😞thinking about Elliot page & Amanda bynes & Britney Spears & Shelley duvall & Jennette McCurdy

im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:

videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.

and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.

this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.

there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.

there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.

for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.

i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.

here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."

eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.

we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.

"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"

thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.

it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.

an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.

and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."

you go girl 💖

I don’t usually make posts like this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-intellectual junk lately, and I really think we need to put the word “pretentious” up on a shelf until people learn what it actually means.

It doesn’t describe someone who likes artsy-fartsy deep meaning media. People who are pretentious are fake. They’re posers trying to be sophisticated and unique, not like other girls. They pretend to only like stuff they think will make them sound cool when they talk about it. They want to act like they know something you don’t, and they want attention for it.

By definition, if you genuinely enjoy something, you can’t be pretentious. If it resonates with you, and you analyze it, and you don’t care what people think, that’s the polar opposite, actually. If you love obscure experimental prog music, if you watch underground high concept indie films through English teacher eyes, if you spend hours in a modern art museum reading each piece as a vessel for storytelling, if your backpack’s full of poetry books that inspire you, if you play underrated games that were someone’s passion project, if you have an interest in studying the classics or the masters, you are not pretentious.

Of course, some people just don’t like some stuff, and that’s fine, but that’s not what this is about. Don’t let anti-intellectuals shame you for enjoying things just because your interests are inaccessible to them, because they refuse to be brave and put effort into critical thinking. You’re not stuck up for refusing to overlook the craft of artists.

my coworkers are being turbo transphobic and literally refuse to listen to answers to questions they fucking ask argh!!! I can just tell you!!! I can just answer you!!!!! I have answers!!! to the ridiculous questions you ask in a mocking way!!!! if you listen for one second I can just fucking explain!!!! 😡😭😡😭

actually On Your Feet gave us two good things (well. three if you like Realize which I do). Kohane's "it's frustrating" line and the great crack fic idea of Vivid Bad Squad getting cancelled online for skipping school to yell at The Kotaki Taiga as he was about to go back to America.

(timidly comes up to mic) erm. in-game max and chloe, especially episodes 2-4, gives off “our love is god” vibes.

"Cuhut it out- you guys!" "Nu-uh, not until you're all perked up first! You don't want those gym challengers meetin' with an ol' mopey leader, do ya?" "Whitney's right, dear friend. No need to hide that beautiful smile of yours, alright?~"

What it takes to cheer up Johto's beloved ghost boy 👻💕

update: finally got through the son of neptune audiobook and onto the mark of athena!! been nice looking back to when i first met these characters and this story and how much it meant to me even back then :´) <3

but also concerning spotting my favorite boi leo valdez having the saddest inner monologue known to man and knowing exactly why i got so attatched to him back then ToT!!!

Lowkey hate race swapping sometimes. Now hear me out!

I don't mind when people race swap chatacters I just hate it when changing their race would totally change the entire story or have a lot of implications to the story.

I don't mind when fictional charcater race are changed but I hate it when they change a characters race who are suppose to be a certain race for a reason. When they chnage those types of characters a lot of time it changes the narrative of the story and their actions.

Same with historical show or documentaries. If this real life figure was another than they were we would have completely different story on our hands. Like please open a history book.

Listen, when it comes to fictional characters "racebending" means nothing to me unless it's whitewashing (Titans casting a white actor to play Dick Grayson and the MCU casting a white actress to play Wanda Maximoff when they are both literally canonically Romani both ethnically and culturally is my villain origin story) because fiction is fiction, and honestly you can tweak a story to make a character's journey adapt to the new inclusion of them being a member of a minority class so long as you're talented enough. Most writers aren't, and that's why a lot of "oh we made X character a POC in this adaptation" moves tend to ring hollow, but it is possible.

But I have a genuine bone to pick when it's about history.

For one, it's just such a lazy move. "Oh we made Bess of Hardwick Chinese!" fantastic but you do know that Chinese people existed in the late 16th century right? Like, China was a country with a lot of people in it and a thriving culture and way of life and plenty of influential people living there. Why aren't we telling stories about a Chinese woman living in that time period, it's not like that period of Chinese history was dull or as if no one ever mattered or nothing ever happened there. Like, for God's sake, it's just a way of showing that you aren't actually interested in learning about other parts of the world, or decentering Western history, specifically European history, as the only history worth learning about, you just want brownie points for being diverse without actually putting in the work to learn about the vibrant world that existed outside of Europe for the vast majority of human history, aka doing anything to actually explore different non-Western narratives and how the world moved outside of the European bubble.

For two, like you said, a lot of the time "racebending" doesn't really include attempts to accommodate how the history would change. Bridgerton is a wish fulfillment fantasy show so I don't often care about how it deals with history (even tho I do think the Charlotte was black theory is complete bunk and I refuse to engage with people who think it's real) but its whole "and now England is desegregated" thing falls very flat when you remember how involved England was in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, how reliant it was on slave labor, how invested it was in capturing and buying and selling slaves, including the royals. It puts a lot of onus on characters that they've made POC without doing any of the work, and oftentimes deals in a lot of harmful stereotypes. This was seen most egregiously in the 2021 Anne Boleyn show that cast Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne. @duchessofferia discussed this much better than I will, but relying on the same old lazy tropes that have defined Anne Boleyn with a black woman playing her turned into genuinely harmful racial representation. Having Anne be sexually aggressive and domineering and harsh in her mannerisms, especially when compared to Jane Seymour, isn't new, but having a black woman be looming over a small white woman and being sexually aggressive with her feeds into harmful stereotypes about black women and their femininity, and by having George Boleyn also be black, painting him as a sexual deviant and adding a plot where he abandons his responsibilities as a father turns him into the "absent black baby daddy" trope that still does a lot of harm to black men today. Not to mention, changing George Boleyn's race but keeping the rumor about Jane Boleyn lying on the stand to incriminate him turns a "wife turns against her husband for unknown reasons" story into a "white woman accuses a black man of sexual inpropriety that his society would frown on for the purpose of getting him executed by the state" story, which has a long and incredibly dark history in the United States (it's basically the Scottsboro Boys but Renaissance now). I mean, it's basically my primary issue with Hamilton, that the show really wants to capitalize on the whole "America then as told by America now" thing without delving into what it means to have literal slaveowners portrayed by black men and to have the character of Thomas fucking Jefferson call Sally Hemmings by a pet name in that show without any introspection into the fact that she wasn't his girlfriend but, you know, a woman he full on owned and repeatedly raped. It's all surface level and generally causes a lot more problems by refusing to alter the history to deal with these new changes, because it's history and you can't really alter it without creating a host of problems.

With Cleopatra specifically, I mentioned it before but the Ptolemies were total fuckups and literal colonizers in and of themselves, and turning them from a Macedonian dynasty into actual people of color for some kind of narrative (like there aren't any other important women of color in history, or even that time period) while not attempting to even examine the history of that dynasty and that queen in particular doesn't sit right. Like, congratulations, you've now created a story where a woman of color's most important contributions in life were her relationships with white men who held significantly more power than her and over her country, and fucked up to such a degree that her country wouldn't even be considered its own country until the 1950s. How absolutely groundbreaking. Next you're gonna tell me it's subversive to paint Livia Drusilla as a scheming, conniving bitch who manipulated everyone around her, instead of a sexist and tired trope that exists only to demonize one of the few women of actual importance in Augustan Rome because she was half a decade older than her husband and was able to keep her own power after he died. It's not just a lack of intellectual curiosity or good storytelling, but a fundamental misunderstanding of why people want to see stories about people of color, and how Hollywood itself thinks so little of their audience that they think we'll be content with a simple coat of "hey this person's a minority now!" paint over a subject without any attempt to really look into things or understand why the world works the way it does or how these people shaped their lives or the lives of those around them, never mind the new messages you're sending now with these changes.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot that can fuck up with historical representation in media, and representation of people of color in media in general can always be so incredibly fucked that giving people anything is oftentimes a win in and of itself. But I honestly think that focusing on the same Euro-centric stories and just switching around Pantone skin swatches to do the bare minimum is lazy and insulting. You want me to care about historical stories about people of color? Great, give me historical stories about actual people of color. Let me hear more about ethnic Egyptians, about their lives and their culture and how they influenced history, not ahistorical trash that causes more trouble than its worth and certainly isn't doing anything new or interesting with the subject.

tagged by @risingsh0t @indorilnerevarine @shadowglens & @swordcoasts to do this picrew for some of my ocs – this was a super cute one, thank you all so so much! ♡

🐺 ithrenil (tes; they/them) // 🚁 dani (re; she/any) 🐍 diana (re; she/her) // 👑 reina (sr; she/her) ⛓️ damien (re; he/they) // 🌻 mehlia (da; she/her)

tagging: @aartyom @aelyosos @brujah @cultistbase @denerims @faarkas @florbelles @girlbosselrond @leviiackrman @liurnia @morvaris @narshadda @nocticulas @noonfaerie @nuclearstorms @reaperkiller @shellibisshe @solasan @steelport @voerman @windupcharibert @wrymbloods & anyone else who'd like to do this, feel free to say i tagged you! ♡

spent two hours studying and I’m STILL thinking about Cassie

My batshit fucking insane conservative nurse coworker who once used slavery as an argument that abortion access should be up to the state's discretion and not a universal right: You know you shouldn't be wearing your mask everywhere, it's going to hurt your immune system. >:(

Me, a girl who eats expired food off the apartment floor that she cleans exactly once a year, touches random bugs outside, and just randomly sticks her fingers and hands in her mouth without even thinking of washing them first: No, no I think I'll be ok.

the thing is

barbie girl by aqua is one of the most backfired attempts at satire in history

went to my college’s bars for the first time this weekend and they were exactly as i expected. i did pregame too hard and was veryyyy drunk and i did have fun but they are lame and full of people i have no interest in. but alcohol and music will work on me regardless and no cover so whatever it was fun to be white girl wasted and bar hop for a night ☺️