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samasmith23 · 7 months

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We need to talk about EssenceOfThought's ongoing bullying & slander campaign against Rachel Oates...

I normally don't make posts covering this kind of stuff since I mostly try to keep my Tumblr blog here relatively positive and cheerful. And I normally try to avoid YouTube drama in general. But recently I've become increasingly frustrated and angered by the behavior of a certain YouTuber whom I regrettably used to be a fan of awhile back known as "Essence Of Thought" (aka, Ethel Thurston), whom in the past 2 months has been continuously releasing multiple videos & shorts which slander and defame another YouTuber named Rachel Oates. I know that Rachel herself is currently trying to combat this situation and has even filed multiple claims against Ethel's videos, but I felt the need to try and show my support for Rachel by help signal-boost her story in response to Ethel's revived targeted harassment campaign against her.

Content Warning: Mentions of Transphobia, Cyberbullying, Self-Harm, Suicidality, and Child Abuse.

Also, while this post is going to be very critical of Ethel and her conduct, I will NOT tolerate any misgendering or deadnaming of her! Just because I think Ethel is a bad person does NOT excuse any transphobia that is directed at her, and I will immediately block and report anyone who engages in such reprehensible behavior!

Section 1: Confessions of a former fan, or my personal falling out with Essence of Thought

For those who are not aware, Ethel Thurston is a transgender atheist content creator who regularly produces video essays analyzing and criticizing TERFs and the broader far-right. This content greatly appealed to me as both a supporter of trans-rights and as someone who vocally opposes both TERFs and Neo-Nazis. However, exactly 1-year-ago I unsubscribed from Ethel's channel when she began made a series of videos accusing Lily Orchard of being a child groomer. While I do agree that Lily is an AWFUL person who has received multiple credible accusations of sexual abuse from both former partners and even her own younger sister Courtney, Ethel's videos which accused Lily of "grooming all minors in her audience" were actually heavily criticized by several former victims of Lily's abuse who have argued that the way Ethel & her editor "ABirdCalledLevi" (aka, Levi) presented their information against Lily was not only overly inflammatory, but only served to misrepresent and damage the testimonies of her other victims.

Specifically, critics like "Patchwork Heart" (aka, Shiloh Conner) took serious issue took issue with Ethel & Levi's constant liberal usage of the word "grooming" to describe Lily's actions towards individuals like Glade, who accused Lily of encouraging him on her Discord to watch a livestream where she repeatedly flashed her audience (Glade was still 17 at the time of this incident). Essentially Shiloh stated that while Lily was undeniably guilty of sexual harassment, neglectful misconduct, and indecent exposure, her behavior technically does not qualify as "grooming," since "grooming" is a term specifically meant describe the gradual breaking down of a victim's boundaries through manipulation and isolation from others (online it's usually conducted through private DMs rather than on public servers like Lily's channels). Furthermore, Shiloh and other fellow victim's of Lily's abuse also criticized Ethel & Levi's usage of the phrase "parasocial audience grooming" to argue that Lily was grooming her ENTIRE audience instead of individuals, as "parasocial audience grooming" is NOT a legally or medically recognized term, but was instead invented by the commentary YouTuber "Korviday" in 2020 to describe Shane Dawson's sexually abusive behavior towards several underage members of his audience. Essentially, it's impossible to groom an entire audience all at once since grooming is defined by the specific and deliberate targeting and manipulation of individuals in private or isolated settings with the intention of eventually sexually abusing them. But when criticized for the way they badly mishandled the testimonies of victims like Glade, Ethel & Levi instead doubled down by not only continuing to misuse the word "grooming" in their videos, but actively smeared and defamed their critics and other victims of Lily's like Shiloh as "abuse/groomer apologists.” Ethel even went as far as to compare Shiloh criticizing how she misrepresented Glade’s testimony to “defending Harvey Weinstein.”

Like... YIKES!

I'm not going to lie... when I saw the way Ethel & Levi actively bullied and slandered other victims of Lily Orchard, I was deeply disappointed and disgusted. While I was already starting to grow weary of Ethel's tendency to overly moralize in her arguments, and I knew she was unpopular in a lot of online spaces, for the longest time I tried to give both her and Levi the benefit of the doubt since I knew she had been harassed by TERFs like Graham Linehan past simply for being an outspoken non-binary trans-woman online. But the way Ethel bullied people like Shiloh Conner was simply inexcusable! And personally, I completely agree with Shiloh's criticisms against Ethel & Levi. Even though I dislike Lily Orchard and think that she's an abusive scumbag, spreading misinformation about issues as serious as CSA only serves to inflict further harm onto the people that Lily has hurt. Victims like Shiloh have very publicly stated that they either want their testimonies to be reflected as accurately as possible, or not at all. And I especially understand their concerns about misusing the word "grooming," especially because of how that word in particular has been so easily co-opted as an anti-LGBTQ+ slur by Republicans and the far-right in the past 2 years alone, which only serves to promote bigotry and obfuscate actual instances of child sexual abuse (Ethel claimed in their video that they "saw no harm in extending the definition of the word" BTW). Here's a link to Shiloh's video responding to Ethel if you want further details on the ways in which both she and Levi so badly mishandled the testimonies of Lily Orchard's victims BTW:

So how does Rachel Oates fit into all of this exactly? Well...

Section 2: Reevaluating Ethel's past conduct and the targeted bullying of Rachel Oates

Once I witnessed the ways in which EssenceOfThought bullied and smeared the victims of Lily Orchard's abuse, it honestly caused me to reevaluate and question a lot of their past content, especially because Ethel & Levi already had reputations of being overly inflammatory figures who've burned tons of bridges with lots of other leftist YouTubers. It was then that I was reminded of the biggest controversy Ethel's been involved in, and one I was only tangentially aware of before the Lily Orchard drama. That being Ethel's 4-year-long and currently ongoing defamation campaign against feminist and atheist British YouTuber, Rachel Oates.

The conflict between Ethel & Rachel all started back in 2019, when Rachel's friend and former atheist YouTuber "Rationality Rules" (aka, Steven Woodford), got into serious trouble when he posted a video arguing against the inclusion of trans-people in sports (which relied on heavily fallacious scientific data and even cited clips from Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan). Unsurprisingly, the backlash against Woodford's video was enormous, and it even resulted in him being deplatformed from hosting a panel at an ACA conference in Austin, Texas that same year. However, a lot of Woodford's friends within the YouTube atheist community, including Rachel, argued that Woodford did not make his video out of intentional malice or bigotry, whilst fully agreeing that it was a terrible poorly-researched video that did serve to reinforce transphobic narratives even if it was unintentional. This led to Woodford not only delisting and demonotizing the original video, but also releasing both an apology and retraction video to try and help mitigate the damage his original video caused.

Ethel however, refused to accept Woodford's apology and retraction, and made several response videos accusing his apology of being fake and him continuing to spread transphobic misinformation. And while that's perfectly understandable if Ethel personally didn't find Woodford's apology to be adequate or genuine, where this crosses the line into unacceptable behavior is that Ethel then went onto repeatedly attack Rachel Oates simply because she was both friends with Woodford IRL and didn't want to get directly involved in the controversy. Essentially, Ethel is engaging in the "guilt by association" fallacy here. In actuality though, Rachel not only repeatedly stated that she disagreed with the content Woodford's original video and agreed that it was very bad and harmful, but that she is supportive of the trans community and felt unqualified to weigh in on the subject matter of trans-people in sports since she has barely any knowledge or interest about sports in general.

This response was not good enough for Ethel however, who instead misinterpreted Rachel's comments as a backhanded attempt at silencing Woodford's critics.

Things got even worse when a random fan messaged Rachel a screenshot taken from a private Facebook group from a trans-self-help group which compiled a list of public figures for the trans community to avoid following the Woodford controversy, and her name was included on that list. Rachel, not knowing that the list was from a private chat, immediately went on Twitter to defend herself, which led to Ethel accusing her of doxxing by publishing private information. This is in spite of the fact that not only did the screenshot already exist before Rachel discovered it, but she went out of her way to censor the names of the members of that Facebook group. Furthermore, Ethel had also blocked Rachel on Twitter which led to the latter asking some of her followers to show her what Ethel was stating about her so she could try to adequately defend herself, which in-turn resulted in Ethel accusing Rachel of sending her millions of followers to circumvent her block and harass her.

The situation escalated even further however, when Ethel posted a now infamous tweet to one of Woodford and Oates' friends' Lizzy Lang, not only described Woodford as a "violent transphobe intent on stripping away dozens of human rights,” but called Lang and others (presumably Oates) "members of Woodford's church a transphobia" before ending the tweet with the words, "do this world a favor and exit it."

That last line in Ethel’s tweet, “do the world a favor and exit it,” got a lot of people justifiably angry since it was very easily misconstrued as Ethel advocating for Woodford's defenders to commit suicide (she claimed it was meant to say “exit Woodford’s church of transphobia”). And while EoT later apologized and clarified the incredibly poor wording of that last comment, she still refused to apologize to Rachel after several months of targeted bullying and defamation. When Rachel saw the infamous tweet, it only served to amplify her pre-existing feelings of depression since she mistaken that tweet to be directed at her instead of Lizzy Lang. And a few days later, in an act of desperation Rachel posted an impromptu unedited video begging and pleading for Ethel to stop bullying her, not realizing that she was still badly bleeding from cuts on her arm due to feeling completely hopeless and isolated (Rachel already had a history of engaging in self-harm and cutting).

But not even Rachel engaging in self-harm nor her feelings of suicidality were enough to sway Ethel, who still continued to double-down on their harassment by arguing that Rachel "weaponizing self-harm, transmisogyny, and benevolent patriarchy," and was using "upper-class cis white woman tears" (even though Rachel has openly admitted to being lower-middle class). And to this very day, Ethel still continues to slander Rachel and falsely label her as a "serial transphobe" and "abuser" all throughout her videos, even going as far as to not only claim, "Rachel Oates' [abuse] was the second most psychologically destructive thing [she's] ever suffered, only being second to being raped as a child," but that she would rather relive her trauma of "being outed as bisexual, groomed at age 15, and sexually assaulted."

Seriously... FREAKING YIKES! Those are incredibly extreme and inflammatory statements to make! I do understand that Ethel is a CSA survivor (and on that level I 100% empathize with her because that is of course absolutely terrible and is one of the absolute WORST things anyone can suffer from), but claiming that someone circumventing a Twitter Block and or begging you to stop bullying her whilst feeling suicidal is even remotely comparable to “being raped as a child"?! That is so unbelievably insensitive on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start! It’s insensitive to not only Rachel herself, but to other CSA survivors as well since it trivializes their trauma! Ethel should know better than this!

Also, that screenshot of Ethel tweeting a link to a Guardian article discussing the weaponization of white woman tears? That was literally the top pinned-tweet to her Twitter account immediately days after Rachel posted that desperate video of her pleading to Ethel to stop her harassment campaign whilst feeling suicidal. What a truly vile and unempathetic thing for Ethel to do!

Section 3: Showing support for Rachel Oates

After I did more research into the whole EssenceOfThought Vs. Rachel Oates situation, as well as hearing Rachel's side of the story, I ended up subscribing to Rachel's YouTube channel and have since become a fan of her work. Before I eventually unsubscribed from Ethel's channel due to the way she similarly bullied several of Lily Orchard’s victims, I was given the impression by her that Rachel Oates was just another garden-variety TERF YouTuber based on he way Ethel constantly talked about her. But that’s NOT accurate at all… Rachel's channel from what I’ve seen is mainly just about discussions of secularism and religion, feminism, book reviews, and cute dog videos!

Seriously, her dog Kyra is so FREAKING adorable!

Look at her! Kyra's such a good girl! She's such a cute doggy!

But yeah, this is a prime example of how Ethel’s pattern of engaging in bad-faith moral absolutism while misrepresenting events and evidence can be seriously damaging to uninitiated viewers. And I say that not only as someone who was largely unaware of the full extent of what she had done to Rachel, but also because Ethel frames her content in a very pseudo-academic/intellectual manner and uses a lot of professional sounding words to try and disguise severely misguided and inflammatory arguments. She tries to portray her YouTube videos as if they’re akin to college-level essays with lots of citations and crap, which can easily fool people into thinking that her content is well-researched and sophisticated. Except looking below the surface, in hindsight Ethel’s videos are mostly just pretentious word-salad, cherry-picking evidence, and relying heavily on academic terminology in order promote her thinly-veiled absolutist black-&-white views on morality, attacking anyone who is “not progressive enough” for her (in addition to Rachel, Ethel & Levi have also done this to other leftist YouTubers like Lindsay Ellis, Philosophy Tube, & Suris the Skeptic). According to Ethel’s logic, you’re either an entirely good or entirely bad person, and there’s zero in-between and if you dare disagree with her to even the slightest degree then she’ll automatically consider you to be just as bad as the far-right. Basically, it’s moral absolutism.

All of Ethel’s fallacious claims against Rachel Oates are textbook examples of bad-faith moral absolutism, and I deeply regret the fact that I was ever once a fan of Ethel’s content. She is a bully and a liar. And that’s a conclusion I arrived to after seeing how Rachel’s stories about being repeatedly slandered & bullied by Ethel heavily paralleled the similar experiences of individuals like Shiloh Conner, thereby revealing a pattern of toxic behavior on Ethel’s part.

Section 4: Ethel’s renewed and current bullying campaign

So why do I bring all of this stuff up?

Well, even though the worst of the harassment Rachel suffered was back in 2019 and she has since tried to move on from this whole fiasco and continues making her usual feminist book reviews and dog videos (she even deliberately avoids mentioning EssenceOfThought by name in her videos...), Ethel has not only repeatedly tried to drag all of this drama back up, but has this singleminded obsessive vendetta to defame and destroy Rachel's YouTube career at all costs. For instance, in 2022 Ethel tried to further slander Rachel by yet again engaging in "guilt by association" fallacy because notable transgender TERF YouTuber "Rose of Dawn" (aka, the British equivalent of Blaire White) once tried to befriend Rachel in 2020 after the initial harassment campaign by Ethel, and later in 2022 Rose openly defended self-confessed genocidal serial rapist Lily Cade when the latter was platformed in an infamous transphobic BBC article. What Ethel completely neglects to mention however, is that Rachel had permanently stopped interacting with Rose when several members of her audience informed her that Rose is actually a TERF (and the way Rose suddenly tried to befriend Rachel after Ethel's bullying of her strikes me as very cult-like since TERFs sadly do have a history in engaging in incredibly abusive cultish tactics to recruit new members, as many people who have escaped that disgusting hate movement have reported...) and she has since apologized for ever giving Rose any attention. Regardless, Ethel still tried to falsely implicate Rachel alongside "Rose of Dawn" in a video condemning Lily Cade & the BBC, which led to Rachel rightfully filing a defamation claim to YouTube, getting Ethel's then-latest slanderous hit-peace against Rachel blocked in the UK.

But even worse however, is that starting in August 2023 Ethel has begun releasing a constant stream of videos continuing to smear Rachel even further by both repeating all of the exact same aforementioned slanderous claims along with a whole bunch of new ones. Like, not only has Ethel already released 3 main videos out of a planned 6-part series ranting about Rachel Oates, but she has also released 24 shorts taken from the main videos!

Geez! Not only is this beyond obsessive, but this is just straight-up targeted bullying and harassment on Ethel's part! And the new claims she makes against Rachel in these videos are equally slanderous as the ones before! For just one example, Ethel & Levi’s cite a now-deleted livestream of Rachel's that they re-uploaded as a mirrored-copy to their channel, accusing Rachel of denying trans-women's existence by making the offhanded comment of, “No, the only thing a man can provide me that a woman can’t is a p*nis. Only thing.”

Except… I actually went and watched the ENTIRE 3-hour mirrored livestream myself just to see the full context of Rachel’s quote, and it turns out that Ethel took that quote completely out of context! Not only are there lots of points in the livestream wherein Rachel repeatedly states that “gender is a social construct and that trans and non-binary people exist,” but during the stream she's doing a counter-response to a Christian fundamentalist incel who once responded one of her earlier videos. And that potentially problematic quote of Rachel’s, “No, the only thing a man can provide me that a woman can’t is a p*nis. Only thing,” was actually a sarcastic response to the incel’s homophobic argument that “women don’t want to love their equals [(aka other women)] because they actually all want what only a [dominant alpha male] can provide them.”

Essentially, Rachel was criticizing the incel’s sexist & homophobic “logic” that, “all women secretly only want p*nises,” in a snarky & sarcastic manner, but Ethel took Rachel’s comment out of context to try and instead paint it as some transphobic-slip-of-the-tongue/TERF-dogwhistle, accusing Rachel of “completely ignoring the existence of non or pre-op trans women,” in order to try and support the fallacious argument that, “Rachel Oates doesn’t actually view trans women as real women, but instead as props to objectify in order to make herself look like a better ally.”

Not once does Ethel ever mention the context that Rachel was responding to & mocking a bigoted incel during the livestream... at all...

I don't have time to go into all of the other new lies that Ethel & Levi are currently spewing against Rachel Oates since this post has already gotten incredibly lengthy (for instance, Ethel also claimed that Rachel “downplayed JK Rowling’s transphobia” simply because she used the words “incredibly problematic” to describe the Queen TERF’s bigoted views; which is such a weak and pedantic argument), but it’s a whole lot…

Conclusion

Overall, I just wanted to bring attention to this situation because EssenceOfThought's harassment campaign against Rachel Oates has been ongoing since 2019 and it shows ZERO signs of stopping anytime soon. Ethel & Levi are serial bullies and liars who regularly engage in bad-faith arguments, misrepresent evidence, and engage in moral absolutism in order to paint anyone who disagrees with them or makes even the slightest mistake as the worst people imaginable. So the more people who are made aware of this mess, the better.

Please show support for Rachel, whether that be through signal-boosting this post, subscribing to her YouTube channel, or even donating to her Patreon if you so choose.

And to EssenceOfThought, aka Ethel Thurston, (along with her editor Levi...) specifically, the famed basketball player Michael Jordan would have some choice words for you:

And I mean that sincerely. Seriously... just stop this targeted bullying & slander campaign against Rachel. It's incredibly unhealthy and obsessive. Just let it go already...

#rachel oates #EssenceOfThought is a bully #EssenceOfThought is a liar #EssenceOfThought is a moral absolutist #cw: cyberbullying mention #cw: self-harm mention #cw: suicidality mention #cw: child abuse mention #lily orchard is a predator #anti lily orchard #mini essay #tangent #serious post

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soul-dwelling · 1 year

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I got a question about Kurono and Nataku in Fire Force that I’ll address in this post, regarding how the manga justifies the abusive relationship.

…Yeah, I can’t really add to that: Fire Force justified that abuse, either to act like this is a legitimate answer (“abuse children”) or as a warped aesop for comedic effect (“LOL imagine anyone reading a comic for philosophical validation, this is a joke, let it go”).

But this requires getting into Fire Force spoilers, as well as requiring content warnings (death mention; death penalty discussion; mentions of rape and sexual assault of children as portrayed in Fire Force).

And spoiler warning for the orphanage headmaster in Bungo Stray Dogs.

Content warning as well for discussion about the current (as of 2023) national attack on LGBTQ+ people (fuck homophobes, fuck TERFs, fuck transphobes, fuck the Republican Party, fuck these lying sacks of shit lying and maligning LGBTQ+ people with lies about child abuse, fuck this goddamn Nazi-level genocidal shit).

This discussion also requires that I bring something up that keeps being an argument, about whether the art you read reflects on your ethical standards.

I get that your life should not be based on the art you engage with.

Sometimes, art is just entertainment, not a reflection on your values. In those cases, your reading of it does not indicate your ethical alignment: if you pick up the book and read it, that doesn’t suddenly put a scarlet letter onto you--you read it, you got whatever you got out of it, that was an experience--what happens after that experience is what we need to discuss. So, about that post-reading experience: even your enjoyment of whatever you got enjoyment out of doesn’t make you a bad person…unless you’re enjoying the unethical stuff…

…Which, yeah, this is a thorny issue I’m not going to do a great job addressing, but I’m on the side of, if you enjoyed the unethical stuff, that suggests you do some self-reflection on your values.

In that regard, sometimes, art is indeed reflective of a set of ethical standards, and if you end up agreeing with the message of that story, in that specific context, and you know that is fucked up, yeah, your ethics are fucked up.

If I heard someone say, “Kurono was right in how he went about handling Nataku,” I would say, “Fuck no, he wasn’t.” I get that ascribing this to Ohkubo personally is difficult, if not impossible, seeing as you can’t know what a creator is thinking, even if you go through their work. If the excuse is, “It was a joke,” sorry, I don’t find that funny, it feels too mean and too much of a lie to work as a joke.

That leaves me with, “Does Ohkubo agree with Kurono,” and, again, I can’t answer that: I don’t know what he was thinking, I don’t know who he is or what his philosophy is about teaching or child care, and I am not about to make any assumptions beyond, no, Ohkubo does not agree with Kurono. And that’s the side I come down on: I don’t think Ohkubo agrees with Kurono’s treatment of Nataku.

And one reason I can’t imagine Ohkubo would agree that Kurono’s abuse of Nataku is good is given how Ohkubo wrote what happened with Joker and the religious authority figure who physically abused him and sexually abused him. Joker’s story felt like an indictment against real-world religions that have histories of sexual violence against children, the Catholic Church being one of them. Joker killing his abuser should work for catharsis, again showing why what you enjoy may not indicated anything about your own ethical values: you read a fiction to see an abuser get killed, that may indicate you want to see abusers punished but not necessarily that you want to see abusers killed--it’s fiction, it’s fantasy, that’s all.

But then you get to Kurono, who physically abuses Nataku. How is that not treated the same way as all the torture Joker went through? Why is the story asking us to cheer on Joker getting vengeance, while telling us that Nataku should not get vengeance on Kurono? Because the abuse is somehow less? Who is to say that the abuse is less? Isn’t it enough that Kurono crossed the line from fair behavior to abuse, and that Kurono should be punished for that abuse, period, regardless whether or not it was worse than other forms of abuse seen within the story?

Ohkubo tries to glide past these questions by pointing out the kind of emotional abuse Nataku suffered from his parents, how Nataku was putting so much pressure on himself to be better and be perfect--and Kurono arrives, tells him to stop thinking he has to be perfect because he’s just a kid with a new ability that he cannot control so he shouldn’t expect to be perfect because no one else thinks he can be perfect at that age and with such a complex ability.

Does that mean Kurono is making himself the embodiment of everything Nataku feels--all that self-hate, now externalized to be represented by Kurono himself--so that Nataku can stop self-hating and just hate Kurono?

Spoiler warning, but that’s pretty much the back story for Atsushi and the orphanage headmaster in Bungo Stray Dogs: we spend two seasons thinking the headmaster is a monster, that all of our hate against him is justified, so that when he dies in the third season we should feel relief--only to see Atsushi is conflicted, because this person was the closest to a parental figure he had, and what is worse, as Atsushi learns after his death and as we the audience learns as well, the headmaster was abusing Atsushi on purpose to make Atsushi not hate himself for his own dangerous ability and to instead take that anger out on the headmaster so that Atsushi would strive to get stronger, get out of the orphanage, and put this miserable past behind him.

If you have read discourse about Atsushi and the headmaster, you’d see that general consensus ranges from “this doesn’t work” or “I get your point, but I completely disagree with this ethical lesson.” I think it worked for Atsushi’s story--not because it was pulled off well, not because it is an ethical lesson I agree with, but because series writer Kafka Asagiri wanted to go in this direction, to build up the world of this story and where the headmaster factors into the organized crime of this world, and to give Atsushi a new challenge, whether to hold him back given how overpowered he is, or to give him a way to bond with Akutagawa, or to set up future plots. This is a case of, “I get why you did it, but I do not agree with this message at all.”

But then there is the another argument Bungo fans have made, that the point is not whether what the headmaster did was correct--it wasn’t--but that we are to focus on Atsushi’s response to this trauma, and that is is valid for Atsushi to feel regret and sadness for the headmaster, even if he was an abusive parental figure, because our emotions are not so simple that we just turn off our sadness when someone we know was awful to us died, because that was still someone we knew personally who died.

But back to the question I received. The question asked whether Kurono’s abuse of Nataku seemed to justify abuse, including sexual abuse, towards minors.

As I said, Ohkubo’s story seems to settle on that we can justify non-sexual abuse of a minor, whether as an actual lesson (“Kurono was right to abuse Nataku, so that he would externalize his own self-hate and put it against Kurono, so that he can grow up at his own rate and not feel the pressures to grow up faster than a child should”) or as a joke (“LOL you thought Kurono would have some heart-to-heart with Nataku, but instead Kurono promises to keep physically attacking Nataku, and Charon and the White Clads say this is good, so they leave, and Shinra and Company 8 just let this happen, LOL, aren’t they all just the biggest fucking dumbasses you have ever seen?!”--God, I fucking hate Fire Force).

But as for sexual abuse? Fuck no, the Kurono and Nataku shit is bad, but it never struck me as justifying sexual abuse.

As I said, look at how the story has Joker murder the person who sexually assaulted him as a child. The story seemed to act like this was fair for Joker to kill his tormentor. Even Burns, who supervised the program that held Joker as a child prisoner and a child assassin, permits Joker to walk away, not just because Benimaru was going to kick his ass, but also because this child molester wasn’t worth Burns’s time to defend and protect. It’s gross, and speaks even worse about Burns (a topic for another time), but the story seemed to make it clear that it was on Team “Let Joker Kill That Rapist, Fuck Him.”

…Granted, Shinra then resurrecting that rapist at the end of the manga complicates this. That seemed like a take by the story to suggest that no one gets to play God and decide who lives and who dies, that it’s not for any one person to decide someone deserves to die…

…which, fair philosophical argument with real-world applications regarding how, especially in the United States, we are so excited at the prospect of executing people, even if later evidence may exonerate those convicted, and at a time where I’m seeing my country getting this close to wrongly associating LGBTQ+ people with child abusers that deserve to die (fuck homophobes, fuck TERFs, fuck transphobes, fuck the death penalty, fuck the lies defaming LGBTQ+ people as corrupting children when that is not fucking happening you fucking fascist sacks of shit).

So, yes, taking an anti-death penalty stance is something I’m in favor of in real life.

But also, this is fiction, and that fictional character was a fucking child rapist, so fuck no, let that fucker die in this fictional work.

#cw: child abuse mention #cw: rape mention #cw: death mention #cw: homophobia mention #cw: transphobia mention #fire force spoiler #fire force spoilers #long post

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