15, that have been implemented since, 2012? 2013? And as far as I can tell there’s Absolutely nothing on those last two levels that a player would have as an insentive to even bother so. why. tf. do they still exist? Like dude you’re reverting this system a whole decade in a sense, why do the last two levels still exist if they don’t mean anything to the player at all??)

been seeing a lot of "kids these days" kind of posts bitching abt minors in fandom, and tbh i'm starting to feel a little bad for them.

like yeah, it can be exhausting to hear them complain about the stuff they see on ao3 that they don't like, but that's just the experience of curating one's own online experience for the first time. i remember taking countless aliquots of psychic damage by merely existing in the snk fandom back in the day!!! i have diary entries from that age where i talked about that discomfort and what i, at the time, thought should be done about it!!!

and like. spoiler alert, but it was pretty similar to those kinds of "this isn't right, and i think you're an icky person for being into it even though it's fiction" conclusions that you see a lot from people who are the same teenaged age as the characters involved.

there have been issues with calls to take down ao3 bc of this kind of thing, but that's not a position exclusive to people below the age of eighteen, and i don't think we're really going to actually get young fans to listen to us if we just keep calling them brats or snot-nosed children.

i've grown and changed a lot since i was their age, but something i have noticed is that it's easy to blame younger versions of yourself or others for not knowing the lessons you've learned since then. "i used to be that person; i know how they think, so why don't they see the obvious truth to my current viewpoint?" we fail so hard at giving kids the grace to be uneducated kids that we subsequently fail to educate them as intended.

being compassionate to kids is hard, i get it, especially when it feels like they're trying to actively dismantle the good you've worked hard to help create, and i don't think that bad behavior should go without consequences just because they're not adults yet. it's not our job as adults in fandom to parent them; hence the block button.

but like, idk. i think often about how easily we forget all the latent fear that existed within us growing up that slowly dissipated once we gradually assumed authority of our own lives. i think often about those posts that circulated tumblr about a decade ago promising to become the generation who wouldn't talk down on the generations below us, because we would remember how it felt to be talked down and dismissed at that age. and i just think that perhaps, generational warfare is not the answer here.

Just wanted to say I've read through a lot of your posts, and you are amazingly well-spoken and thoughtful, particularly in regards to LGBTQ issues in society. I am a follower and a fan. You rock!🏳️‍🌈❤️

Thank you so much, this made my day. I pride myself on being nuanced and thorough but sometimes on the Worst Faith Approach website it's easy for me to feel like I explain myself poorly. It means a lot to hear that other people understand what I mean and that I actually do explain myself well - some people just love getting angry and that's not my problem