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rollercoasterwords · 2 years

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the tiktokification of ao3

or: some of you fundamentally misunderstand ao3 and it really, really shows

i was talking about this with a friend a few days ago and since then i've seen multiple posts of various sorts that have just made me think about it more, so. here is me breaking down a disconnect i see particularly with younger members of the marauders fandom (i say marauders specifically just bc that's the only one i'm plugged into):

okay, so i've seen many (usually younger) marauders fans either talking online about how they wish ao3 was more like social media (specifically regarding algorithms) OR talking about ao3/fanfiction/fanfic writers as if they are operating under the same etiquette/guidelines/assumptions they would bring into social media platforms. this ranges from being mildly irritating to genuinely harmful, and i want to talk abt why.

first - you have to understand that social media, in this day and age, exists in a profit economy. and when i say social media here, i'm referring to platforms like tiktok, twitter, instagram, etc. all of these platforms exist in a profit economy where content is a product that can be monetized. this leads to a few important distinctions:

people posting on these social media platforms are generally posting with the intent to get their content seen by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible

they post with this intent because once their content is consumed by enough people, it becomes a product that they can monetize

therefore, if that content gets popular enough, these people can become influencers, where content creation is an actual job and their audience are, in a sort of vague and obscured way, similar to consumers purchasing a product

because of the profit economy surrounding social media, there are certain assumptions + forms of interaction that bleed across almost all social media platforms. the ones relevant to this little essay include:

operating under the assumption that anyone posting anything on the internet wants to go viral, ie. be seen by as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to grow an "audience"

these influencers are creating content for us, their audience, so they should want to please us. they should also be trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience. therefore, if we dislike their content, we have a right to make that very, very clear.

in that same vein, we have a general right to critique content creators, as they are making a profit and we are the consumers purchasing their product--much like you might feel entitled to a certain standard of service in a restaurant where you are paying for the food.

when you carry these assumptions over to a platform like ao3, it creates problems. why? in a nutshell: because ao3 exists outside the profit economy

ao3 is a non-profit. it does not have an algorithm because it is not trying to sell you anything. this means that the writers posting their work on ao3 are not making a profit. we are not influencers. we are not creating monetized content to sell to a consumer-audience. where consuming content on other social media platforms might be comparable to eating at a restaurant, reading fanfiction on ao3 is more like coming over to someone's house and eating cookies that they made for free. you are in their house. the cookies are free, given as a gift. so what happens when those assumptions outlined above start to bleed over from other social media?

assuming that anyone posting fanfiction online wants their work to go viral -- i've seen this with popular fic writers getting questions like, "are you worried x isn't going to be as popular as y?" those questions are usually not ill-intended, but they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about why writers post work on ao3. it's not to go viral. it's not to build any sort of online following. most of us who post on ao3 have jobs or schoolwork or other commitments, and writing fanfiction is something done for fun, out of a love for writing. those sharing their work online might be seeking community, but that is fundamentally different from seeking an audience, and in no way involves internet virality. if someone is posting fanfic on ao3 with the hope that it'll "go viral," then they likely either won't continue writing fanfic for long or will reach a point where they have to re-evalute their motivations, because seeking joy and validation by turning your art into a product for consumption just isn't very sustainable.

influencers are creating content for us, so we have a right to let them know if we don't like it -- nope!! fic writers are not influencers. yes, even the popular ones. no matter how much other people might blow their work up on social media, fic writers are still outside the profit economy. they are not creating content for an audience. they are not creating content for you. they are writing because they love it, and they are generously sharing it. if you don't like it, don't interact with it. you are never entitled to loudly and publicly proclaim how much you dislike a fic. i talk about this more here

we have a general right to critique fic writers, the same way we do with content creators/influencers -- again, no. you should not be treating fic writers the way you would treat an influencer on another social media platform, no matter how popular they may be. this is not to say fic writers are beyond all reproach; rather, it is a call-in to check your entitlement. fic writers are not little jesters entertaining in your court. they are not subject to your whims. they do not have to do things for you. they do not have to write things you like. in that post i linked on point 2, i talk about what etiquette might look like if you're really concerned that a fic writer is doing something harmful, but that is not what i'm talking about here. i am talking about the proliferation of negativity i have seen, especially on twitter and tiktok, where people essentially just talk shit about fics or fic writers as though they are entitled to have those fic writers working to please them. this is gross, and it needs to stop. you wouldn't go over to someone's house, eat the cookies they baked to share, and then spit those cookies back in their face and start shouting about what a shitty baker they are. or maybe you would--in which case, congratulations! you are Not A Good Person.

anyway, at the end of the day, a lot of this can be boiled down to: Because ao3 exists outside the profit economy, fic writers are not influencers, and you should never be treating them as though they are. i think i see this disconnect largely with younger people just because they've maybe only ever really understood social media within this sort of influencer-consumer-culture economy, and genuinely don't understand how to interact differently with the internet. so, consider this post a call-in to reevaluate the way you interact with fic writers and the etiquette you use when it comes to engaging with fanfic on ao3! i promise that ao3 being different from social media is a very, very good thing, and also a very, very rare thing, so let's treasure it and focus on fostering community rather than trying to morph it to fit the mould of influencer-audience dynamics that we see almost everywhere else <3

#tldr: fic writers aren't influencers #stop acting like they are #it only creates problems!!!!#anyway if you have engaged in some of these behaviors that doesn't make u a bad person #it just means u should maybe shift ur perspective moving forward #capitalism is a lifeless desert that grows every day and ao3 is a little oasis #let's all enjoy it while we can #instead of trying to place it within a consumer economy #ranting and raving #txt

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burst-of-iridescent · 11 days

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No, Shipping Zutara Is Not Supporting Amatonormativity (Please Use Some Fucking Braincells For Once)

- a treatise by a severely pissed off aroace zutara shipper

since words don’t mean anything anymore (if they ever did on the esteemed piss-on-the-poor website), let’s start with a definition.

amatonormativity: the set of social assumptions that everyone prospers with a romantic relationship, thereby positioning marriage as a universal goal of adult life. amatonormativity forms the basis of several institutional structures that are built to cater to romantic bonds over all others, also manifesting in social pressure on individuals to find a romantic partner by pushing the false narrative that those who do not experience romance are automatically lonely, unhappy and unfulfilled. it is usually characterized by the prioritization of romantic love over other forms of love, particularly platonic.

the anti-zutara argument based on this is as follows: wanting zutara to happen is amatonormative because it a) devalues zuko and katara’s platonic bond b) pushes the idea that men and women can’t be friends and c) doesn’t align with the themes of the show, as romantic love was never the point of atla.

i would like to take the time today to tell you that this is some fucking bullshit, for the following reasons:

one, this may come as a shock to some of you, but zutara shippers did not invent the concept of romantic love in avatar: the last airbender. you are more than welcome to criticize the pairings of suki/sokka, katara/aang, mai/zuko, yue/sokka, jin/zuko, jet/katara, and even kanna/pakku for perpetuating amatonormativity through their unnecessary romantic subplots. and if you don’t have anything to say about any of those pairings, then here’s a word for you: hypocrite.

zk shippers are not introducing the taint of romantic love into some kind of wholesome platonic utopia where it never existed. when we say zutara should have been canon, it is a statement that ends with the implicit instead of kat.aang and mai.ko tacked on at the back because if we were going to get a romantic relationship anyway, it might as well have been one that was well-developed, narratively impactful, and thematically relevant.

two, saying zutara is amatonormative is fucking rich when the main “romance” of atla is a three season long struggle to get out of the friendzone. aang’s desire to be in a romantic relationship with katara is one of his primary motivations throughout the show, and not once does either he or the narrative ever entertain the thought that just being katara’s friend might be enough. to the contrary, aang’s crush and the potential of its reciprocation is a fundamental part of how the story gets its audience to invest in both his character and the kat.aang relationship. they want you to want him to get the girl, and that’s the driving force of the ship’s development from start to finish.

you can see the influence of this in the way people defend why kat.aang had to happen: “aang would be crushed!” “it would break aang’s heart!” “aang deserves to be happy!” and that in and of itself is more amatonormative than any version of romantic zutara, as if this idea that aang is somehow doomed to a life of misery and loneliness just because he can’t be with the girl he likes isn’t inherently based on the assumption that platonic love can’t be as meaningful and satisfying as romantic love.

three, let’s be so fucking fr: a show written by cishet men in the early 2000s was not “subverting amatonormativity” by not making zutara happen, especially not when they went for the fucking olympic gold of romantic cliches — the hero gets the girl trope — instead. otherwise, why did the entire show end with an uncomfortably long liplock? if romance would’ve devalued zuko and katara’s platonic bond, then what the everloving fuck happened to their friendship in the comics and the legend of korra?

it is blatantly false to say that zutara shippers are the ones devaluing their platonic bond when the creators did it first. they evidently don’t view zutara’s platonic bond as equal to kat.aang’s romantic one, judging by their treatment of both relationships in the comics and LOK and the fact that they talked about kat.aang “winning” the ship war in the first place. because if the two relationships were of equivalent standing, why would there be a winner and a loser at all?

amatonormativity is baked into the DNA of atla, and while some people choose to reject this framework entirely (zk friendship >>> ka romance anyday), it is also not wrong for zk shippers to be annoyed at the treatment zutara received within the context of said framework. since the creators clearly thought a romantic relationship was better than a platonic one, they could at least have picked the couple that actually made sense instead of adding insult to injury by making that romance kat.aang. it is not amatonormative to acknowledge that zutara was not afforded the distinction it should have been in the eyes of those who wrote it, because it’s obvious that the decision to keep zuko and katara’s relationship platonic wasn’t to respect their friendship, but to position them as inferior to kat.aang.

four, detractors of romantic zutara often argue that their platonic relationship is inherently better & i’ve discussed before why that isn’t the case, but i also hate this argument because it’s perpetuating the very thing that aromantic people are trying to get rid of in the first place: the hierarchization of love. it is not the “gotcha!” you think it is to genuinely state that platonic love is better than romantic love, because it’s still buying into the idea that there’s some kind of order to categorizing human relationships. the solution to amatonormativity isn’t changing what form of love gets to be at the top of the list — it’s doing away with the hierarchy entirely.

i ship zuko and katara because canon already gave me their friendship. i already know what their platonic relationship looks like and that gives me more room for imagination in developing their romantic one because it’s a place canon didn’t go.

at the end of the day, friendship and romance are just different avenues of exploring intimacy. neither is inherently more valuable than the other, and neither is inherently more problematic. and if you truly believe in dismantling amatonormative beliefs, you would recognize that making a distinction between the two is only perpetuating the problem, not challenging it.

#zutara #anti kataang #anti atla #anti bryke #amatonormativity #thanks to you idiots now i have to be out here as a romance repulsed aro defending romantic love on main #i enjoy a friendship better than romance joke as much as the next aro #but if we’re using it as a genuine argument… come on now

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camilieroart · 9 days

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TMNT COLORCODED CHARACTER LINEUP COMPLETED !

After MONTHS of work, here is finally the lineup of all

61 CHARACTERS

That will be relevant at one point or another in Colorcoded season 1 :) More non-spoilery informations about them below !

Harry the Pickpocket gets beaten up pretty often. People like to hate what is ugly, and Harry wasn't the prettiest homeless guy around. Then again, most of the time he got beat up because he was caught stealing, but that's irrelevant. He had to do what he had to do to survive, and in New York, if you don't steal what you need, well people won't give it to you. More often than not, New Yorkers liked to step over him and a few sometimes walked on him, while still ignoring him. Harry was used to being hated, being beaten, being ugly and undeserving. What he was definitely NOT used to, was being saved by a group of reptilian people that, despite the fact that he stole from them, did not beat him up, talked to him nicely, and even built him a safe shelter. The Purple one even got him running water ! Now that he could drink and shower and look presentable, he might even be able to get a job, all thanks to these kids ! Harry didn't care that they were green and had a tough back. They were nice to him, and it was only fair Harry shared whatever scraps of infos he got to help them during missions. Especially when they brought some of these tasty pizzas…

Angel had always been called a bit naive, a bit stupid, a bit too good. She was always accommodating, always saying yes and her trust could easily be abused. But that wasn't true. Angel wasn't stupid. She knew what she was giving, and she knew that sometimes it was a bit too much. But she wanted to believe in the good of people, and in their good intentions, because it's always nice to be believed in ! So, what if she felt horribly ostracized by her only friends Casey and April, always out of the loop and pushed aside, ditched out of nowhere for them to run off with poor excuses ? They surely had a great reason ! Plus, she also kept secrets from them. You see, Angel had a part time job in the local Dimmart. She didn't really need it, it was just a good way to store away cash. And the fact that she didn't NEED it, made her able to freely walk out or shrug off if she gets fired. That definitely came in handy the night she caught a giant rat man and 4 turtles stealing from the store. So maybe she let them get away and purposefully covers for them everytime she can, but what else was she supposed to do ? She knows that people who steal, are usually people that don't have choice. Some nights, maybe the cameras have some strange malfunctions.

Steve Spiegel was a failed artist. At least that what his mom said. No matter how much work he put in his comics, nobody seemed to care. Maybe he just wasn't good at coming up with nice stories... But if there's one thing he's good at, it's listening to other people's stories, and giving advice. Now that's his thing ! Maybe he doesn't enjoy it as much as making his own stories, but at least, it pays the bills ! Plus there's that new client, Casey Jones, that had been telling him the craziest stories. Of course, Steve knew realistically, that this kid was either having a laugh at his expense, or in a serious situation that he struggled at expressing and tries to explain through silly stories instead. Either way, Steve listened like it was real, gave advice like it was true, and everytime the kid seemed happy and satisfied. And professional confidentiality be damned, these stories were too good to not be turned into a nice comic…

Vernon Fenwick was what you can call an asshole. After he failed to work in any of the TV channels the city had to offer, he made his own show called the Earth Protection News, courtesy of his roommate Ulysses S. Grant, that might have passed away soon after giving him the right to his show and all of it's audience. Vernon's show didn't work well at first. In this stupidly 'woke' world, having an openly racist, and misogynist and transphobic show seemed to have a certain impact on how it performed. It wasn't until the apparition of the monsters (that the arrogant and blind-sided left calls 'mutants' to hide their horrific nature) that Vernon truly started to shine. Each new footage or even pictures was dissected in his show and explained. People listened ! Finally the world knew he was right. These reptilians had grown tired of waiting, and decided to finally start to take over, but humans won't let them ! we'll fight back, starve them, torture them, kill them ! His show was bought by Channel 3, and millions hung to his every word ! And if Vernon hid some footage that proved these mutants weren't as dangerous as he thought, then who would know ? It was only a matter of time anyway. He could see it, when they mess up and the entire world is at stake because of them, oh he would be right. He would have won. And when it happens, Vernon would be there.

Akira is the Shredder’s right hand. When Shredder rose to power, he went against her, and was thrown into a prison pit to rot. But Shredder knew the man had talent and skill, and she didn’t want it to go to waste. She broke his mind, and took his eyes, and Akira is now completely obedient to his master.

Tanner G. Rollins is the failure of the family. His family moved to New York to make it, 2 generations ago, and were very successful. Tanner chose not to take over the family business and become a doctor. They were kicked out and banished because of it. He struggled really badly to become a dentist, and even then, clients were rare and barely enough to survive. Thanks to Splinter’s kindness, they decided to devote his life to helping mutants. He became a pro-mutant activist and takes care of mutant patients without ever compromising their safety. Also they’re a big rabbit fan. They’re just neat. He’s very blunt and honest, and heavily depressed.

Avril and xer twin Amaro Knox work in their grandma's (Anet Knox) Calm Corner Comics shop, and often scare of assholes that try to bother. They are both pro-mutants. Both are Tanako no Ichi fan. Avril is very chill and cool (xey/xer). Amaro is a party guy and always poppin'.

Anet Knox might be a small woman, but she is strong-willed and is a person to respect. She rules her comic shop with an iron fist, and is ready to beat the hell out of anyone disrespectful, despite her grandchildren being there to do so. She’s loudly pro-mutant, and is very happy to see Leo and Donnie whenever they come over for the new Tanako no Ichi manga or some Lynthia’s Legends.

André Murakami is a blind japanese chef, owner of the small but delicious restaurant "Fuyuuran". He was blind from one eye when he was born and fucked up his other eye by running around with a knife as a kid. He's very sweet and pro-mutant.

Renet Tilley is Casey's and April's history teacher, as well as their reference teacher. She is pretty awkward and shy around other adults and tend to relax around teens and younger. Her classes are always interesting and she strives to help her student as best as she can.

Shinigami and Yumiko live together. Shinigami was Karai's nanny and basically raised her. After Saki's death, she talked to Karai calling her sweetheart as she always have and got gutted and thrown out. Thankfully she was saved by one of the clan's cooks, Yumiko. They both ran away from the Foot and they assume they're dead. Since the Foot had always provided for them, they live in extreme poverty, and Yumiko works 5 jobs to try to save up to buy a proper wheelchair for Shinigami.

Baxter Stockman found, one day, a lot of canisters clogging his lab’s water tunnels, and after a few experiments, saw the potential in the mutagene. He sold it to scientists all around the world, and kept some to himself to experiment with. Ethicality and morality didn’t have it’s place in Stockman Entreprises, and it was in the way of progress. However, Baxter knew it was dangerous, and thus took it really badly when he noticed one day the Foot Clan spying on him, and decided to teach them a lesson. Baxter’s main drive is learning and discovering, advancing technology and driving humanity forward, no matter the cost. With global warming and world leaders playing with atomic bombs, time is limited, and Baxter will be the one to save the human race.

Don Vizioso is the nicest guy alive, he's known as the philantropist Vizioso. He would help you pay off your debt, take you under his wing if you're struggling, pay an ice cream to a little kid, shoot a guy that betrayed him 35 times in the head, pay for your college tuition, help fix the fucked up streets, or even give you access to his free hospital he set up in Manhattan ! His employees are helping out everywhere in the city, even if their influence is mainly in Manhattan. Recently, they have been bravely battling the group of thugs named the Purple Dragons, that keep aggressing people and destroying properties. Of course, Vizioso always helps with the reparations, sometimes coming down himself to fix up a wall or entertain the kids. For some reason, people keep coming after him with wild accusations, and these thugs often end up being recruited by the Purple Dragons. Plus, after the city announcement about the existence of monsters in New York, he's taken a stance on protecting New York, and has been bravely fighting back the creatures that keep trashing the city ! What a hero.

(This is the version that Vizioso believes about himself as well as the propaganda)

Don Vizioso is a mafia boss, despite being known by the mass as "the philantropist Vizioso". He would help you pay off your debt, but in return you're indebted in him. He'd take you under his wing, then shove you into a life of crime you can't escape. He would pay an ice cream to a little kid, because that way the shooter on the roof can't get to him. He would shoot a corpse until it's disfigured, and then go after his family. He would pay for your college tuition, and then ask you to kill the dean. He would fix the fucked up streets, and ask a tax from the people to pay for it. He made a free hospital, that actually records everything about you, and steals money every month without you noticing. His goons are looming over the entire city, but Manhattan is what is truly under his control, including the information. A group of resistant was created, called the Purple Dragons, but they are constantly discredited and Vizioso's crimes are pinned on them. Vizioso helps this idea that he's innocent by helping rebuild buildings he destroyed, but not the families he killed. When people realize they've been dupped, and lost everything after trusting Don Vizioso, they go after him, and then join the resistance. The mutants are a menace for his organization, and they won't destroy what took him so long to build. Plus, if he could capture them and sell them, he could make a good buck out of it.

The Purple Dragons are angry people, most of which have been wronged by Don Vizioso, that let their anger known. They are demonized by Don Vizioso and the city, and cast aside. Hun is their leader, driven mostly by anger and resentment. He always feels as if everything is being stolen from him and reacts impulsively and violently, which has often has negative effects in his life. He tries to aim that anger directly onto Vizioso and his energy into taking him down. During the raids to places that would weaken Vizioso, Hun goes wild and is often the reason for the bigger property damage. After hurting his loved ones when he was little however, he is always careful to not hurt people unless they ask/agree to it (like for a spar or he asks people if they want to fight. If they refuse he insists but doesn’t lunge for it anyway), or to defend himself or the people he wants to protect. Only when it’s directly and immediately. The few crimes they do commit in order to fight Vizioso is often the justification for the other, bigger crimes Vizioso commits and pins on them. Hun knows that getting mad at that and being violent back would only make their reputation worse, but he refuses to stay idle or passive in the face of the mafia boss. Hun, Koios Streight (the voice of reason), Nermin (tries to better the reputation of the Purple Dragons and deal with the damage. She's the n°1 reason Hun reigns himself in property damage). Also Koios and Nermin are dating. it's like irrelevant to anything ever. All the purple dragon things they wear is merch from Lynthia's legends (donnie's fav books) because it's about dragons and the color theme is purple.

Miss Chow, Malo and Arune are a little recomposed family. Miss Chow owns a food stall called "Chow's food and drink" in Manhattan. Arune and Miss Chow are married, and each handle a different job for the stall. Miss Chow is the main face and makes the food and such. Arune is usually working on paperwork and taking care of the finances and going to pick up Malo from school… Malo is from Miss Chow's previous marriage. She loves her moms but she's very very shy. She’s also partially deaf, but is able to hear pretty well with her hearing aid. Miss Chow is battling cancer, and thanks to Arune’s incredible talent in handling finances and worming through admnistrative, they’re able to stay afloat and have most of her treatment covered. Arune had a congenital malformation, and due to the fact she spent her entire life disabled and surviving America’s legal system, she really knows her way around their traps.

8-ball needs to feel like she has control over her life, and herself. After 18, her parents pushed her out for her to become independent, but 8-ball struggled and failed to get a job. Desperate and unable to seek refuge at her parents’, she was extremely grateful when a kind man took her in. What she thought was kindness turned out to be abuse, as he used her fragile mental state to control her. His constant pressure to be more beautiful and thinner, and her need to feel like she still belonged to herself led her to the dangerous path of controlling her food. It started small, not allowing any snaks after 2PM, then it became not eating more than once a day, then that one meal became smaller and smaller. It felt good, to be able to control that, to see the changes on her body that at last SHE was making happen. One day, as he hit her, one of her bone broke, due to malnutrition. He realized that his puppet would no longer work, and he left. 8-ball was right back where she started, in a much worse condition. Her control over her life kept slipping away, even with him gone, and it only amplified her need to control her food intake. Then, an evening she looked in the mirror after showering and it hit her like a truck. She was not okay and she needed help. But with no job and barely surviving, she couldn’t afford the help. She had no support group, nothing. So she made one, with other girls that like her were struggling and needed help but couldn’t get any professional one.

She is slowly relearning to eat without the swirl of guilt and horror to appear, but it’s very hard, and set backs happen often. But she’s going to survive it, she’s determined to make it. She wears wigs to hide her falling hair, and contacts because she likes it. Her favorites are the 8 balls ones.

The Turks were originally just a support group for disabled girls to talk about their problem, but it quickly turned into a way for them to expel their anger and sadness at being abandoned by society. It was founded and is being lead by 8-ball (favourite weapon baseball bat), along her two right arms, Aïda (spiky punchy things) who has down syndrome and is tired of being pushed aside, and Ruth (knife hidden in cane), an old black lady that seems fragile but will tear you apart, earning her the nickname “ruthless”. The gang often trashes the city and beat up people that make comments on their appearances. They tag a lot of walls about the city’s abandonment of disabled people and the lack of help and care for them if they do not fit hyper-specific criterias. As well as they are constantly judged due to their disability, leading to an impossibility to get jobs and sometimes even housing. They are led by 8-ball, that cannot fight due to her fragile physical state, but is the voice of their group. As the group gets known, they are being joined by other women, that while not disabled, are victims of societal or domestic abuse, and wishes for things to change. Of course all of this nuance and why the group was created is being pushed aside by medias and they are being labelled as a violent mob gang that only wishes to create anarchy. All their messages through tags are not relayed by the media, and some of them even present 8-ball and her right arms as big strong men (because how else could they have trashed the street ?). They are regularly being stopped by the turtles for hurting people, whenever it goes too far. However the mutants have never stopped them from writing their messages, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone. For a while, the girls abided to the rules, but they are getting tired of their messages disappearing in the wind. They need to do something big. To finally be listened to. Also this women only club does accept trans women, who goes through the same selection as everyone else.

it was originally a support group for women to reunite and talk about their problems and such. now, sure they trash the place but technically that's still the case. It's a support group for women about women discrimination, which includes all women, but it's a support group for women. Like that's just it. It turned into a gang which isn't great, but yeah. Plus it's not like a windmill. There's like questions they ask you before you join and stuff. It's a group that includes everyone that has experiences woman discrimination, and so includes trans women and Ft anything. Of course regardless of gender or build or whatever if you start being an ass you get kicked out

General Blanque is loyal to his country, and after that the world. He will defend it from any threats, and after New York City’s mayor gets attacked by monsters, and the mayor gets convinced to stay inactive, General Blanque decides to act in the shadows, helped by his assistant Lonae. It would take him a while, but he would get rid of these pests, before they fester and grow. He has a plan for a special squad of trained criminals, as he could not use soldiers without being noticed, and he’d grant them immunity if they succeed... Lonae is a model secretary and assistant. Always proper and straight, remembering all the meetings and accommodating her general whenever she can. Dutiful and loyal to a fault, especially to her clan’s leader, Shredder. She’s a wonderful spy, not once suspected by the General. Shredder stays aware of all the political movement happening in New York, without ever giving away her precious asset.

Libby and Harold Lilja own the store “Friendly neighbourhood store”, in the end of Brooklyn, towards Staten Island. Originally both graduate of a science PhD, their paths led them to each other, and in the end, to this little store that is their pride and joy. They met Splinter and the turtles when they were still little, as Splinter was trying to steal for food. The Lilja were the first ones to welcome the mutants with open arms and help them out. They are considered precious allies, despite not being in each others life all that often (not visiting each others houses or anything). Both of them are very outspoken pro-mutants, despite Harold being generally very quiet, and Libby avoiding political discussions.

Oxymary's maker, nicknamed "Ox" by fans. They're a bit fan of non-human creatures, going as far to inspire their main guiding character from a non-human, and then always dressing up as them when they go out. Which is ironic, when you know how anti-mutant they are.

Ox, making the game : "ommmmmg so like monster characters are soooo cool, so mysterious and interesting, and different ! i love how different from us monters are :D" Ox, as soon as they learn about mutants "oh ewwww what the hell is that kill it with fire"

The mayor is sooo important. He's so important you know. A big important man, that needs to be respected. And taken care of because he works soooo hard for this city. A good business man. A big boy. He can yell reaaal loud if you don't listen to him ! So brave ! So imposing ! He's doing soooo well, his mama sure thinks so. She supports him when he goes after the big bad monsters that harmed her baby boy ! Like a superhero.

James Bond is just a guy. He likes animals, and he’s a trans man who had Bond as his last name and just ran with it. He’s the only pro-mutant vetenarian in an anti-mutant clinic, so he keeps a low profile but he helps the turtles when he can. Nothing fancy or big, just a guy doing his part.

#colorcoded #colorcoded au #tmnt #tmnt colorcoded #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt au #tmnt iteration #camilieroart

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tarotbiscuits · 6 months

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𝔭𝔦𝔠𝔨 𝔞 𝔠𝔞𝔯𝔡: 𝔞𝔩𝔩 𝔞𝔟𝔬𝔲𝔱 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔯 𝔣𝔰

(this is for my female audience interested in men)

˜”°•.˜”°• Who are they?

What do they have to say to you?

What are their intentions towards you? •°”˜.•°”

We'll see what their energy (and the cards) say

Try to meditate on the piles beforehand and choose the one which calls you the most. If you don't feel drawn to any of them, close your eyes, take a deep breath and open your eyes. The pile you notice first is your pile!! If you feel drawn to two piles, i'd suggest choosing the one you're most drawn to, as the messages tend to be similar in nature.

𝔭𝔦𝔩𝔢 1 𝔭𝔦𝔩𝔢 2

𝔭𝔦𝔩𝔢 3 𝔭𝔦𝔩𝔢 4

PILE 1

Signs this might be for you:

444 is significant to you

you have a flowy red dress that you love wearing and it looks great on you (i see you turning around happily in that dress)

Who is your fs?

the hermit, temperance, page of cups rx, page of wands rx, five of swords, king of cups

Greetings, pile 1! For starters, i see that your fs is someone that you’ve already been in a romantic connection with. Your fs is someone who is more introverted or a loner at heart. He usually takes a lot of time for himself to balance his emotions out in his day-to-day life. He can be rather emotionally immature at times, not admitting his feelings for his love interests due to poor communication skills. I feel like he’s not the type to take risks. He wishes to be like everyone else, instead of standing out from the crowd. Your fs is a guy who doesn’t engage in conflicts much. Whenever he gets into conflict with someone, he tends to leave the situation to meditate upon it instead of lashing out. What I see coming for him is the fact that soon enough, he’ll be in his king of cups energy, because he took the time to get to know himself and seek answers to his problems. He’ll become an emotionally mature man, who can be honest about his feelings and support you emotionally when you need him.

His message for you

tower rx, four of cups, justice rx

“I’m sorry (i felt a lump in my throat right after that). Justice wasn’t done in our connection and it’s all my fault. I did you wrong big time and I don’t expect you to even forgive me, let alone take me back. I was a fool in the past when I denied your offer. I pursued other options over you (i don’t feel like this is a third party situation, just casual dating). Now I realized that having a lot of options won’t bring me emotional fulfillment and happiness if they’re not you. Our break-up was a traumatic experience for me and I did everything I could to numb my feelings and forget about you.”

His intentions towards you

death rx, ten of swords rx

Dear pile 1, I’m sorry to break it to you, but for now, your fs wants to heal from the connection. He feels like there are some demons from your past connection that still follow him and he wants to stop them from inflicting more pain on him. He wants to let go of the past and move on with his life. Considering he’s going to be your fs, the story isn’t probably over yet, i think?. Knight of cups rx is at the bottom of the deck, he feels like he can’t make a love offer rn. Under this there’s the queen of cups, omg he sees you as his soulmate. He deff still loves you, but is too heartbroken over the past. Give him time, pile 1. It’s just not the right time for the two of you to be together now.

Extra:

likes reading a lot

also likes ducks (and other feathered animals)

zodiac placements: virgo sun, water signs (cancer, scorpio, pisces) in big 6

PILE 2

Signs this might be for you:

33 is relevant to you

you have sneezed recently or you sneeze a lot

Who is your fs?

three of pentacles rx, three of wands, king of swords rx, seven of wands, ace of wands horizontal (yes, i take horizontals as advice cards), eight of swords, the world (bottom of the deck)

Hello pile 2, hope you’re having a great day! Your fs is someone who’s independent – he prefers to work alone than in groups or in collaboration with another person. He’s likely an adventurous type who travels a lot for work, but also in his free time. When he travels for fun, he likes to explore the natural wonders of our planet: hiking in the woods, tasting the freshness of the water streams around him. On the downside, he can be rather arrogant with his words, feeling like he’s above others intellectually or that people aren’t as honest and truthful like him. He can get a lot of backlash because of this, which makes him feel like he needs to defend for himself most of the time. I see that your fs wants to pursue a new creative endeavor, likely stemming from one of his passions, but he’s afraid. He is advised to take a leap of faith and do it anyway. He won’t know what’s in store for him unless he tries.

You two will probably be in a long distance relationship for a while. He’ll deff open you up to new experiences, getting you out of your comfort zone. Since he’s well travelled, count on him when you two are booking a holiday destination – he tends to know the coolest spots for taking pictures :)

His message for you

sun horizontal, page of pentacles horizontal, three of swords rx, king of cups, four of cups, five of pentacles rx

“Hey baby, it’s okay. The sun isn’t shining today, but that doesn’t mean it won’t shine tomorrow. Tomorrow is a new day. I know you’re afraid to take a new beginning, you’ve been hurt so bad by love and all I want to do is take away your pain. I promise you, I’ll take away your pain one day, okay? Just don’t close yourself off to new possibilities, heck even in love. Don’t wait for me. Live your life, explore other options. See what you like and what you don’t. Just remember, you’re never alone. There are people who will love you for who you truly are, your family loves you (i sense that you might have had a difficult upbringing, a dysfunctional family, especially an absent mother, but your fs doesn’t know that yet). I will. You’re never alone, remember that.”

His intentions towards you

the high priestess rx, wheel of fortune rx, the star, nine of pentacles

Pile 2, your fs is closing himself off from your connection in the higher realm for now. Like pile 1, he feels like now is not the right time for you two to be together – your connection is divinely guided by the Universe and his higher self is guiding him towards some hardships in his personal life to learn valuable lessons, which are needed for your connection. He’s hopeful that you exist and he knows that you will be reunited at some point, but for now, he’s happily single and he wants to focus on maintaining his independence.

Extra:

rice is very significant (either his origins are from Asia or he strongly loves/hates rice)

zodiac placements: strong sagittarius, especially sagittarius sun/venus, gemini sun (it might be aspected with pluto, i see mostly conjuncting pluto or squaring/opposing pluto), gemini mercury, leo in big 6 (mostly ascendant and mars)

PILE 3

Signs this might be for you:

you have blue eyes (sorry guys, i can’t get any more signs for this one; he’s also telling me that you’ve eaten something specific recently but i can’t see what; i'm hearing mozarella sticks? lmk if it resonates, i'm not sure on this one)

Who is your fs?

five of pentacles rx, the tower rx, the emperor rx, temperance, page of cups rx, eight of wands, the star (bottom of the deck)

Woahh, pile 3. When i was shuffling the cards for this question, a lot of them fell down. Your fs has a lot to tell you about himself!! I think he has been often told to shut up by others. That’s what made him keep to himself a lot, but with you, he wants to tell you everything. Hahaha, now he's got a much calmer energy. Pile 3, your fs is the type of person that has outbursts of anger and he lashes out everything, but after that he’s like a lamb lmao. I see that your fs has been through some deep, dark shit in his past, likely involving his parents. Either his parents divorced at some point and it affected him deeply or his father abandoned him at a very young age. This broke down his world at the time, but i see that he has healed from it. He wished he had a happy childhood, but he just wants peace now and he got it. I felt his energy for a moment where he kept saying “I just want the fights to be over already” and then he kept repeating “over” again and again in a very demanding tone. I’d say his unhappy childhood still haunts him at times (i got death rx on the bottom of the deck when i clarified the first 3 cards), but he does believe in true love. He’s someone who tends to keep his feelings in check and his life in moderation. He can act immature at times, but i feel like he does feel sorry for his actions and tries his best to become a better person.

His message for you

six of swords, nine of pentacles, the well rx (i'm using ethereal visions by matt hughes it's my only deck ;-;), knight of swords

“Be strong. You have walked away from so many storms, that you’ve become this beautiful butterfly on your own. And if you haven’t walked away from those toxic people – do it NOW. I’ve walked away from my parents and friends, was it easy? No, but I’m much better now. You gotta be who you truly are as a person, you’re so fricking valuable. You need to be upfront and direct with people. I’ll teach you if you can’t. Why have you blocked your creative juices? Was it because of pain? Don’t let past hurts hinder your light. You are this beautiful goddess that is above EVERYONE else (i can really feel this feminine energy coming from you). I’ll worship the ground you walk on. Just don’t let them win.”

Pile 3, i feel like some of you are healing from a break-up, but you are already almost fully healed. You’re glowing and your fs adores that.

His intentions towards you

six of cups rx, page of swords rx, king of wands rx, wheel of fortune horizontal (yes, i take horizontals as advice cards)

For some of you, i feel like you already know them. Your fs might have been a childhood friend, a neighbor or a classmate that you used to hang around with when you were kids, just doing fun stuff. I don’t think he was in your life for a long time, you probably lost contact for some reason. I also don’t think you two were romantically involved, but if you did, it was more of an innocent fling.

For others of you, this is someone completely new and the six of cups rx might just point out to his unhappy childhood. He’s been pondering on it lately and feels very sad, maybe even depressed.

Either way, I feel like he’s going to enter your life really soon, but it won’t be at the right time. He’s not someone that is guided by a higher force, his intuition is quite blocked and he tends to act on his impulsive feelings without thinking of the consequences too much.

If you already know him, he might tell you about some harsh truth. Either point out to something you do which isn’t right, so he’s gonna call you out on that or he’ll say something regarding the times when you hung out as kids, which didn’t sit right with him.

If you don’t know him, he’s probably going to show off to you in a very “look at me, I’m better than the other guys” kinda way.

Whether you already know him or you will in the near future, i do feel like he has romantic feelings for you and he feels like he has got a chance to be with you, but like i said, the universe is saying that right now is not the right time for your union. It’s very likely that he’s still in school/college and is very focused on it. He doesn’t know if he should choose to pursue you or his career rn. This last bunch of cards just flew so this has been heavily on his mind. I’d say don’t engage too much with him, this is only the beginning of your love story. It will solve itself out when the timing is right.

Extra:

bichons/havanese dogs might be significant to your or them

zodiac placements: heavy aries and leo energy (i wouldn’t be surprised if most of his birth chart is filled with fire placements), libra sun or an afflicted sun (with lots of squares and oppositions)

PILE 4

Signs this might be for you:

you had a very hard time picking a pile (yeah, i literally didn’t know if i should make this pile or not)

your fav color is purple

Who is your fs?

three of swords horizontal (yes, i take horizontals as advice cards), the emperor horizontal, three of cups rx, nine of wands rx, knight of wands, six of wands

Pile 4!!! Spirit was telling me to do this reading asap because it’s urgent (and then i got a call lmao). Your fs is likely a very busy guy, getting calls all the time. Damn, I just saw him in a suit. He’s someone influential in his career for sure, probably works in business. Even the cards hardly came out, like he didn’t want to talk because he’s too busy atm. I see that for your fs, career is everything. He is used to declining invitations to social events and parties because he would rather spend his time and attention on making money. He’s very VERY successful in what he does, i see massive recognition here, because he seizes every opportunity to advance in his career and he goes for them!! Sadly, he wasn’t always like this. At times he felt like the competition was too much and that he won’t succed, but in the end he gave his all, despite his feelings. He is advised not to become too bossy with the people around him, even though i feel like he isn’t like that anyway. I also believe that his overfixation on his career comes from a past break-up that he hasn’t processed fully. He is advised to process it and move on, instead of trying to simply forget it by doing something else.

His message for you

The chariot rx, queen of cups, page of pentacles clarified by two of swords, eight of cups clarified by seven of cups, five of pentacles rx clarified by the hermit, five of swords rx clarified by the king of wands

This is more about his ex and what happened to him, I feel like he really needs to vent so be gentle with him pile 4

“I wasn’t ready for her. I wasn’t ready for our relationship, but my feelings for her were so much, I just couldn’t hold them inside of me anymore. At that time I believed this was a new beginning for us, one that we would both (and i emphasize both) build for, something which would have lasted for a long time (i’m hearing everlasting). I felt like something was off from the beginning, but I thought it was only my imagination playing tricks. I wanted to take it slow because I wasn’t sure…oh boy, was I wrong. I had to leave when I found out that she was cheating on me this whole time. I poured my heart to her and she cheated…I don’t want to remember what happened after. It took me a long time to get over it, get over her (i’m hearing sleepless nights). I felt so alone and abandoned, I didn’t want to talk with anyone, I drank myself to sleep. But this experience made me into who I am today. I know I’m strong. I weathered storms no one would have imagined and I came out victorious. But I’m never leaving my heart to anyone else.

I don’t know if you exist…I’m feeling strong now, but what if it’s just a façade? Do you even exist? (death is on the bottom of the deck , under the death card is the queen of wands rx, he really doesn’t feel like you exist). I feel like the world is filled with harsh people, people that only want to benefit from others and I’m not letting others exploit me anymore.”

Pile 4, i honestly feel like he has so much love to give to others, even to you, but i’m not sure if he sees that. He will make a great partner, i can feel this already. Please show him that you will be there for him and that your feelings are genuine. He needs it.

His intentions towards you

four of pentacles, page of wands, ace of cups, seven of swords

Well, he’s deff focusing on his finances rn for sure. I see that there will be a passionate, new beginning in your connection. I don’t think you two have met, i feel like this is a fresh energy. I heard that you will have to make the first step tho. He will open up to you quite fast after that, but he will also feel a bit wary in the beginning. He doesn’t want the past to repeat itself. I see him trying to peek into your phone when you’re texting someone, just to make sure you’re not cheating on him or anything. He does have the tendency to become paranoid, which can get out of hand if not addressed. My advice to you is to have open communication at all cost. I see a lot of love between the two of you. Don’t let it go to waste.

Extra:

zodiac placements: capricorn in big 3, sun/ascendant conjunct saturn, strong sagittarius and leo in big 6, mars in aries or sagittarius, scorpio energy in big 6 or pluto is significant

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why-animals-do-the-thing · 9 months

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To continue the theme of "wtaf is up with that sanctuary that feeds bears Twizzlers and camels Mountain Dew", here's another recent social media post I find rather concerning. Who the heck is giving cheetah - vulnerable animals with a very small population - to a sanctuary that is rabidly, openly anti-zoo and anti-conservation breeding?

The reason this stands out to me so much is that there just like... are not cheetah in sanctuaries in the US. Most cheetah in the US are part of a breeding program, either AZA's SSP or ZAA's AMP - it's not common to find them in even unaccredited zoos, much less newly moved to sanctuaries. Of the 400-some cheetah I found doing the big cat census in 2020, there were less than 10 in facilities that branded themselves as sanctuaries. So where did these cats come from?

What's more, okay, there's no trace of these ladies on social media before now. The Wild Animal Sanctuary is normally very open about their acquisitions, and no facility they've gotten animals from since their last USDA inspection has had cheetah. I haven't heard about any imported cheetah recently either, which is another thing you can check for this facility, because the majority of their rescues are imported from all over the world.

There's another weird thing about this post, too. Look at the language. It's all very "here's a cheetah! they're very happy outdoors in their nice habitat." And if you're not facility with this institution and their messaging, you might not catch why that's odd. This facility emphasizes, in every post they can, that their animals are rescued from horrible no-good very-bad abusive situations. Normally they name and shame if they can, or talk about how they came from the cub petting industry or private exploitation or such. There's none of that in this post, and it stands out because of it - especially because it's the first time these very rare, very charismatic big cats are being shared with their audience.

So where the heck did these cats come from?

Whelp.

Turns out the answer is AZA-accredited zoos. And whew, man, does that raise some questions.

Luckily these girls have some pretty distinctive names, so I was able to find them in the international and regional cheetah studbooks pretty easily. For both cats, the most recent listing in the studbooks was at AZA-accredited zoos in Texas: in 2020 Dahlila was living at Caldwell Zoo, and in 2022 Jaina was at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center.

Now, we don't know for sure that Caldwell and Fossil Rim are the facilities that chose to dump their cheetah in a sanctuary. There's some important context to know about exotic animal ownership and how animals leave AZA SSPs. General practice is that large charismatic mammals aren't bought and sold at AZA zoos, especially SSP animals, so animals sent out to other facilities for breeding or exhibition are moved around on loan. Sometimes their ownership changes with the transfer, but not always - it really depends on the species and how much control each facility wants to have over their animals. On top of that, the ownership of offspring sometimes alternates by litter or individual between the institutions that own the parents. When they're part of a cooperative breeding program none of that matters very much because all the animals are managed as a single population and moved as required for breeding and to fill empty display spaces. Where it's relevant is when an animal is removed from the SSP population - at that point it's totally up to the facility that owns it to choose where they live, as long as they send them somewhere AZA agrees is providing a reasonable standard of care. (This will be important in a little bit.)

So what we can tell from this situation is that Jaina and Dahlila were, for some reason, probably excessioned from the SSP in the last couple years. And whichever AZA facilities owned them decided to send them to The Wild Animal Sanctuary instead of finding a display-only placement at a zoo or safari park or similar facility.

Since I started writing this post, TWAS confirmed the origin of these girls in a Facebook comment.

I have real concerns about what appears to be an emerging trend of exotic animal exhibition facilities using sanctuaries as a "dumping ground" for their elderly or extra animals, in order to prioritize space for breeding or more desirable animals. I can't prove it yet, but there's been just enough weird transfers to have caught my attention. (In some cases, there's a good reason - sometimes all the habitats designed for the physical needs of elderly animals of a certain species already are full, and it's better for them to go somewhere they can exist more easily rather than trying to retrofit their current habitat - but it isn't every case). And here's the thing: many sanctuaries, like TWAS, message about how they have to exist to take all the discards from the zoo industry. In recent years that hasn't really been accurate, and historically, it did happen but not as commonly as it's portrayed. So... if that's true... and it's a bad thing... why are sanctuaries encouraging it by taking the animals zoos are transferring out to free up space? You'd think they'd want to say "find space in your own institutions and only call us if there's a crisis." (Money. The answer is money. Every new intake is used for marketing and drives additional donations.) Heck, why are zoos playing into that narrative, when they're frequently rebutting attacks claiming they discard the animals that aren't useful or aesthetic anymore?

All of this actually makes a lot of sense given how short on space all the AZA SSP programs are. Both in general, and for big cats, there are not enough spaces across accredited zoos to hold all the animals needed for sustainable populations. (This is why AZA just recently re-imagined their SSP programs, which is a whole other complicated mess that I am working on a writeup about). Recent political shifts within AZA corporate leadership have also discouraged collaborations between AZA-accredited zoos and non-AZA facilities, so while 20 years ago it would have been fine to move extraneous / non-breeding cats to smaller unaccredited facilities for display, that's less of an option. Which leaves sanctuaries as kind of the only politically appropriate option. This would also explain why the text of the post is so weird: there's probably a contract in place to prevent using their images to bash zoos.

The problem with sanctuaries as a solution for housing extra animals is, well, the quality of care they provide. If you haven't seen me say it before: sanctuaries are as varied in their expertise and function as zoos. In the case of The Wild Animal Sanctuary (and their other facilities, like the Refuge these cheetah are at) everything I have learned about them indicates that their animal care is highly questionable. Which is a problem, because - as mentioned earlier - AZA-accredited facilities are required to follow a responsible population management policy, which means ensuring that animals they send outside of AZA go somewhere that gives them high-quality care.

TWAS is an organization that prefers to feed big cats at multiple facilities frozen meat puree "frisbees" by chucking them over the fence. They don't have any way to separate co-housed cats to prevent conflict during feeding or resource guarding, because they don't build their enclosures with any sort of shift or lock-out areas. It's also unclear how they remove food waste without a way to shift animals out to go find it. (For bears they drive in on a truck into the habitat and then go on foot to clean, but I don't know if that's done with the big cats once they’ve been released from quarantine pens.

(These are my photos of food in carnivore habitats at TWAS this summer. Given the pest accumulation on the meat frisbee and the fact that I visited early in the day, it seems probable it was at least a day old.)

This is an organization that is ethically against training their animals for any reason: it's literally written into their statement of purpose as a “true sanctuary.” It's also described below, in a recent book published about the facility.

That policy means these cheetahs will not have a recall behavior, will not be trained for medical examinations or as a way to lower stress for procedures, and will not get the mental enrichment and interaction they're used to from regular training sessions. According to the book, medications are delivered on a long spoon / tongs tucked inside the cat equivalent of a pill pocket. (Which anyone with a pet cat knows falls apart as a plan if they're sick enough to not feel hungry).

I'm pretty sure there's no heated shelter for the large carnivores or bears at TWAS. The main shelter for animals at the Sanctuary is single-entrance concrete culverts buried underground far enough they're supposed to maintain a constant temperature all winter.

Sounds nice in theory, but with no second exit animals can get trapped down there, and there's no way to monitor them when they're inside. I don't know what type of shelter the Refuge provides, but it probably isn't much different. Even the quarantine spaces - smaller outdoor kennel-type pens with three exposed mesh panel walls - have no heat, and just an above-ground culvert block for them to curl up in. While cheetah are surprisingly adaptable to cold weather, winters in Colorado can be very harsh for prolonged periods of time.

As far as I know, most of the animals at facilities TWAS runs don't get regularly changed, novel enrichment. I've certainly never seen much in the habitats other than climbing structures when I've visited their main facility over the years, and most of their messaging around “toys” is semi-permanent furniture like giant telephone wire spools or a suspension bridge for climbing. I think some of the bears get balls? The messaging from TWAS is that their animal care is better because it's close to a natural life in the wild. Animals can be animals! When returned to their wild roots, animals shouldn't need anything from humans and are happier that way, etc.

When animals come to the Sanctuary (or the partner facility, the Refuge) they're literally chucked into a big fenced-off piece of land and left out there to "be cats" without human interaction except for feeding time and observations. Which is the polar opposite of what these cheetah are used to! AZA cheetahs, even those that aren't program animals, are intensely managed. They're used to regular human contact, frequent training, and constant enrichment. So what's "normal" for a wild cat is a far cry from what these cheetah girls have always known. That's not better - that's a loss of quality of life.

I don't understand how moving animals to places like TWAS is in line with AZA's Responsible Collection Management policy. I don't understand how AZA facilities think the type of husbandry the facility describes providing is acceptable. If another zoo utilized half the same care practices, they'd be drawn and quartered by their industry peers as well as by the public - and rightfully so. I don't understand why anyone wants to send animals there, based even just on what's easily observable. I don't have more information or really a conclusion, just that’s what's observable from an external vantage point is upsetting as heck and I worry for those cheetah girls.

#big cats #cheetahs #animal welfare #sanctuary politics #zoo industry politics #animal care #AZA #long post #this originally said cheetah are highly endangered which was a fact checking error #updated it to reflect that #bug tw

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magnetothemagnificent · 8 months

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My full thoughts on 'You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah':

So first off, going into it, I didn't think I would like it. I don't really watch the tween-angst genre of movies, and the promotional material for the movie made it look like it was just gonna be a movie about Jews having an extravagant and expensive party, which is obviously problematic.

But the movie.....it blew me away. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Things I loved:

-The typical Jewish stereotypes you see in every movie about Jews weren't present. I really expected Adam Sandler's character to be another nebbish pushover Jewish dad stereotype, but he wasn't. He was goofy and soft but also he was strong and passionate about Judaism and his family. When he got really, truly angry at Stacy, I almost cheered. Of course all the characters in the movie are on the upper middle class end, but upon reflection, that's just the genre of movies. There's a genre of tween and teen movies about extravagant birthday parties where the characters live in a world free from poverty, and well, it's nice to have a movie in that genre for ourselves. It's escapism.

-The characters all loved Judaism and being Jewish. Jewish religious practice and belief wasn't treated as a joke or an afterthought. The kids would actually look forward to Hebrew school, and Hebrew school wasn't depicted as boring and stuffy. The religious aspect of a Bat Mitzvah was front and center- it drove the whole story, from Stacy practicing her Maftir (not "Haftarah" as the movie got wrong) as she comes up with her worst mistake, to Stacy working on her Mitzvah project.

-Because the majority of the story occured at the characters' homes and in Hebrew School and Temple, antisemitism wasn't a player in the story, and I liked that. We have so many movies about Jewish pain and suffering, and it's nice to have a light-hearted movie. It doesn't pretend antisemitism doesn't exist, but it's just not relevant to the story.

-Even though it was a movie about a tween girl and all her struggles and insecurities, she was never once insecure about her Jewish features. They could have very easily slipped into the old "Jewish girl hates her nose" but it didn't. And I hope that if Sunny Sandler gets serious about acting as she grows up, she won't feel pressured to get a nose job like so many other Jewish young women do.

-It doesn't pander to goyim and take time to explain every single Jewish word and reference like Hallmark Hanukkah specials do. It's a movie made by Jews for Jews, and it doesn't edit itself to be more palatable to goyim. And I loved that.

Some critiques:

-My biggest criticism is the portrayal of Jewish tween boys. I get that the movie is from Stacy's POV, so as a tween girl she might see all boys her age as gross and as assholes, but I find it problematic that all the Jewish boys were depicted as nasty, while the only boy depicted as nice and polite was not Jewish. I think it plays into stereotypes of Jewish boys and sends a harmful message.

-I loved Rabbi Rebecca, but I think that at times her character went from endearingly awkward to just gross and inappropriate, such as when she talked about her yeast infection in front of her students. I think just a bit of editorial tweaking would have been beneficial for her character.

Overall rating: 9/10, would definitely recommend it to my Jewish friends. Goyim, you might enjoy it, but it really isn't made for you so you might be lost at times. Just accept you're not the target audience.

#jumblr #you are so not invited to my bat mitzvah #movie review #movie recommendation #jewish movie #my thoughts

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em-dash-press · 11 months

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Tips for Starting and Stopping Chapters, Plus FAQs

Even if you have the most exciting, engaging ideas for your novel, you might struggle to write it because you have to deal with chapters. These are a few of the most frequently asked questions about chapters and a few tips that might help you overcome manuscript challenges.

How Many Chapters Should a Book Have?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this question. Genres and intended audiences influence manuscript word counts. Younger readers will need shorter chapters to keep their interest and older readers might prefer longer chapters that dive deep into conflict or theme.

Storytelling elements also change the number of chapters per book. A fast-paced novel might have more short chapters to keep up the faster narrative pace. A slower novel might linger in wordier scenes, so there could be fewer chapters with longer page counts per chapter.

You can always look at comparable novels in the same genre to guestimate how many your manuscript could include. If you’re writing a Twilight-inspired novel in the same fantasy genre and Twilight has 26 chapters in a ~110,000 word count range, you could aim for a similar number.

What’s the Purpose of Chapters?

Chapters divide longer stories into segments that help readers process new plot events. They give people breathing room to digest heavier topics or moments by pausing or putting the book down to do other things for a while.

They also give more weight to cliffhanger moments or events made to shock readers. Even if they immediately flip the page to keep reading, the momentary pause lends gravity and meaning to whatever ends the chapter before.

Tips for First Chapters

Include Some Action

The first line of every chapter doesn’t need to be a dramatic car chase scene, but the chapter in its entirety should include some plot-moving action. It hooks readers and gets your pacing started.

Add Emotional Weight

Action can only intrigue readers so much. What’s the emotional weight compelling your protagonist to take part in, react to, or fight back against your inciting incident? Establish some emotional weight in the first chapter to motivate your protagonist, like showing how much they love their sister before getting betrayed by her in the inciting incident.

Avoid Infodumping

Readers don’t need to know everything about your world-building or protagonist in the first chapter. The infodumping only weighs down your pace. Sprinkle your descriptions and reveals throughout the first act of your book to keep readers coming back to learn more about the world.

Tips for Starting a Chapter

Introduce a Choice

Choices help stories move along at a pace that keeps readers engaged. If your protagonist is stuck in their head for most of a chapter, there’s nothing pushing your story forward. Always include at least one choice when starting a chapter, whether it’s big or small.

Keep Expanding Your Conflict

Every chapter should expand your primary conflict in some way. It might affect newly introduced characters, change your protagonist’s world, or require a sacrifice. As long as your conflict is relevant to your chapter in some way, your story will always remain true to its thematic purpose.

Remember Your Cause-and-Effect

An initial chapter sets up or introduces a conflict that gets your plot moving. If you’re unsure what to do in the following chapter, use it to address the effects of that previous chapter’s conflict. Although the conflict likely won’t get resolved that quickly, you can still write about your characters’ choices post-conflict or how the world changes in a way that affects their futures.

Tips for Ending a Chapter

Experiment With Your Endings

I used to be afraid of ending a chapter without some shocking, groundbreaking plot twist. Althought that’s a great place to put those moments, it’s not plausible to end every chapter with one. Where would your readers feel comfortable pausing for the night? When would they feel the quiet sanctity of peaceful moments where characters build trust between themselves?

Play around with your endings by refusing to be afraid to cut your manuscript into segments. If one doesn’t feel right during your read-through, you can always merge it into the next chapter and cut them differently during editing.

Use It to Shift Your Story

When your story needs to change times of day, locations, or perspectives, that’s usually a good sign that you need a page or chapter break. It’s not always necessary, but these are the types of chapter breaks that give readers breathing room.

Again, you can always re-work your chapters during editing if you find that they aren’t ending in the right places during your first few read-throughs.

Ramp Up Your Tension

Who says chapters always have to end on a cliffhanger? You can also end them when the action or tension is becoming more intense. When two characters are in the car on the way to rob a bank, they argue over whether or not to actually shoot people. One character’s eagerness and the other’s disgust raises the tension. As it escalates into them yelling in the parking lot, the chapter can end when one leaves the car and slams the door.

Ending on a moment of heightened tension is another reason readers turn pages and stay engaged. In the above case, they might not be able to put the book down until they find out if the robbery resulted in murder.

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Starting and stopping chapters can cause plenty of anxiety, but remember—you’re always in control of your manuscript. Play around with these ideas and make any necessary changes in your editing phases. You’ll figure out the best way to organize your story by chapters and develop more confidence in your long-form storytelling abilities.

#creating chapters #writing chapters #chapter length #writing a first chapter #writeblr #writing advice #writing tips #writers of tumblr #writing #writing help #creative writing #writing inspiration #writing community #writing a novel #writing a book #writing a story

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exitwound · 5 months

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Maybe think about why you care so much about calling gerard way a woman to the extent that you equate it as the only correct way to engage with their work, as if art as well as support for the trans community can’t have value by itself, as if that isn’t the point, not their literal personal internal experience of gender that’s no one’s business, the same way trying to decide if anyone is trans is not your business if that person doesn’t want to tell you or talk about it with you, because it’s gender essentialist, and why it’s so baffling to you that a celebrity in general but especially gerard way might want to avoid labels or this specific type of intrusive categorization , as they have explicitly stated as well as created music that is about the same thing. And shouldnt we live in a world where someone can present gnc, and talk about experiences with gender and with femininity in honest ways, without people not just obsessing over whether that means they’re “really a woman” but outright deciding, and acting like they are. That’s a narrow fucking definition of womanhood. And shouldn't we value that authenticity from people who don’t want to choose a label as much as we do from people who identify in ways they do choose to label, (labels or the lack of btw have never been individual terms but tools for relating or not relating ourselves to the world in specific ways,) Isn’t that a better more open and beautiful mode of creating relationships to each other? Why does gerard need to be a woman to you? Why are you so obsessed with this? Why is transness and queerness and gender nonconformity itself, to you, some kind of item, an object or artifact for distribution upon others — and it is not in fact “creating cisnormativity” to accept the way a person wants to relate their identity to an audience. There are lots of trans women and transfeminine people who are doing everything gerard way is doing for transness and much more. If you want to call someone a woman go call a woman a woman. If you want to celebrate trans joy go celebrate trans joy. Please by all means do I will celebrate with you I am celebrating with you and I am doing it while listening to my chemical romance. So what’s the point in acting like this. I really don't get it. But it concerns me because this isn't the only time I've witnessed this kind of attitude and although its well-intentioned and "playful" its ultimately weird, ultimately harmful. So honestly, if this really feels "low-stakes" to you it might be because you've never dealt with the kinds of situations where the stakes exist, or considered the perspective of someone who has a different relationship to the stakes of your argument than you do.

Because not to be dramatic, but these stakes are the same stakes relevant to the literal record numbers of legislation currently being passed in the US using bioessentialism and gender essentialism to install systems of state-controlled gender-enforcing and forced gendering of trans and non-trans gnc children in schools and in healthcare. What you're doing is, if on a small scale, still contributing to the same conceptualization of gender as these laws, and as the people who passed them, even if you're well intentioned and hate the laws, even if your beliefs are reversed, the framework is the same, and that framework is going to empower the dominant culture, not yours. That's how power works. Which is why it's stupid. It's literally just stupid. And it hurts trans people who have had experiences in the real world where people are just as intrusive as you are being about trying to interpret their gender, and you’re no different for trying to clock people. If you don't know the stakes of your words, you should learn them before you use those words. Just because you're in a bubble of people who agree with you and think this is just about being either "right" or "wrong" about gerard way's gender and wanting to be "right" doesn't dismiss you from the meaning of the actual words you are saying and the ideologies informing your beliefs, whether or not you're aware of them, because the rest of us aren't trying to be right, we're not living in a this-or-that world in the first place. Personally I don't know them. I've appreciated & engaged with what they have said about their experiences with gender as well as their art while also respecting their statements about not liking labels, and treated their silence on their own identity as intentional, because I like knowing what words, and the absences of words, mean

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soraka-in-warhammer40k · 10 months

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I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.

#random rant #wh40k #T'au #tau empire #warhammer 40k

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joannechocolat · 1 year

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On why women’s rage is a superpower

My mother hates my new book. I gave her a proof just a few days ago, and although she’s still only halfway through, she can’t wait to tell me all the ways in which she hates my novel.

“Is this science fiction?” she says. (She detests science fiction.) “Were you ill when you wrote this?” (I was.) And repeatedly, she says: “Why are the women so angry?”

I get it. She’s out of her comfort zone. At 83, with no internet, no interest in pop culture and a deep-rooted hatred of anything close to horror or the supernatural, she wasn’t my target audience. And yet it’s never easy to hear such criticism from a loved one. But in some ways, she isn’t wrong. Broken Light is an angry book. It came from a time of lockdown, when social media was my only window onto the world. It came from a place of trauma, when I was fighting cancer. It came from a place of corrupt hierarchies, self-serving politicians, anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, victim-blamers, and those eager to blame all their woes on minorities. And of course, it arose against the background of the #MeToo campaign and the Sarah Everard murder – a murder that shocked the nation, not least because the murderer turned out to be a serving police officer with a reputation for sexual misconduct - which unleashed a collective howl of protest, as well as an ugly, misogynistic backlash. Even so, my story came as something of a surprise to me: the story of a woman’s rage, and, on reaching the age at which women often feel least valued, her coming into her power.

It surprised me, most of all because I wasn’t an angry person. At least, I didn’t think I was. Those who know me describe me as someone who tends to flee conflict, who generally tries to find common ground, who gets upset when people fight. And yet, writing this story, I found myself saying and feeling certain things on behalf of my heroine, Bernie Moon; things I might not have said for myself, but which felt right and urgent, and true, and strangely liberating.

Anger has a bad press. A woman’s anger, especially. While men are encouraged to express feelings of justified anger, women are often criticized when they try to do the same. Angry women are often portrayed as “harpies,” “banshees,” “Furies.” It suggests that a man’s rage is righteous, but that a woman’s is unnatural, making her into a monster. Male anger is powerful. The God of the Bible is one of wrath. Seldom is he ever portrayed as expressing any other emotion. In the same way, men and boys are often led to believe that expressing emotion is weak - except for anger, which is seen as acceptably masculine.

In comparison, women are often criticized when they show aggression. Angry women are hysterical, shrill, out of control, unreliable, unattractive, unfeminine. A perceived lack of “femininity” makes a woman less valuable, less worthy of respect and of protection. The Press coverage of women victims of violence is a case in point. A victim of violence needs to be attractive, white, gender conforming and virtuous in every way if she is not to be overlooked, or worse, portrayed as somehow having contributed to her misfortune. When trans teenager Brianna Ghey was stabbed, the Press were very quick to state that her murder was not thought to be a hate crime, whilst at the same time obsessing over – and questioning - her gender. When Nicola Bulley disappeared, police felt obliged to divulge details of her struggle with the menopause, as well as her alcohol issues, even though this was privileged information and of no public relevance. When Emma Pattison, the Head of Epsom College, was murdered alongside her daughter, the Press immediately assumed that her husband George must have felt “overshadowed” and “driven to distraction” by his wife’s prestigious job. In all three cases, the victim falls under the hostile scrutiny of the Press, while the perpetrator is given an excuse. In all three cases, the victim – one trans, one hormonal, one better-paid than her husband - is effectively portrayed as “unnatural”. Subtext: Unnatural women do not deserve the protection of the patriarchy. Unnatural women come to bad ends.

Once you start to acknowledge it, rage grows at a surprising rate. Over the past three years, I have found myself growing increasingly angry. Angry at the injustices committed by our Government; t the greed of corporations; angry at the prejudice extended to those who are different.

Connecting with others on social media has made me more aware of the lives and experiences of those from different backgrounds to mine, and with different levels of privilege. For a long time I’d been resistant to calling myself a feminist. Feminists are angry, I thought. What right have you to be angry?

Growing older, I realize that this was my mother speaking. A woman of a certain generation, who although she was aware of the challenges of living in a patriarchy, still had a level of privilege that many women do not share. White, professional, cishet women can sometimes have the luxury of choosing not to be angry. White, professional, cishet women can sometimes have the illusion of equality. But feminism isn’t only for just one kind of woman. A feminist must look beyond the limits of their own experience. And that’s where the anger really starts: anger at injustice; anger at corruption and lies. Most of all, anger at the prejudice against certain people for just being themselves; for being transgender, or Black, or old, or simply not conforming to what a white, patriarchal society expects and values. And once you start seeing injustice, you start to see it everywhere. It’s like an eye, which, once opened, cannot unsee inequality.

My anger flourished in lockdown. A time of growing divisions. Masks are invaluable in a pandemic, and yet they inhibit connection. They serve as a kind of reminder of who can speak, and who is to be silenced. While Boris Johnson was urging the public to trust the police, a vigil for Sarah Everard was broken up, with violence, by officers citing lockdown laws. While elderly people were dying alone; while I drove for four hours just to go for a half-hour walk in the park with my son; while I sat alone in my chemo chair, politicians were partying. Billionaires were enriching themselves. Behind the mask, the eye opened wide. I caught myself making faces behind my disguise at strangers. There was something weirdly liberating about this; as if, behind the piece of cloth, I could express myself at last. Not unlike writing a book, in fact. On screen, the eye opened wider. Bernie Moon, my heroine, was unlike like me in many ways, and yet anger connected us. The anger that comes from helplessness; from seeing others mistreated. Anger at a society that propagates inequality. And the anger that comes from hormones – those mood-altering chemicals that everyone produces, and yet which allegedly make women erratic; unreliable; hormonal.

In his novel, Carrie, Stephen King tells the story of a girl, whose telekinetic powers are unleashed by her teenage hormones. Carrie is unpopular, bullied, isolated. Her rage finds an outlet in her power. Driven to breaking-point by the bullies, she becomes a monster. Of course she does: after all, the author of this tale is a man, writing from the perspective of a couple of thousand years’ worth of patriarchal inheritance. In literature, a woman’s anger is unnatural; monstrous. It leads to terrible, unnatural things: makes murderers and infanticides of Clytemnestra and Medea; monsters of Medusa and Scylla. Unnatural, monstrous women are always punished in literature, even while acknowledging that they are often the victims of men. And unnatural women are often seen as physically repulsive – a reminder that, to be valued and loved, women must be young, and pure, and conform to the standards of beauty set out by their society. In literature, just as in life, those women who do not conform tend to be less valued, less seen, and when they do appear, do so as wicked witches, evil stepmothers, ugly crones and hideous travesties of womanhood.

But what would happen if a woman took control of the narrative? In recent years, we have observed a number of retellings of Greek myths from the point of view of the monster. Stone Blind, by Nathalie Haynes; Medusa, by Jessie Burton; Circe, by Madeline Miller. In both cases, the monstrous woman is seen from a different perspective; her rage absorbed and justified; her narrative reclaimed from a patriarchy that seeks to tame and subdue a woman’s rage, even at the cost of her life.

My new novel, Broken Light, comes from the same process of reclamation. It owes a debt to Carrie, but I have avoided the explicitly paranormal theme of the original, as well as the girl-on-girl bullying and the psychopathic mother. In my version, Carrie lives; marries her childhood sweetheart; internalizes all her rage and suffocates her power. Until the menopause – a topic which until recently has been largely misunderstood and taboo – at which point her power returns, and with it, a new kind of freedom. Freedom from the male gaze; from the responsibilities of motherhood; from the largely impossible expectations of society. Unlike puberty, menopause is triggered by a lack of certain hormones; and yet the symptoms can be just as dramatic and isolating. Loss of libido, exhaustion, depression, emotional outbursts as well as unpredictable and alarming hot flashes – my version of Carrie’s pyrokinesis. Whether my heroine’s powers stem from any kind of paranormal source is very much up to the reader to decide – after all, paranormal is only a step away from unnatural. And what counts as unnatural is in the eye of the reader – an eye that has been opened, I hope, to a series of new possibilities.

One is that rage is natural. Living in a patriarchy, women have a right to their rage. In fact, it seems more unnatural to me when women are not angry, given how much misogyny remains in our society. And growing old is natural. Being hormonal is natural. Differences are natural; so are disabilities. All women matter; whatever their age, or colour, or sexual orientation, or marital or reproductive status. The value of a woman’s life should not be defined by her popularity, or her age, or her looks, or her kids, or her value to the patriarchy. And no-one else gets to decide what a woman ought to be. A woman is not what, but who - a person, not an object; an active participant in her world. Women have lived too long behind the mask. They deserve their own stories. Stories in which they are allowed the full range of human possibility. So, to answer my mother’s question: Why are the women so angry?

Because it’s a superpower.

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tossawary · 12 days

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When writing both original fiction and fanfiction, it's my personal preference and style to remind people who characters are in the narration when I feel it might be needed. It's especially handy when bringing OCs into a fanfiction. Example: "The person calling out to them was [Character's Name Here], the baker they had met earlier that morning." This quirk of narration often reads to me as the POV character internally reminding themselves who someone is.

Sometimes, a character is quite bad with names or wasn't given one, which is where it's handy to refer to this other character by a fixed epithet. Example: "The person calling out to them was the square-faced man from yesterday, who had given them those bad directions." OR: "The person calling out to them was the mayor's daughter." This reads to me as though the POV character is distinguishing people by a particular feature or remembers them by their relationship to someone else, which is a common way to remember people, until their own name becomes more fixed in your mind.

I also think it's important to keep an epithet / title the same across a scene. Epithets are best used, in my opinion, when that particular feature or quality is actually relevant. It's a little weird for a POV character to suddenly think of their own husband as "the tall man" unless his height is suddenly important in some way, and it might confuse the audience into thinking another person is in the room. If a character doesn't have a name, then "the square-faced man" or "the mayor's daughter" effectively becomes their name, and it's confusing to have a character's name change too much with every other paragraph. (It would be fine to also refer to "the mayor's daughter" as "the girl" or "the young woman" as long as there aren't any other nameless girls speaking in the scene.) Keeping the same title allows it to blend in in the same way that the word "said" does, rather than break up the flow of a scene.

Not every person or character is bad with names and remembering people, of course, or is inclined to give them funny little internal titles. There are people who are very good at names. There are tricks to use to get yourself to memorize names as you're introduced to someone. Narrative styles are going to be different by author and by the current POV character. (Sometimes, you might want the audience to be confused and disoriented!)

In fact, thinking about how different characters think about each other is one of my favorite starting places for crafting a perspective voice. A single character might be referred to in the narration as "His Majesty" by one character, "my husband" by another character, "the king" by a third character, "the usurper" by a fourth character, and "Dad" by a fifth. The name that a character calls someone else by will often say a lot about their relationship and their opinion of that other person. If the prince appears to think of his father as "the king" rather than "Father", that implies something about their relationship.

But back to introducing character names, you as an author, in my experience as a writer and reader, generally can't rely on the audience to easily recall very minor character names unless they're very distinct or the character was introduced in a particularly memorable way. Like, if you introduce a character as the protagonist's best friend, Mary, and immediately start refering to her as Mary because it's followed by a conversation between the protagonist and Mary, that's fair! It's reasonable to expect the audience to just learn Mary's name here! But then if Mary disappears after Chapter 1 and doesn't show up again until Chapter 10, I think it's reasonable to subtly reintroduce her to the audience again. Example: "It was Mary smiling at me from the doorway, and I jumped up to hug my best friend immediately."

Like, there's no one way that you have to refer to characters and introduce them and reintroduce them, of course. Characters have different levels of importance and sometimes we don't really need to know who they are. Sometimes, an author wants an audience to feel grounded, to recognize people, and sometimes they want their audience to feel lost and scared. It's all situational. Style is a thing.

But because it's all situational, this is something I like thinking about and I think it's something worth studying when you're reading original fiction. It's interesting to pay attention to how characters enter and exit scenes in different forms of media, and how the narrator introduces them and how other characters greet them aloud. (Shakespeare comes to mind as a neat thing to look at, to see how theatre does it. Comic books and films and visual media will do it differently to a text-only story.) The audience doesn't have the background that you, the author, carry around in your head all of the time, and you often need to give them a helping hand in keeping your cast of characters straight. Even in fanfiction, without including OCs, not everyone in the audience has the whole canonical cast perfectively memorized, and not every character in any given cast actually knows every other character! It's not just OCs who need introductions, whether those introductions happen subtly or a character enters the story with a bang.

Kind of another side note:

One of my favorite character introductions comes from the book "The Princess Bride", in which Princess Buttercup is kidnapped by three men who are referred to only as "the Spaniard", "the Turk", and "the Sicilian". You don't know their names for quite some time. Buttercup doesn't know these people.

You only learn the Spaniard's name when the Sicilian leaves him at the top of a cliff, tasking him the Spaniard fighting and killing "the Man in Black" who is pursuing their kidnapping. When the Spaniard is about to fight someone to the death, the book pauses to tell you that his name is Inigo Montoya, and then there is an ENTIRE CHAPTER dedicated to Inigo Montoya's long and tragic backstory, in which you learn about his decades-long quest to find the six-fingered man who murdered his father. And then the book abruptly dumps you the audience back out onto that cliff, where Inigo (no longer just "the Spaniard" and no longer just some random kidnapping thug) is about to fight for his life.

I think it's a terribly fun piece of whiplash that suits the comedic style of the book really well. (The book is a little different to the movie and there are things about it that I don't like, the movie gets across a level of a sincerity and love through the acting that the book misses in places, but there are lots of really funny elements to the book that the movie sadly couldn't cover.) The transformation from "the Spaniard" into "Inigo Montoya" is really neat to me.

#tossawary fandom #tossawary reading #long post #tossawary tpb

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leportraitducadavre · 6 months

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You know there’s a weird connection between the fandom’s perceived idea of “good writing” and their personal feelings about specific characters. “I like this character, therefore, they’re well written” and viceversa, “I dislike this character, therefore, they’re badly written” –I’ve seen this in many fandoms and with different characters, but there’s no fandom where this is more noticeable than in the “anti Sakura” portion of the audience.

Before we start, let me be clear on something: I don’t personally like Sakura, I don’t consider myself a fan of hers (or her stans, which are just as annoying as Hinata’s), nor I believe she’s the “heroine” of a story that has no room for a character with such status (I’ve said this before, Naruto is the hero and Sasuke is the antagonist -there’s no necessity nor space for anyone else as Sakura is merely the female character with most panel time, yet she doesn’t move the plot forward and she isn’t relevant to the development of other key characters, as most of them completely ignore her existence).

“Likeability” isn’t a determining factor when it comes to labelling a character “well” or “badly” written, such notion relies on subjective factors which makes it impossible to objectively determine the overall value of a character inside a story.

The most important factor to label a character “goodly written” has more to do with how well they represent their theological narrative. For instance, Danzo -who I genuinely despise, is amazingly written, as he spot on tackles the subject of extreme-nationalistic world view, while Itachi -on the other hand, is sort-of all over the place as he subscribes to Danzo’s ideology and defends it with the same actions, yet Kishimoto desperately wanted to keep him inside the “good guys” group, which ultimately failed and took down anything Itachi might have had going for him (besides other inconsistencies as he’s presented as a genius who made nothing but mistake after mistake). There’s a reason why the antagonists are often the ones with the best characterizations, as they aren’t tied to been “morally correct” or “likeable” in order to reflect their thematic plot, which is why the better characters in Naruto happen to be Uchiha (Sasuke, Obito, Madara).

Sakura has no weight inside the plot, as she is mostly used for support of either Naruto and (to a lesser extent) Sasuke, she stands narratively in the same spectrum as most “good” characters of the show, so she’s thematically not much more relevant than the rest of K-11; yet she’s given more depth than many other characters, as she’s a layered character of whom we see both her strengths and flaws, something we can’t say for other characters, such as Hinata.

In the Hyüga princess™’s case, her personality is mostly one dimensional as she is a thematic piece used to deepen Neji’s character. In case you haven’t noticed, she was constructed in opposition to him: She needs to be shy in order for Naruto to take pity on her when Neji insults her (as Neji is mostly arrogant and outspoken), she’s comically bad because Neji is a prodigy, she’s “a freak” (said by Naruto himself) because Neji isn't, she’s a slave owner because Neji is her slave, and so on –the only thing she has that wasn’t built in order to oppose her cousin was her infatuation with Naruto, something she makes a priority.

Everything we “know” about Hinata was mostly fandom-made, Hinata is shy and soft spoken, why is she considered “nice”? We never saw her worrying about anyone but Naruto: She was glad Kiba lost his match and offered Naruto the ointment to treat his wounds, she diminished her cousin’s trauma and endorsed the oppressive system of her clan, we never see her visiting Kiba after he returned from his mission to bring Sasuke back to Konoha (something we see Ino and Sakura do with their respective teammates, and while Hinata was recovering from Neji’s attack, she had enough strength to train and go see the Chünin Exams final stage, at no point is mentioned she was bed-ridden, as Sasuke had enough time to recover from Gaara’s attack before escaping the village), she thought about Naruto’s warm hand seconds after her cousin died and she was the only character not shown to be glad about Shikamaru being alive as we saw her pouting and thinking about how much she wanted to be beside Naruto. Furthermore, is there any scene in which she appears where she’s not thinking or talking about Naruto or where he is not the main focus?

How come a character designed to be nothing more than support (for Neji and Naruto, as her infatuation with him was built in order to have some oppositional force to the idea of “nobody likes him”, as Naruto has an unrequited love for Sakura during the whole duration of the manga) is “better written” than Sakura, who despite herself being also support she has far more thematically ground to move around (Kishimoto explores through her different themes, even if they aren’t relevant to the plot itself, such as romantical obsession, low self-esteem and the decisions/characteristics that are driven by it, female friendship, and few others).

Honest question: It’s her sad background reason enough to like Hinata? Do you truly need a “compelling” backstory in order to claim a character is “better written” than others? Sakura was bullied because she was shy, Hinata -being the Hyüga heir, wasn’t shown to suffer the same fate at the hands of her classmates. Think about it this way, while Sakura was being bullied and had to be helped by Ino, Hinata was being trained by her father and witnessing Hiashi torture her uncle while Neji cried, helpless! –and just a few years later, she used that exact knowledge to insult him! So she’s not really that nice after all!

What is it with the obsession of both fandoms with the idea of “potential” and how, apparently, they were “robbed of it” (what “potential”? When did Hinata even hint at improving her fighting techniques? She was defeated every single time! When did Sakura, who canonically has a smaller chakra pool than both Sasuke and Naruto, have the possibility of surpass literally Ashura and Indra’s reincarnations? Them having more panel time will mean absolutely nothing as we’ll see them doing the exact same thing we already see them do only twice as much. “Potential” is about exploring a latent ability of them, Hinata has none and Sakura’s chakra flux control was properly exploited!).

There’s more to say about this, but I’m honestly tired at this point…

#anti hinata #anti hinata hyuga #anti hinata hyuuga #anti hinata fandom #anti hinata stans #anti nh #anti naruhina #anti naruhina fandom #anti sakura #anti sakura haruno #anti sakura fandom #anti sakura stans

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andy-wm · 7 months

Text

I have thoughts about the Tiktok JK deleted

<<I realise its a few days ago now and you might be wondering 'what tiktok?' but I've been writing in snatches when I have a few minutes so it took a while. Anyway, here it is...>>

A few posts I've read have suggested JK did the silly>sexy Tiktok challenge backwards. That he did sexy>silly instead. That he was being random and funny.

I disagree.

What he did was unexpected, a little left of centre, and for the people who can read subtext, not random at all but very very clever.

I'll tell you why, (It may not be what you think) but first I need to vent about two things:

1. Give the man some credit. He knows what he's doing.

There are some who love JK but who see him as a naive innocent. He is not. He isn't a child or a himbo.

Saying he did the challenge just because it's trending, and he reversed the order of the content for a bit of a joke, is insulting to him as an artist. It would suggest he has no forethought or understanding of himself or his (global) audience, and his decisions are made on impulse with no idea of the consequences.

He's very intelligent and has plenty of experience with digital media and creating content. Besides being involved in producing complex visual narratives as part of BTS for the last ten years, he has directed and produced seven highly polished and professional GFC videos. And don't forget the MVs for Life Goes On. For the October issue of Vogue Korea he took on the role of Creative Director. That's a pretty big deal. So we can assume he knows what he's doing.

If he produces content in a particular way, it's because it enables him to communicate what he wants to communicate.

2. You may not understand the message. That doesn't mean there's nothing to understand.

A heads up to people who can't work it out... your inability to grasp meaning doesn't equate to 'no meaning exists'. Suggesting that people who recognise what he's doing are reaching or delusional is an insult to both the audience who can read this situation, and to Jungkook, who is sharing his message.

Consider a system of writing you can't decode. Lack of comprehension doesnt mean the writing is meaningless, it means you don't understand the language.

Even if you believe you understand what's being said, please recognise that context may play a role too, that it could reveal a richer and deeper message. Don't just assume the easiest (laziest) interpretation is correct.

(You may have guessed, someone suggested I was 'behaving like the cult' when I pointed out that JK's tiktok was more than being funny ... and now I'm mad 🤣)

Vent over. Now back to he topic at hand...

💜💛

What was he was really doing? And why is it not at all random?

Let's take a step back to recall what army has been saying about this...

Almost every interpretation i read suggests he reversed the order (silly>sexy becomes sexy>silly). The reason given is that his tiktok only makes sense if the order is reversed, and this idea is backed up by the caption saying "I go the other way".

But the 'reversed order' theory is based on a hereronormative perspective of what's sexy (and a stereotypical perspective of silly.)

So consider the content of his tiktok from a queer point of view...

For a man in a relationship with another man, the idea that he's with all those women is silly.

It's silly to believe he's got a girlfriend - or several. It's silly to think the womens' names in the song are relevant to him.

He posted this tiktok at a time when he's releasing music that fits the western pop norm of boy + girl, and when rumours of him dating several women at once are rife. The timing is not a coincidence and nor is the choice of background song for this.

All these assumptions and rumours are pretty silly, JK is telling us.

Now let's talk about the second part, the sexy part. Yes it may look silly on the surface, but we have seen him and Jimin make dorky faces at one another when they're flirting. It seems to be the visual equivalent of calling Jimin 'Jiminssssi'.

It's just another way they create distance and avoid 'getting caught'.

Maybe sexy for Jungkook actually is lying on the couch in your sweatpants making corny faces at your boyfriend.

Remember that he puts out 'stereotypical sexy' on command as part of his job so maybe that doesn't feel very sexy to him. Maybe that's work.

In my view (I know this is subject to interpretation) they've been together for years now. This is not the first flush of love. When you've been with a partner for a while, sex is (hopefully) more fun and less serious. Maybe it's about having the confidence to be wholly unselfconscious.

(My partner makes a Pepé Le Pew face at me when he's goofing. No, i don't know why either... 🤣🤷)

But wait, what about that caption?

What about 난반대로 간다?

My beautiful Korean friend (who sadly has zero interest or care about jikook) confirmed the literal translation:

"I go the other way"

"I take the opposite direction".

It's not "it goes the other way" or "this goes the opposite direction". He's referring specifically to HIMSELF.

Jungkook goes the other way.

But it's more than that according to my friend.

It's a bold statement:

"I don't follow the mainstream."

It reminds me of his tattoo ...

RATHER BE DEAD THAN COOL

He doesn't do things just because everyone else is doing them.

"I don't follow the mainstream."

OK. HOLD UP.

This is where it gets interesting.

Then why would he do something as mainstream as a trending tiktok challenge? Especially something as vapid as this challenge?

And why would he tell us DURING that Tiktok challenge that he DOESN'T follow the mainstream?

And then delete it.

Creating content takes time.

And we know he's a busy man.

He's about to release an album. He's doing live performances. He's prerecording for music shows. He's overseas right now... for the fourth time in a month! Does he have time for this??

And he DELETED it...

Did he just WASTE all that time?

No, he did not.

He deliberately chose to do this.

He did it knowing ARMY studies every action, every video, and every media release.

He did it knowing ARMY would already have copied the video before he took it off his profile.

He said on Stationhead that he knows ARMY has it, and is sharing and posting it. He's FINE with that.

So he took the time to create and upload that video. He wants it out there.

He just doesn't want it on HIS page. That's an important part of the story.

So lets go back to the caption.

"I take the opposite direction"

"I go the other way"

"I don't follow the mainstream."

*Said boldly* remember. It's a loud statement, captioning an otherwise pointless very mainstream trending challenge.

So if he's not referring to tiktok itself, or to uploading challenges, what could he be referring to?

...

There's only one thing left: Himself.

I take the opposite direction

I go the other way

I don't follow the mainstream

Essentially... I swing the other way.

There's no way a queer man would make that statement and not fully recognise the message he's sending.

As for deleting the video, I'd say he knew it was too risky to leave on his profile, being a celebrity in Korea. He's managing his brand. Deleting it also gives him plausible deniability. He can say he made an error. As I said, he's very intelligent. He knows ARMY will see it and share it. He knows that those of us with a queer eye will hear the message loud and clear.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 And we do hear it. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

#jeon jungguk #jikook #kookmin #국민 #jungkook

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