"This character is trans," I say about the most cisgender man on the planet without a hint of irony in my voice.

one of the things that i loved about barbie (2023) that i think a lot of the posts making fun of male-written reviews miss is that, though the movie presents itself as a commentary on the patriarchy and sexism, the message at the core of the film isn't actually limited to being about (cis) women. it's about anyone who is Other.

i went to go see the movie on thursday afternoon before all the big midnight premieres, and the theater was still packed. there wasn't an empty seat in the entire theater. i had a seat at the end of the row, which i had picked out in a faint (futile) hope that no one would sit next to me. thirty seconds before the trailers started, a family of about 10 black people walked in and split up, presumably because they'd only just bought their tickets and there were no longer 10 seats together. the dad and the son, who was maybe a few years younger than me in his early-20s, a good foot and a half taller than me, and who i recognized as one of the football players at the local university, ended up taking the two empty seats next to me with the linebacker in the seat right next to me. and that was pretty much the last time i thought of them until the last twenty minutes of the movie.

see, in the last twenty minutes of the movie, america ferrera makes an impassioned speech about not just the limitations that male-dominated society puts on women but the limitations that women put on themselves in order to survive in said male-dominated society. it's about the contradictions that we're subjected to--you can't be too much, but you can't be too little either. you have to lift each other up but you're also in constant competition with other women for the shredded dregs of respect that men have left over for us. you can't say yes to a man because then you're a whore but you can't say no because then you're a prude. it was passionate and bitter and furious and it had every woman in the theater, myself included, in tears.

and in the silence of the theater following america ferrera's plea for barbie not to make herself less just so that society isn't threatened by her, the linebacker sitting next to me said fervently, "i feel that."

it brought everything to a screeching halt. now i'm a white woman, and though i'm fat and nowhere near as gorgeous as margot robbie, from the very first trailer, it was obvious that this was going to be a movie for me. and if done right, it was going to be a movie for all women (and i would argue that it was). but the thing that it also did right was that though the surface of the message was about women making themselves lesser, the core was that it was for anyone who makes themselves lesser to fit in. yeah, it's for women who are trying to fit into a male-dominated society, but it's also for bipoc who are trying to fit into a white-dominated society. it's for trans people trying to fit into a cis-dominated society. it's for gay people trying to fit into a heterosexual-dominated society. it's for anyone who's been Othered and has to shrink themselves in a desperate attempt to survive.

i love the posts making fun of male-written reviews that are butthurt that this movie isn't for them just as much as the next person. but i think it's important that we don't forget that those are representative of the people in power, the people that could never understand this message. barbie is for me, yeah, but it isn't just for me. it's for my trans friend who is six feet tall and has a beard and wears pink dresses every single day because they make her feel pretty. it's for my labmate who could practically be a barbie herself and irritates me every time she talks about thinphobia but also can't find someone who wants to be with her because she's brilliant and not because she's beautiful.

it's for the black linebacker who sat next to me in the theater and felt heard when a fictional character in a movie told him not to make himself smaller just to fit society's standards.

People are super weird about letting fictional trans people get on with their lives.

There's a thing I've written about before where people will refuse to accept that fictional characters could possibly be trans no matter how incredibly blatant their creators are about it. You can put a big note on a character design sketch that just says "she is trans," you can have a character whose body shape suggests one gender and have every single character in the show make a point of correcting anyone misgendering that character accordingly, you can straight up have a character come out as trans, either having a serious talk about their identity with a parent while bathed in the trans flag color scheme with an actual trans flag on the wall behind them, or just straight up say "hey, I'm a man, gonna change my name to Victor, everyone cool with that?" and people will still find ways to bend over backwards and deny it.

But there's a small handful of characters out there people will accept as trans, generally, without a huge fight over it. Typically this happens with characters who are first introduced to people in a context where them being trans is treated like a mean-spirited joke, or is at least put so bluntly people can convince themselves it was. But then we have this weird thing that happens where that recognition is completely conditional on feeling like there's a mean-spirited joke they're in on.

Let's just dive in with the example that's going to be on most people's minds lately. Bridget from Guilty Gear.

I'm pretty sure if you had internet access from 2022 to 2023 you are Extremely Aware that this girl Bridget is trans, and that the scum of the earth threw a gigantic snot-nosed bawling fit of denial over this for at least half a year, trying to cope with all sorts of weird baffling denials where she wasn't trans in Japan and localizers made this up or there was some double-secret "true ending" to the game you could unlock somehow that walked this back or whatever, and the creator of the series as a whole, and this character, and really the only voice with any authority on the subject ended up writing like 4 big public statements directly addressing these bigoted weirdos about how no, she's trans, and she's always been trans. There's also some possibility that you were aware that Bridget is in a fighting game called Guilty Gear Strive, and maybe even that she's been a character in that series since 2002.

Here's the thing a lot of people don't seem to understand though. Since Strive has this whole story mode bit with her gaining the confidence to admit she's trans to everyone around her and they're all accepting and all that, if you just got here it would be pretty reasonable for you to assume that either she's a brand new character, or that in previous appearances, she was either "stealth" and everyone thought she was a cis girl, or this general look is new and she used to do the boymode thing. But, no. She's always presented this way, everyone's always known she was assigned male at birth. We went through two whole decades with Bridget being THE poster child for gross bigots going "hey, the little blond girl dressed like a nun is pretty cute right? HA! That's actually a boy! You're freakin' gay dude!" TVtropes had a page forever called "Dropped a Bridget on him" for describing all the media that as a "reveal" along those lines. The 4 letter T-slur was pretty much coined to describe this specific character.

So it's not that the recent rage from bigots is because they were into Bridget and thought they were into a cis girl, or that this character is "suddenly a girl." It's that we are now very explicitly saying "yeah, she's trans. Everyone knows she's trans and everyone is cool with it." There's no more "dark secret" to use as a gotcha.

Meanwhile, the incident that was really on my mind today was seeing someone's big retrospective piece about good ol' Poison, refreshingly opening with the actual story of how she was created, citing the same concept sketch from that post of mine I linked earlier, and not repeating the usual gross playground rumor, going on to mention an a fighting game appearance where backlash from trans-positive people caused Capcom to walk back some gross jokes in victory quotes about her "manly strength" or whatever... and then proceeded to speculate if cutting those transphobic jokes meant they have "retconned her into being cis." Like, what the hell is this logic? Is the idea of a character being trans and NOT being subject to gross ridicule seriously so hard for people to get their heads around that "they must have decided she was never trans at all" feels like a sensible explanation? That's... not how retcons work. If we've had years of hard confirmation that a character has had some particular trait, that's just a fact about that character, and you can go ahead and keep assuming it's true. A retcon would be like, if there was a new game and it had some cutscene where we see Poison dying her hair, revealing/confirming that it hasn't been naturally pink this whole time. There isn't a word for people just quietly deciding drastic changes have happened to characters, then never mentioning these anywhere. Because that's just not a thing that happens. It is completely absurd to just go around assuming characters stop being trans or gay or vegetarian or whatever the hell else if you haven't been reminded of the fact lately. That's like assuming your parents ceased to exist when they played peekaboo with you and hid their faces behind their hands. What the absolute hell? Oh and people do this with Birdo like all the damn time, too.

"Hey, don't you mean Birdetta?" I was going to make one of those rambling joke tags about this but, no, actual real discussion on this one. So just to clarify things here...

Here's the Japanese ad for "Super Mario USA," the Japanese release of the American "Super Mario Bros. 2" being presented in a way that makes it pretty clear we're going for as clear an example as we can give of mid-80s Japan's conception of a trans woman. Technically her first appearance was in Doki Doki Panic, a game created as part of this multimedia promotional thing for... a Japanese TV station's 1987 fall line-up. It was then reworked a bit into a Mario game because... it was really good, the actual Japanese sequel to SMB wasn't great, and Nintendo didn't want to have to deal with all the weird licensing issues tied into things. In the original manual for that, we have...

I'm a bit rusty, but in Japan, she's Catherine, and this brief description here says she's trans in a bigoted fashion, along with mentioning she tells people they can call her Cathy, you know, in a flirty sort of way. The general structure of this made its way into the original Super Mario Bros. 2 manual, at least in keeping the same general format of here's her name, here's some gross transphobia, here's her nickname, but... the whole thing's kind of a mess? Like, if you just saw the U.S. manual, and it said "Birdo- [Transphobic nonsense], ... rather be called 'Birdetta.'" It would be reasonable to interpret that as a dead name/chosen name sort of thing, but the original Japanese version has roughly the same formatting (and confirmation she's trans) but there's plainly no dead naming there, just an informal nickname... and the U.S. manual didn't even call her Birdo at all. It calls her "Ostro" and then it calls the actual ostrich enemies "Birdo."

And they're like that in-game in the credits too. Everyone caught the obvious error there about the wrong names getting used, and flipped those for future western mentions, but nobody ever caught that there was supposed to be a cutesy nickname going on, and future releases cut the whole transphobic description entirely. So, she's called Catherine in Japan, Cathy for short, and just kinda arbitrarily called Birdo instead in the west. But there's no dead name in any of this, just one of those Mash/Sabin Terra/Tina M. Bison/Vega/Balrog localization messes. And she always has been trans, everywhere, that's just a thing and has nothing to do with badly written manuals, and she's not going to somehow stop being trans just because the awful jokes have stopped.

Here's some fun extra trivia from wikipedia though! "Birdo/Catherine was prominently featured in the cut-scenes for the Japan-only, Satellaview pseudo-sequel of Super Mario USA (Japanese title for the Western version of Super Mario Bros. 2), known as BS Super Mario USA. In this version, three "Super Catherines" were voice-acted by Jun Donna (Pink, described as "slightly mischievous"), Rika (Red, "whose finances are always in the red"), and Akemi (Green, described as "cultured and affluent"). The voices were those of gay men or transgender women." That should really be "BS Super Mario USA" though. The Satellaview was weird.

rest in peace tumblr user barkhoffman 🕊🕊

I'm gonna use this ask I got to springboard an explanation as to why I've gone silent and stopped updating, so! here it is! the Discourse no one asked for!

it was brought to my attention recently that some people on twitter (a site which I no longer use and have not used for years because it is a cesspool) have been vaguing/insulting SLAP, which! sure! fine, that's your right! not everyone has to like what I create, I don't mind that at all! that's not why I vanished, though.

my issue with these "criticisms" is that they ended up insulting who I am as a person. accusations of fatphobia, transphobia, and ableism (among other things) have been leveled at me, and that's where I personally draw the line.

you don't have to like me. you don't have to like what I write. but when you call my moral character into question, I get a little bothered.

an example: some of the accusations include calling me transphobic for using the word "vagina" to refer to a transmasc character's genitals. for those of you who don't know (not that I should have to disclose this information), I am not cis. trans people are not, in fact, a hivemind, and the idea that we should all be ashamed or uncomfortable or whatever the fuck with our anatomy unless we couch it in different terms is actually rather more transphobic than using a medically accurate term to refer to a person's genitals during a smut scene -- a scene which is written from the third-person limited perspective of a 48-year-old cis man who is unfamiliar with transgender issues, so even if it WAS universally offensive to call a vagina a vagina, it would still be in-character.

the thing is, in-character observations, speech, and thoughts are not actually a universal indicator of the author's identity or beliefs. things that you dislike or that make you feel uncomfortable are not automatically morally impure, and you don't have to reach for reasons to say the creator is a bigot because you don't agree with how they portrayed things.

(there's also something to be said about the inherent colonialist racism in the transmed viewpoints that lend to "transmascs shouldn't ever have vagina used to refer to their genitals," dismissing nonwhite cultures with a rich history of third/other genders and gender euphoria. DYSphoria is not the only trans experience. furthermore, calling the word vagina "female-gendered" is a slap in the face to all of us who are NOT female who have no problem referring to our genitals in that way. idk man, are the arguably more gendered terms "pussy" and "cunt" REALLY more appropriate here? should I have used "bonus hole" instead? not sure what the solution is supposed to be.

anyway.)

I could go on and on and get into every little accusation thrown at me and how insulting and ridiculous they are, but I don't want to invite that level of discourse. this is bad enough. it is absolutely batshit bonkers that I, as a nearly 30 year old person, am sitting here typing this right now. it is even more wild to me that at least some of the people involved in this drama are apparently in their 30s as well.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. if those of you who have a problem with my fics expended even half that energy into helping actual real life people instead of defending the nonexistent honor of fictional ones, the world might actually get better.

I know, I know. it feels good to vague on twitter and pretend you're doing activism when you're trashing a small creator's work in a way that's very likely to get back to them. it feels nice to know you've "saved the world from some evil" when you discourage people like me from continuing their projects. it feels like you're making a difference, right?

unfortunately, you are not. I would advise those of you involved in all this to get well soon and mature a little bit past wrongly deducing someone's viewpoints via the fictional works that they create. there are happier and more productive ways to spend your time, I swear.

I'm not mad, honestly. I'm just sort of tired. tired of getting messages asking where I am and what happened. tired of feeling like I have all this bottled up inside. tired of fandoms that would rather stoke fake moral outrage like Republicans than, idk, go to a protest or give a homeless person a dollar or defend POC from your racist uncle at the neighborhood barbecue.

I don't think we as an internet "society" really understand the mental toll it can take on someone to be called things like fatphobic, ableist, and transphobic -- particularly when, in my case, I am fat, disabled, and trans. of course, being a member of a group doesn't absolve you from bigotry against that group. however, when these accusations are leveled based entirely on someone's body of work and not on their actual character, it makes us far less likely to create works, what with the likelihood that they'll continue to be looked at in bad faith by those who have some sort of weird moral high ground point to prove.

I really didn't want to have to post about this and bring the people who like my work down, but I think you guys are owed an explanation rather than silence. not sure if I'll post anything after this, because I'm really too old to be engaging in internet slapfights over torture porn movie fanfics, of all things (I guess I really spoke too soon when I called this fandom nice, drama-free, and welcoming). if my ask box gets too messy, I'll turn it off. idk. just wanted you guys to know where I've gone.

now stop telling everyone I'm dead

I saw a good post about the anti-BL creators of Western BL flavored stuff like Heartstopper and RWRB that was like: if they are so hell bent on the idea that their stuff is aimed at gay and bisexual men or boys, why did they not bother to look at any media by/for gay men? It’s not like that’s hard to find. Even if you’re just looking at stuff for teens like with Heartstopper author, most of the big YA books about gay or bi male characters are by gay male authors. Maybe try reading those. They’re clearly reading nothing but slash fanfic and maybe like M/M romance novels for women or like, idk, Check Please, and then going Shocked Pikachu Face when it turns out their books are way more popular with female audiences and Heartstopper TV has a famous gay man talk about how it’s clearly not for gay men and not how actual gay boys act.

And like… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with M/M stuff for women, the author of this post was clear that she didn’t think there was either. But these authors clearly wanted to make M/M for men so like… maybe talk to queer men or look at the media queer men are making for themselves if that is your goal! Less fanfic, more Looking or whatever.

It’s just the sheer fucking hubris of assuming that because they are some other flavor of queer and they’ve read some M/M fiction (slash fanfic) that they must know what it’s like to be every type of LGBTQ+ and don’t need to do any research to appeal to that audience.

--

They don't want to make m/m for cis gay male culture.

What they want is to have their current tastes validated in a "You're one of the boys and those other filthy fujos aren't!" way.

Trust me, this crap has been going on since the 90s and before. It's a common affliction of slash fans who want to be the most special. That goes for the trans men trying to assert their masculinity in a world that doesn't respect them as much as for the straight ladies who endlessly tell you about their Gay Best Friend. It's a disease that hits all parts of BL fandom.

It's just our local flavor of "Knitting isn't just for GIRLS anymore!" and "Now you can drink tea as a MAN!" startup bro insecurities. You know, the people being parodied here.

The best we can do is to keep laughing in their faces and keep treating BL as a marketing niche with genre conventions that's open to whomever shares that taste.

she did NOT say that fictional csa is fine though, that’s the thing that everyone is very expressly telling you. and IM not defending ““people who jack off to fictional children”” either, where the fuck are you getting that, do you just say this shit to every trans woman you see? you can’t argue by putting shit in people’s mouths. the “standards” you are describing are the same standards that the people you’re smearing agree with. im not saying its all or nothing at all, you just can’t take anything we’re saying seriously

when you read "stopping being mean to sex freaks who like ageplay and incest shipping" why do you think that suddenly stops at loliporn or fictional csa when that's part of the package? do you think "ageplay and incest shipping" only applied to game and thrones fanfiction and mild "daddy" play? like of course those posts saying "don't be say you love sex freaks if you don't include ALL sex freaks" is also including fictional csa, like fucking cailou porn or whatever. because the posts those are response to are like "stop being mean about people with weird fetishes that make you uncomfortable! (except fictional csa fuck you you can die)" if she's not supporting fictional csa great, but why did she reblog the fucking post than?

and again the fact that i criticized her has nothing to do with her being a trans woman, that didn't even cross my mind, and i've criticized cis men, cis women, trans men, non binary people and people of all genders and sexuality that have been dismissive of concerns over this shit. i've criticized cis women on twitter for publicly posting their weird underaged boy rape fantaties and i got accused of "hating women's fantasies", i've also critcized other cis gay men for drawing actual "toddlercon" and got accused of being a "pick me" gay, and other variations of "stop criticizing grown adults for what they do in private even if they post in publicly actually oops"

i don't actually care what people do in the privacy of their own homes, but the only reason people on tumblr make posts about how "you should stop being mean to people about their age play, incest porn" is because most people don't actually keep it private actually, or else other people wouldn't be seeing it and complain about it. like if you go into someone's dms or a locked private space to "out them" for being into scooby doo or even some actually more harmful fantasy than that's still kind of gross and intruding and they shouldn't do that, but if said person is doing it in a PUBLIC FORUM than yeah they're not above criticism because it's their own "private fantasies" when it's clearly not.

(and before you take words out of my mouth i am not inherently against public displays of sexuality or even kink, i don't think a child seeing a man in a pup mask and harness is going to tramatize them, i think they'll be fine, and in general i think try to hide the fact "sex" like. exists from children does not nothing to deter grooming and kind of causes it in some cases. i've seen people insisting that people who don't lock their nsfw twitter accounts of adults have regular but explicit sex that they're are personally grooming children who might have to figure out porn exists, and i think that's an unhealthy attitude to have. my point is more that the entire argument that noone can criticize or have a negative opinion on "ageplay" or "incest kink" because "it only exists between two private consenting adults" is just. not true.)

honestly what kills you as a seeking-/post-bottom surgery trans in the online transmasc community isn't even the open disgust people have for your body or how quick they are to spread misinformation bc mysteriously their trans sex positivity only applies to transition they personally want/are attracted to. like yeah that stuff hurts, the fact that every couple months a post about how it's TOTALLY FINE to be grossed out by my body and assuring trans guys NOBODY wants to look like me gets 10k notes sucks, but that's actually a minority of the problem. the killer is that disgust towards bottom surgery is SO normalized that, in general, people just assume that no post-op people exist in transmasc spaces, if they think about them at all. you're just left out of everything by default.

jokes? sorry, every transmasc joke assumes you have a boypussy and menstruate and the only surgery you've ever had is top surgery and if bottom surgery does crop up it's a joke about how you'd never get it. sucks to suck! fictional representation? no post-op characters exist and in fact any characters that mention their junk specify that they're non-op just in case you were worried about that. sucks to suck! fictional character headcanons? i mean, sometimes you could imagine that the shapeshifting characters might change genitals...? the medieval fantasy characters DO get top surgery scars though, so really it's just an excuse not to have to think about how gross bottom surgery is even if you acknowledge the desire to swap your junk. sucks to suck! positivity posts? nope, even ones specific to surgery don't bother to acknowledge anything below the waist. sucks to suck! discussions of transmasc sexuality? hahahahaha yeah no, those are even more inaccessible to anyone without a boycunt. sucks to suck! discourse about obstacles to transmasc transition? nope, again, that just removes the possibility that people could care about you since not mentioning you in this context means they definitely just aren't thinking about it at all. sucks to suck! discourse specifically about bottom surgery? congrats, people acknowlege you...... as a 3rd party who can't possibly be present and definitely fits into the .01 x .01 inch box they have in their heads of the Cis-Passing Binary Transsexual Male who only wants to get bottom surgery to lick cis boots, and "discourse" is kind of a misnomer because in reality what that means is "discourse about how gross it is that people think me, a trans man, might have gotten bottom surgery". sucks to suck!

naturally i need to add a million disclaimers about how i don't think transmascs who don't want bottom surgery are any less trans than i am(true) or that transmascs who don't get bottom surgery face as much transphobia as i do (so true bestie) and i'm saying this as a reflection of my own personal experiences even though i'm sure you personally have nothing against us genital-mutilators. that same grace has never once been extended to me though so i will be cranky about it.

i feel like we as a fandom tend to either over uwuify klapollo or over stoicify them and this is by no means a real character analysis or genuine conversation because it is 4am for me and i’m not very good at articulating myself i don’t actually care that much i’m in fandom spaces i’m used to mischaracterising bullshit but

why does it seem to be the only options are “apollo is an actual child and klavier is sexy and suave” or “apollo doesn’t experience emotions and klavier is a cringefail babygirl”. like genuinely can they not both be people.

i feel like a lot of the infantilisng apollo stuff is partially the usual fandom short man = yaoi bottom shit but i’m not gonna sit here and pretend it isn’t also bc of the transmasc apollo headcanon. like it can’t be a coincidence that the most infantilised grown man in the game is also the one that’s most widely headcanoned as ftm. like it feels like a lot of it is your typical uwu short trans uke baby x big strong suave tall hot cis seme and i’m used to that but man it sucks to see people making weird shit about Flustered Virgin apollo getting his first ever kiss from Playboy klavier and. y’all know he’s 25 right? not 15?

there’s also the other side of things where people make klavier into this cringefail babygirl boyfailure who’s hopelessly in love with apollo and spends every waking moment thinking about apollo and can’t do anything without relating it to apollo and apollo just fucking does not like him. and that’s almost worse because at least the first kind of mischaracterisation still feels like a ship. why are we pretending apollo doesn’t care about klavier. he doesn’t like his boy band music but it’s not personal. he still likes klavier.

and then there’s the ones who take one half of the mischaracterising and applies it to both characters. apollo is an uwu baby and klavier is a soyboy and they can’t spend a second apart because they’re so in love. OR they’re both robots who might as well not even be dating with how little they speak to each other.

y’all know you can make them act normal, right? they can be in love with each other and silly about it and also be serious characters? apollo is a dork ass who cracks jokes and is bitchy but he’s also a genuinely smart guy like he’s a lawyer he’s a politician he’s helping rebuild a whole country’s legal system from the ground up and he’s still a bitch and a loser. klavier is ALSO a bitch and a loser and a smart guy. he’s kind, but he’s not a wimp. he’s bitchy but he’s not insufferable. he’s passionate about music and law and everything he talks about. and he says corny shit and openly flirts with apollo but he’s also a damn good prosecutor and id argue he’s the only one who actually understands his job without the defense having to Fix Him tm. and they can both love each other and be all these things.

for a lot of y’all there’s only two options: klavier has trauma (excruciating) (all encompassing) or klavier is silly :3. and like. he can do both. you can acknowledge his trauma and also acknowledge he’s a dumbass who air guitars during court. human beings are multifaceted and fictional characters should reflect that. you gotta make the people you’re writing feel like people yes even the japanese visual novel people.

back to the living each other thing. klavier can openly flirt with apollo and also actually like him. apollo can ignore klavier’s first flirts and still actually like him. maybe he doesn’t wanna get it with the brother of his murderous boss while investigating a crime scene i think that’s reasonable of him. but he also clearly likes and cares about klavier as a person (“i have to pull the darkness out of him” or whatever he says) so just because he didn’t immediately throw himself at klavier the second he hit him with the never felt this way with a man doesn’t mean he’s annoyed by klavier’s flirting it just means it wasn’t the right time. apollo can hate the gavineers shitty music and still love the man who sung it. he can think klavier’s office is ugly and still love him. i don’t love every single thing about the people i love but i still love them. if my qpp made a dog shit song i hated i would tell him bc he and i understand each other.

So like, I have been having this weird experience analyzing the Harry Potter books lately, and please indulge me while I talk about J.K. Rowling's weird writing.

My goal was simple: read the Harry Potter books to find which parts were influenced/inspired by actual magic that people do in real life. My theory was that there was a lot more magic in the earlier drafts of the books, and that she took a lot out due to fear of backlash from America's ongoing reenactment of the Satanic Panic. For instance it's quite obvious some of their magic lessons got dumbed down so that very little of what's in the books could actually be tried in real life, and I think she took out a lot of astrology.

I also wanted to do a couple errands along the way, one of which was to check and see if it's explicitly written in the books that Harry is a cis man. I'm a trans man, SO I'D KNOW. (I'm a slow reader so all I can say for now is: the FIRST book does not explicitly state Harry is cis, but if he's trans, there's some implied worldbuilding with items like the Sorting Hat that comes into play. Also I'm fairly sure the Dursleys would have gone along with him being trans because that meant Petunia could reuse Dudley's old clothes instead of having to get girl stuff. I'mma save any other explanations on the topic for a video on it.) The reason I'm doing this read-through is because I think J.K. doesn't know anything about trans people and didn't think to make sure her wizard world was trans exclusionary. AND IT TURNS OUT THAT WE TRANS MAGIC USERS HAVE A WAY OF WIGGLING INTO MOST PLACES UNDETECTED BY NORMAL MEANS.

While I was doing the re-read I encountered two sort of broad revelations:

There's a lot of old stuff in there like Latin and Greek and tradcraft stuff, but also modern magic of the more recent era... but the incorporation of modern magic cuts off somewhere before the 80s. These books read like they were written by a early 70s magician. Like they honestly read like J.K. is a magical practicioner who just didn't read any magic books written after 1972 and never discovered what Chaos Magic is, (and also, never heard of most of what happened in the Cold War). I have never found a writer, in fiction or non-fiction, more dedicated to referencing magical stuff that most magicians alive today just don't care about anymore.

J.K. Rowling's knowledge of child abuse laws and general social mores regarding treatment of children also ceased to update itself by about the 80s. I keep getting distracted by this and having to make more side-notes about corporal punishment and researching stuff like when caning was banned in England. (HInt: it was banned before Harry went to school, so in Book 1 it's fuckin weird that he assumes that Wood is the name of a cane he's about to be whipped with.) Like, this woman raised children in the modern era, she should know when canes stopped being used.

So like, when I mention that I'm doing some research in this area, this is the sort of stuff I'm reading for and the sort of stuff I'm encountering. I haven't been talking much about this journey because it seems like any time anyone brings up anything Harry Potter up whatsoever, we've got to talk about how J.K. is a terf in every other sentence. But like, y'all: I hope you slow down and re-read the books, because J.K. Rowling is a terf who is also a child abuse apologist and normalizer. She is a terf who is also a horrible fat-shamer. She is a terf who is also an ableist with a huge problem writing about mental illness. And she's a terf who's also a sexist who undermines feminism with her actual writing of female characters.

And I honestly think she double and triples down on the terf stuff so that people will only talk about that. I think it's worth talking about the fact that not only is she an awful person in the terf way, but like, every other way imaginable too. I think it's worth talking about the fact that with all the obvious biases she has, the group she CHOOSES to publicly marginaiize is trans women, and I think she makes that choice because she thinks that she'll get more allies that way. That if she wore all of her issues on her sleeve like she wears the terfness, that she'd lose a lot of allies, that a lot of prestigious charities would stop having anything to do with her. That she uses the identity of "terf" as a shield because she knows that certain people will protect a terf, and she does this specifically so people won't notice how much of a sexist, abuse apologist, ableist, fatphobe etc she ALSO is. Opinions that could lose her a lot of money and clout if people remember them enough.

She's trying to pick on who she thinks is the most unpopular kid in the class out of the hopes that the bullies in class will be her friends instead of pile up on her, but if the bullies knew what she really thought of them, THEY wouldn't even be her friends.

Also like... I just want someone else to read the actual words in these books and see what fucked-up choices she made as a writer. I think a LOT of people remembering these books are actually remembering the movies, which are way more different from the books than you might expect.

Conservatives: Facts don’t care about feelings!

facts conservatives ignore because they hurt their feelings:

- The fact that scientific studies on transgender people and their brains supports their validity.

-The fact that biology proves that sex is a spectrum (human knowledge of biology does not end in your 8th grade science class, I’m sorry)

-The fact that homosexuality is extremely common in the natural world. Humans are far from the only species known to experience same-sex attraction.

-The fact that several decades of scientific researched has proven without any doubt that yelling at and hitting children traumatizes them and negatively impacts their development.

- The fact that the most conservative states in america that often ban sex ed from schools have the highest rates of childhood pregnancy in America.

- The fact that intersex people are just as common as redheads and are often negatively effected by transphobia

-The fact that no ethical doctor with more than two brain cells would let a prepubescent child take HRT.

- The fact that pink used to be for boys, but it was changed to blue because Hitler labeled gay holocaust victims with pink triangles. The idea that “blue=boy and pink=girl” is inherently rooted in violent homophobia.

- The fact that statistics show that gender affirming care can increases quality of life for trans people immensely

- The fact that their words and actions have a real world impact that causes tragedies like what happened to Nex Benedict.

-The fact that you can debunk most (if not literally all) republican conspiracy theories with basic research (they just choose to believe it face value because it aligns with their personal feelings)

- The fact that minorities exist in real life, and that it’s actually LESS realistic for every work of fiction to have mostly white, straight, cis people in it. Diversity, when implemented correctly, adds realism to a story. And if you find that “distracting” then you might have some personal biases you need to work through.

- The fact that assuming kids are born with completely man-made gender norms like “Trucks are for boys and unicorn are for girls” hardwired into their brains is absurd and has no real scientific evidence supporting it.

- The fact that many archeological discoveries suggest that prehistoric women were a lot more active in hunting and fighting than was previously assumed.

-The fact that clothing is just an object and that dresses, high heels, and makeup were originally designed for men to wear.

-The fact that drug addiction is classified as a mental illness and should be treated, not punished with years of imprisonment.

-The fact that androgynous men are often considered to be extremely attractive by women.

-The fact that language is an entirely human-made construct that evolves and changes constantly, pronouns included.

-The fact that climate change is a real thing holy shit. You are actively destroying the future for your grandchildren by not believing it exists.

- The fact that many dinosaurs did have feathers, it actually looked cool as fuck, and that if you actually think that an animal is “woke” for having a skin covering you don’t like you might need to have your brain studied by scientists so they can find out what causes “Giant Crybaby Dipshit Disease” (GCDD)

What do I do if I, as an author, don’t know if I’m qualified to tell a story? I’ve been thinking about writing a story that deals with gender identity, but I’m cis. I like the idea, but I almost wish I could give it to someone nonbinary or with more experience…

You don't have to tell every story that pops into your head.

Have you ever seen Seth Meyer's "Jokes Seth Can't Tell" segment? They are up on YT. Silly, but the grain of truth that is applicable here: There are some jokes that would sound shocking or just ignorant as hell coming from Seth, a cis straight white man, but funny, or at least not offensive coming from a Black woman or a lesbian. Any joke could be told by any comedian -- but not every joke SHOULD be told by every comedian.

So... yeah. Same with books, I think. Probably a lot of people would like for me to say "oh, any writer can write anything! if you can dream it you can do it! :D :D :D rah rah write on!"

But actually, I think your instinct to NOT need to tell this story is probably spot on. That's self-awareness, and that's a good thing. My reasoning is two-fold -- one half outward / selfless, one half inward / selfish.

On the selfless side: There are few enough opportunities for marginalized creators -- if a given publisher only has room to publish one Groundbreaking Story about Gender Identity per year or whatever -- why should that slot go to you? "I almost wish I could give it to someone nonbinary..." -- well what's stopping you? Authors share ideas all the time.

(BTW, that doesn't mean a given nonbinary person will WANT to tell the story you've thought of -- or that they will tell it the exact way that you would have told it -- they probably won't, in fact! Because every writer is different! And they have their own ideas! But the point is, there isn't anything wrong with sharing ideas and no reason you can't. Again, you don't have to write every story you've ever thought of, ideas are abundant, etc.)

On the selfish side: That's a lot of work. Feh. Why do you want to make writing a book harder than it already is? There are plenty of narratives about trans and nonbinary people and gender identity written by cis people, and they range from fine whatever to actively harmful. I'm not saying YOURS would be the latter, but it could/would/SHOULD add an extra level of difficulty and care for you to make sure your book isn't harmful, as this is not your area of expertise or experience.

And btw, if you, cis person, write a book starring a trans/nb main character, and the book is published, and you haven't done that work or you haven't done it well enough, and there is anything in there that might be construed as harmful, you can FULLY expect internet forensic analysts to pick apart every single word of the story and drag you for FILTH. Which fair enough honestly! I don't know if most people would be ready for that level of scrutiny. It couldn't be me!

So before somebody says "IT'S FICTION! So-and-so brilliant writer wrote a book about such-and-such different identity from them and won a Pulitzer Prize for it!!! ANYONE CAN WRITE ANYTHING!" -- yeah. OK. For sure.

Just like any person with halfway decent hand-eye coordination and a little practice can probably hit a baseball. If you have it in you to step up to that plate in front of a stadium full of onlookers and knock it clean out the park, fantastic for you. I just don't think most / many rookies would want to bet their career on it.

Goddd why is the internet so tiring sometimes like it's a poll about CATS!!! Why the fuck are you trying to push your weird anti-minecraft cringe culture beliefs on it and even more just parroting whatever the fuck you've heard from twitter in order to paint all minecraft youtubers as "problematic" just because there was some problematic people in the genre like hello???

There's assholes in every demographic yet somehow because this one cat is owned by a creator who makes content for a genre you don't like, he MUST be problematic and therefore his CAT too

It's genuinely upsetting and honestly such fun polls gets sullied by shitty people who just hate anyone who dares touch one of the most popular video games in the past decade because of a couple of bad eggs in the community. They don't even have to have interacted with these bad eggs, they just have to have just so happen to make videos about the same video game as them.

Scar BARELY has anything to do with most problematic content creators and yet he and his deceased cat still gets dragged by people who find minecraft cringe and hide it under the guise of thinking any and every minecraft youtuber is simply problematic therefore it's okay to harass them and their fans and spread hatred towards their pets ackshully.

He is legitimately one of the most wholesome minecraft creators in the platform that had constantly inspired many disabled people because of his positivity and his frankness about his experiences with both his physical and mental disabilities and experiences with the medical industry, both positive and negative. All of this doesn't matter though because he plays minecraft so he must be someone who agrees with problematic minecraft youtuber man #34 so he's definitely problematic even if I don't know anything about him. And his cat, Jellie, regardless of how you feel about Scar himself or if he is worth redeeming just because he plays minecraft with his friends, gets thrown under the bus for simply being the pet of this creator because she's just some rando cat of a minecraft youtuber so of course I should also hate her. Oh she died? Well sucks to suck because she's still some youtuber's cat. How problematic of her.

This also happened in other polls like the one from a few months ago with Jimmy being shitted on by outsiders from the fandom to the point that the person who was running the poll had to remove him because of the harassment that they were receiving. This is despite the fact that Jimmy is genuinely one of the most inoffensive minecraft youtubers out there who actively scolds his friends for even making light innuendos whenever they play. "Being bad at video games isn't being doomed by the narrative" says the fans of TTRPG youtube series which is based on game strategy and random chance and has some similarities with sandbox games. And of course, he's also problematic because he plays minecraft. Nevermind you don't actually known anything about him, his character, or the story that people are referring to. He plays minecraft therefore he is problematic.

It happened with other polls like the trans swag poll where people were so giddy to misgender REAL LIFE trans people (not just the characters they played) just because these other fans' FICTIONAL blorbos were up against them in the polls. They would assume any and all people who had ever created minecraft content are cis simply just because of, again, some bad actors that they had or had not associated with in the past. It doesn't matter if they had not spoken about or even actively denounced this bad actor either, they played with that person once upon a time so therefore misgendering them isn't transphobic guys I swear! They're just cringe problematic cis people they couldn't possibly be trans! and if they are they're the bad kind of trans so it's totally cool to misgender them!

I'm not even asking people to like minecraft youtubers or change their minds about perpetuating this new kind of cringe culture but just questioning what is it that makes the term "minecraft youtuber" make these people just assume the worst, and, even further, resort to VILE comments and behavior that border on outright bigotry? Why is it that seeing "minecraft youtubers" make these people think that harassment and hatred sent to the fans and even just the poll makers is justified regardless of the actual stance of the person that had brought them up? Why do these people think that it's appropriate or even funny to make jokes about dead pets or to jokingly misgender trans people just because they're associated with the term "minecraft youtuber"?

I don't know

This won't be rebloggable

I'm tired

trans women on the internet doing 3 hour video essays about how the way you think a hot woman in a video game designed to be hot is actually feminist, i get it. we're not allowed to want to fuck women, especially fictional women designed with a male audience in mind. i get the urge to want to interpret your attraction as something elevated or post-sexual, but you think shes hot because she was designed to be hot. you think shes hot because we all get fed an idea of what makes a woman hot. its actually okay. you dont need to justify it, be aware of the issues with things sure but like, do you think every leftist man is coming up with an essay length justification for the arousal he feels every time he watches porn? or cis lesbians for that matter? let yourself jack off without a care in the world once in a while, instead of doing some corny mental gymnastics shit just let it happen and move on with your life.

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/732092052701052929/im-actually-really-really-tired-of-reading-posts?source=share

Ok, so, I'm the transsexual gay anon you're trying to vague.

First off, my ask was inspired by a reblogger from here who claimed that the reason straight men don't enjoy romance novels is because straight men are uncomfortable when women in fiction have agency. Lots of other commenters and rebloggers debunked that idiocy, but any point anon might have had about misogyny in straight men's choice of reading material was undermined when they described all straight men (a group which people like to forget includes trans men) as raging misogynists, instead of discussing a systemic issue in men's choice of reading material, or even talking about misogyny as a cultural problem. (By the way, if your response to this is to turn around and say that straight trans men don't count when you're talking about straight men as a group, the word for that is misgendering)

So, lets take your post point by point.

1.) I never said that male privilege isn't real, you're the one who made that up.

2.) it's possible to discuss systemic issues like the wage gap without pretending that trans men always have exactly the same male privilege as cis men, AND without pretending that they aren't men. You are correct to point out that privilege is not exactly identical for every single person, but ignoring that trans and gay people exist is not actually good praxis.

3.) "men don't have to take precautions against strangers of the opposite sex potentially assaulting them whereas women learn to do this from an early age" You forgot to slap "cis" on there. This is an accurate (if broad) statement about cis people. I grew up having to worry about the same exact things a cis girl worries about. The fact that I identify as a man and pass well today does not retroactively shield me from gendered violence or harassment back when everyone who saw me thought I was a teenage girl. Also, homophobic violence exists and men (cis or trans, straight or not!) who don't conform to their culture's standards of masculinity have to watch out for it, often to the same extent that women need to watch out for misogynist violence.

4.) no one asked you to pretend that cis men have it worse than trans lesbians, you made that up.

5.) Honestly, anon, the fact that you think that LGBT men like myself are insignificant and that our feelings don't matter tells me everything I need to know about you as a person (and very little about your political ideologies).

6.) you're right, it isn't about me. It's about systemic problems. Demonising an entire gender does not solve systemic problems. Transphobia and homophobia are also systemic problems, and overlap a great deal with misogyny (I've heard it argued that all three are actually the same thing directed at different people). You can't solve one while pretending the others don't matter.

7.) You're right! Trans men who don't pass are subject to the same crap that cis women are! You outright stating that their feelings about this don't matter doesn't help anyone, no, not even cis women.

6.) Acutally, "all men are scum" is radfem rhetoric, no matter if you allow trans men to be scum or try to define us out of manhood.

--

Why do you and other jp players despise twst en sm? Other than small character features, I don't get it. (jp player)

I have a whole large post that compiles stuff I personally noticed but there's tons more. What you call "small character features" are actually pretty big things for people who care about these characters or relate to them.

By making Cater make fun of Riddle while he was crying after his overblot, they took away Cater's empathy which is a very important trait of his. By censoring his flirtiness, they took away his coping mechanism for feeling inadequate and unlovable.

By taking away the twins' violent tendencies, they stole about half their personalities and why they are so loved. They took away the conflicting natures they show to others vs those they care about. By making Floyd nothing but a meme, they took away the depth in a character that many would argue shows clear signs of being neurodivergent.

By taking away or hiding the fact that Jamil is a servant, they changed his entire arc from wanting to be free to essentially bitching about being asked to watch over a friend. The power imbalance is important because it affected Jamil on many levels (see: people under the influence of Snake Whisper calling him master, and master being also the first word he would teach his parrot – twst en changed that to simply teaching the parrot to say hello which lacks any sort of personality). A lot of what his parents say doesn't make sense either if you introduce him as a family friend rather than a servant, and that's not talking about the pre-release mishap of making them cousins in promo materials.

By taking away Epel being called cute, his arc goes from finding out cuteness and strength aren't opposites and you can be both to him being a brat unhappy with his looks who suddenly decides it doesn't matter how he looks. Similar but lacks the punch.

By making Vil use gendered language and emphasize manliness, they took away a core part of his character that focuses on breaking gender stereotypes and traditions that are restrictive to either sex or gender.

By making Trey's parents yell at him instead of Riddle's mom, and by mellowing out Riddle's mom's abuse as much as they did, many EN-only fans view Riddle as a spoiled brat who wants everyone to listen to him just because his mom was a little strict.

By making Sebek rude to his seniors and always put everyone but Malleus down, also calling Malleus exclusively by his first name, they took away a core part of his character and what made his interracial origins so compelling because there's no longer any conflict in his values.

To the censorship point, I'm by no means an advocate for forced representation and I don't believe that every fictional work has to have characters of every race, gender, and sexuality. I am, however, a firm believer in keeping characters as they were originally written. If a character is written as gay or bi, erasing that is wrong. If a character is written as trans or nb, erasing that is wrong. Same goes for straight and cis characters. My problem with twst en in this regard is that it erases a lot of this. It's not just Cater flirting with Vil or Epel or paintings or Eliza or her guards or Trey or whoever else that man flirted with, it's also nearly every mention of Vil being beautiful (they usually get replaced by handsome or cool) or Epel being cute, it's the way Jamil blushes when Kalim compliments him, it's the way Rook often hints at Trey and Riddle being together even if they're not, it's Silver saying Vil is who he thinks of when he hears the word beauty, it's Idia thinking Silver is extremely pretty, it's Lilia going out of his way to be cute, it's all that and so much more. Cater is just the most blatant example of this.

Censorship also applies to other things though. The violence and darkness of Twisted Wonderland is what makes these characters dear to a lot of us. Riddle's mother is abusive and extremely controlling as well as violent. Trey had no childhood because he was a parent to his younger siblings and until he discovered his magic, his whole life was controlled by the family bakery. Cater's sisters together with the moving made him believe he was unworthy of being loved on a personal level. Ruggie's struggled to survive his entire life. Azul was severely bullied since he was very young. The twins hinted multiple times at murdering us, Jade hinted at cannibalism. They also both had near-death experiences during Halloween under the sea. Jamil was forced to put himself down because his life and happiness were treated as less important than Kalim's. Vil got systematically dehumanized and physically and mentally bullied for putting in effort and looking a certain way... If you censor the darkness in these stories, they are no longer the same characters and it is no longer the same story.

Side note here: Twst en removed Sam's makeup supposedly due to racist stereotypes but then they changed the name of Jamil's unique from Snake Whisper to Snake Charmer... which is a racist stereotype... so yeah, they clearly don't care about actually not being racist besides the low-hanging fruit of virtue signaling.

There's more if you wanna dig deeper. But aside from all of these, there's also the constant inconsistencies in translation, the translation team clearly not caring enough to translate catchphrases the same way each time, the oftentimes blatantly wrong translation, the horrendous new English names for things that already had English names in the first place, the visual censorship on Sam (do not use the voodoo argument, Sam has no connection to voodoo and his makeup is purely decorative as stated in Magical Archives), as well as the fact that as soon as twst en was announced, even the original twst started back-tracking on some of their earlier content. For example, despite Cater saying in his school uniform story that he wanted to date Vil, his union birthday suddenly has him claiming he wants Vil as a brother. This is especially interesting because Cater was the first character twst en gave a birthday banner to.

And going even more meta, the pace at which they release events is horrible. Being F2P in twst en is extremely hard unless you have the luck of the gods. They are rushing out too much content all at once and the overall quality of the game suffers for it.

I finished listening to The Magnus Archives many months ago. It is a horror audio drama podcast that was very popular here on tumblr. Yet i felt underwhelmed. It was okay, I guess? I felt that the statements were actually scary in the first two seasons, and by season 5 I was not scared at all, despite horrific things happening regularly.

Like there was nothing outstandingly bad in the writing. The characters were fine, nice representation of cis gays I suppose. Although the only trans woman being a single statement giver who doesn’t actually appear in the show is a bit disappointing. For me, perhaps the most important point of media representation is to get creative people from marginalized communities employed. I get it's a single-writer thing, Jonathan Sims writes every episode, but employing a trans woman actor to give the statement (something that happens with plenty of other statements) for the only transfem statement giver would be nice.

Well the only trans woman if you don’t count Nikola Orsinov. Oh Nikola, she is literally a man turned into an evil fake plastic mannequin/doll woman who hides her malevolence under an exaggerated cutesy performance of femininity and like Jame Gumb, steals skin to appear like a human woman. Giving potentially another meaning to the acronym TMA there, but I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say that’s probably not intentional. even if it does express some anxieties about gender. Besides, she’s my favourite villain by a long shot, Nikola Orsinov is a lot of fun.

I also disliked one of the canonical lesbian couples, Basira Hussain and Daisy Tonner. It's a typical example of the trope where the butch lesbian character is a cop, and on top of that, the series does a police brutality arc with them. It's not like women can't be violent cops, but like come on, Magnus Archives. When police brutality happens and a non-white lesbian like Basira is involved, they don't tend to be the perpetrator in the incident.

Anyway, the show was entertaining but felt underwhelming.

And I think I finally figured out why. It’s because the basic idea of the series is that it starts out seeming like a horror anthology series. It’s seemingly disconnected stories of people being menaced by the supernatural, with no explanation of what the supernatural actually is, as in most horror stories. The statements in Magnus can be good, solid horror fiction, if a bit derivative.

And then it reveals its true face: it’s actually a horror serial. The series actually has extensive worldbuilding which connects together and explains all those seemingly disparate stories.

The shift from horror anthology to serialized drama is frankly just awkward in general, it's such a radical shift in story structure. The show sticks with the statement structure for continuity reasons long after it makes any dramatic sense, when the story is carried forward by dialogue rather than any information gained from the various statements..They interrupt the story by the final seasons rather than develop them. In season 5, characters are literally annoyed with the statements because they interrupt the plot progression.

Yet the problem with this storytelling shift I think is far more deeper. That’s because I think horror is kinda antithetical to worldbuilding. I think horror needs some mystery to it, a sense of the unknown, of humanity being menaced by inexplicable forces. When you can explain the supernatural, as extensive worldbuilding tends to do, it ceases to be really scary. And The Magnus Archives has macabre and dark worldbuilding, but it also explains far too much. It tries to be a metafictional commentary on horror fiction, but it ends up showing how bad it is at understanding the genre

It presents these very genre-typical horror stories, with all their unexplained supernatural events and it seems writer Jonathan Sims saw their unexplained nature as a promise of a future solution instead of actually standing on their own. And that’s not how mystery works in the horror genre for the most part, and for good reason.

I’ve sometimes heard The Magnus Archives described as Lovecraftian, but looking at what Lovecraft said about horror in the classic Supernatural Horror in Literature, I think he would agree with me. “The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” And in what he claimed in the true weird tale “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint...of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.“

This is a kind of horror ethos that is antithetical to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding maps out and explains a setting’s fantastical elements, which works best for a kind of Tolkienian fantasy, whereas horror relies on the unknown. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is often seen as the kind of explanatory worldbuilding Magnus engages in, but that’s something his lesser imitators such as August Derleth engaged in far more than Creepy Howie himself. It’s an impression created more by the Call of Cthulhu RPG than Lovecraft’s stories.

M. John Harrison’s criticism of worldbuilding is also relevant to The Magnus Archives:

“When I use the term “worldbuilding fiction” I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it “logical in its own terms”, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. Representational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to “inhabit”; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake. “

This is harsh, but describes the problem of The Magnus Archives quite accurately. I would add that in horror this kind of worldbuilding also undercuts any genuine horror. The “rationality of the fake” is no substitute for fear of the unknown. Supernatural horror without any mystery regarding the supernatural things just becomes a depiction of fantastical torture.

In season 1, the Archivist tries to deliver "rational" explanations for the supernatural events described, and they deliberately ring hollow. It reads as a man trying desperate to shore up his worldview against events that defy them, showing a "malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature" It's a classic horror writing trick. But by season 3, the archivist knows the basics of the story's worldbuilding, and starts explaining the statements with a new supernatural logic, which is shown to be correct.

And Sims doesn't seem to realize that he has simply replaced a naturalistic rationality with a supernatural "rationality of the fake." The stories in the first two seasons show the supernatural disrupting the laws of normal existence, and are therefore scary. Yet then the story creates a new "safeguard against the assaults of chaos" in the form of worldbuilding explanations of these events. Its fantasy with a lot of suffering, rather than horror.

The Magnus Archives might seem like a story that is very certain of itself. It has built this extensive worldbuilding construction to explain its every fantastical flourish, and even its genre and medium. We get explanations for genre staples such as "why are people able to give such articulate and clear statements of horrific and traumatic events?" And because it's yet another audio drama that has a "found footage" or rather a "found recordings" gimmick, we even get an explanation for why everything plot relevant is recorded.

Yet this is to mask a deep uncertainty, as it clearly feels a need to deeply justify its fantasy. A story that was more genuinely certain of itself would allow things to remain unexplained and not need to justify its own flights of imagination.

I don’t care much about spoilers, but I have some further more specific thoughts under the cut. I won’t summarize and explain concepts and plots from the series because it’s boring to write, so think of this as supplementary criticism for those who have listened to Magnus.

The problem with The Fears as explanations is that they are so boringly anthropomorphic. In fact they are explicitly explained in the final episode as arising from the human emotion of fear, a final bit of worldbuilding that adds explanation at the cost of actual horror.

And their motivation is so boring, in that they are basically sadists, whose goal with everything they do is to create fear in humans. It’s such a mundane motivation for interdimensional amorphous powers. That’s about as scary as the serial killers in the most boring kind of mystery and horror fiction, which is not much.

And it sucks all the actual surrealism and imagination out of the setting. Anytime Magnus borrows from surreal horror fiction, it’s not actually surreal, because everything is explainable. Things are surreal because surreal supernatural events scares humans and the supernatural entities want to scare humans. So things that are meant to be surreal horror like the Stranger ritual in the season three finale or most of the hellscapes in season five aren’t actually surreal.

Speaking of season five. For all my criticisms of the series overall, I have to praise the season four finale. It ends on a revelation that the supposed hero’s effort were all meaningless and that actually he has been manipulated into bringing out the apocalypse he hoped to prevent. This revelation is really effective tragedy, especially as it comes after what seems to be a happy ending for him and his partner Martin. Good shit, the series could very well have ended there. It would be a bleak ending, but that fits a horror series.

Yet then the series continues with another season. And by this time the transformation into Tolkienian worldbuilding fantasy is complete. The story of season five is how Frodo and Sam must journey through Mordor to defeat the eye of Sauron by destroying the source of his power. Sorry, I meant that Jon and Martin must journey through hellscape Britain in order to defeat the rule of the Eye and destroy the source of its power. The parallels are obvious.

This season feels so unnecessary, a fantasy quest to undo the tragedy of the fourth season finale. And they largely do, Jon and Martin are gone, but the fears leave the world. It is all justified with the worldbuilding, but again ending on this note of world-saving heroic sacrifice has barely anything to do with horror.

The hellscapes of season five are dark, but they are not effective horror. It’s the final confirmation that Jonathan Sims did not truly understand why his horror stories in the earlier seasons were so effective. And that was because they were set in a largely realistic and contemporary world. People living mundane lives before they are menaced by the supernatural. Most horror fiction does this, not only because it gives a “it can happen to you” quality but because horror most easily comes from taking a safe, mundane and explicable world and subverting that with unexplained and frightening supernatural events.

The Magnus Archives does have stories like that and they work, but then it undermines it by explaining the supernatural in rationalistic terms. And in season 5, it even takes away the mundane setting. Now almost everyone except the servants of the entities live in hellscapes literally designed to make them suffer over and over again. There is no longer any normal world to provide contrast, just entire landscapes of torture. It may sometimes present bitter parodies of realistic situations, but so removed from real life that is hard to connect with or regain the sense of horror from those early stories.

And again, because the rationalistic worldbuilding of The Magnus Archives there is no real surrealism to these hellscapes, because why they exist is explained. There is just torture and no mystery or wonder to the fantasy of season 5. It’s just suffering for the sake of suffering, the worst and least interesting kind of horror. And it’s a deep-seated problem within the show, developed to its utmost extreme.

It's fiction that feels the need to justify itself at literally every turn. It doesn't dare have something happen without explaining why. So we get this fake surrealism, where if anything weird happens it's because supernatural powers want to scare people with the weirdness.

Apparently there will be a sequel, a Magnus Archives 2, despite earlier promises there would not be. And considering the original show went on for far too long and explained its world too much to be truly scary, I don’t think there is much fruitful to be gained there, but we’ll see.