"patroclus is this extremely buff warrior" this, "patroclus is a soft malewife" that, how about this:

he is both at the same time

The deeply moralist tone that a lot of discussions about media representation take on here are primarily neoliberal before they are anything else. Like the shouting matches people get into about “purity culture” “pro/anti” etc nonsense (even if I think it’s true that some people have a deeply christian worldview about what art ought to say and represent about the world) are downstream of the basic neoliberal assumption that we can and must educate the public by being consumers in a market. “Bad representation” is often framed as a writer’s/developer’s/director’s/etc’s failure to properly educate their audience, or to educate them the wrong way with bad information about the world (which will compel their audience to act, behave, internalise or otherwise believe these bad representations about some social issue). Likewise, to “consume” or give money to a piece of media with Bad Representation is to legitimate and make stronger these bad representations in the world, an act which will cause more people to believe or internalise bad things about themselves or other people. And at the heart of both of those claims is, again, the assumption that mass public education should be undertaken by artists in a private market, who are responsible for creating moral fables and political allegories that they will instil in their audiences by selling it to them. These conversations often become pure nonsense if you don’t accept that the moral and political education of the world should be directed by like, studio executives or tv actors or authors on twitter. There is no horizon of possibility being imagined beyond purchasing, as an individual consumer in a market, your way into good beliefs about the world, instilled in you by Media Product 

the mcyt hate on this website is unreal. i mean, i knew that, but somehow it's so much more striking when it's directed at...jimmy solidarity of all people in that poll. like??? hello? yall are talking about jimmy solidarity?

i assume most of these people hate mcyt because of dream and dream smp. and jimmy is just...not associated with that at all. he's interacted with dream, what, maybe once? they were on a mcc team together three years ago in 2020. i literally don't think they've spoken before or since, not that i can think of. he's never been involved in dream smp either. honestly, in terms of degrees of separation, jimmy's just as close to stampycat (via martyn + netty) as he is to dream smp people. to my knowledge jimmy has never been in any controversy. not that i want to speak to soon or have anybody go digging up stuff, but like??? it's jimmy solidarity?? wet paper bag of a silly man who gives his two kitties little kisses on the head? AND PEOPLE ARE HATING ON HIM THAT HARD JUST BECAUSE HE MAKES MINECRAFT VIDEOS?

the entire term "mcyt" is just trashed because nobody knows how to separate the actions of a few people from an entire genre of content. which i already knew. but it just keeps getting continually proved to me

quick how shocking is it that an alicent stan is claiming that DAENERYS of all people isn’t an ‘actual mother’ and that her only children are her ‘fur babies’ and how DARE she be included in a mother’s day post?

she’s the mother of dragons (they were extinct for over a hundred years, she dreams of her hatching them by walking into a great fire, literally breastfeeds them as if they were her own), she’s ‘mhysa’ to the freedmen AND missandei, she became pregnant at 13 after being routinely raped for months and gave birth to a stillborn son. a baby she wanted so desperately, and it’s disingenuous and nasty af to reduce the bonds she’s procured with her dragons, the people she’s freed from their shackles, and her actual dead child(ren, maybe, bc she might have had a miscarriage at the end of adwd) to ‘can’t stand a fur baby bitch’ i am in your fucking walls.

i forget though, the only women deserving of sympathy in universe need to be given made up rape and abuse storylines in order for their suffering to count. not the THIRTEEN YEAR OLD who was sold into slavery, married off against her will to a 30 year old warlord, raped repeatedly to the point she wanted to die; along with being sexually exploited and physically abused by her brother, the only living family member she had left. they also need to be a white red headed woman who’s either an abusive piece of shit or a massive ungrateful xenophobe. i hope you have that same energy when a real life person loses their baby, make sure to tell them that because their kid is dead they can’t call themselves a parent anymore.

there is always this discourse about if transfem and transmascs have it worse

And like, I know it's not really quantifiable and measureable to find the objective suckiness of being trans.

But like

Man it's gotta suck to be a trans guy. This is coming from the perspective of a trans girl btw.

I know that not all transmascs care about passing and having a "fully male body", like everyone decides for themselves what they wanna do. But let's see this from the perspective from a trans guy who wants to be as close to a cis perisex man as possible, this guy is also perisex afab, meaning normal development and stuff.

Ok, so for this man to "finish" his transition, he would need like, what? 3 surgeries. All of which are gatekept. He would need top surgery, tit chop as you say.

This is already a lot, and it sucks fucking dick that y'all have to wait for that. But other than that already sucky and gatekept surgery, we also have phalloplastry, which many countries including Denmark, doesn't offer at all because it's more complicated than vaginoplastry.

This is also a hugely impactful surgery, and I assume that for many trans men, it also doesn't really feel good enough because no semen and dick pump. Of course I'm no expert, so don't take what I say as gospel, I might flat out be wrong about many things.

But that still isn't it. By now we have moved past surgeries the average transfem would "need"

Like yes, many trans women end up getting BA and FFS to combat dysphoria on top of bottom surgery, but they aren't "required" in the same way. So let's round it out and say one half of both of those surgeries count, so that means that transfems on average get two gender affirming surgeries. Which means that now, transfem and transmasc surgery counts are the same.

But wait, there's more!

There are also hysterectomies to remove the uterus and ovaries. Which again is very extremely gatekept because "devine femininity"(bleugh)

That's three surgeries to transition "normally" for a transmasc versus the two of a transfem, already there it's more sucky.

Of course this is not taking other typically gendered features into account like hip and shoulder width, which is too variable to really take into account here. Also it is not as widely different between the sexes as some people claim.

But this is just the surgery front.

I can't even begin to imagine how dysphoria inducing dealing with menstruation must be to a trans man.

Like periods suck dick, I know that from personal exprience. It hurts like shit for like a week at a time and there's blood everywhere.

But for trans men you add fucking dysphoria on top of that???? Hellish, the female reproductive system is so invasive and intrusive. For transfems we can just y'know, not touch the thingy and we won't have to worry about a visceral bloody reminder every month that stays even after hrt starts.

Really what I want to say is that yea sure maybe transfems struggle more with sexism and such whilst transitioning, I'd argue even that is not quantifiable and will be hugely variable on how the individual looks(speaking from experience as a trans girl who has not once had transphobia aimed at her in person in public from strangers)

But the physical struggle of transitioning? I think that trans masculine transitions take the cake by far here. Like objectively too.

And all the transmascs out there at all, doesn't matter how dysphoric you are, or how far you wanna take your transition. I respect you so god damn much, and I'm in awe of all of you. You're genuinely incredible

it's so funny seeing the negative fan reactions to Jax being even more of an asshole than he was in episode 1. like first of all, how can you not enjoy his dickhead antics and growing frustrations at the things that aren't allowing him to be a dickhead 100% of the time. i think it's really entertaining to watch him be a complete jackass to everything and everyone! and second of all, i feel like this is an effect of twitter fandom kiddies always praising a character who's a perfect angel or a "bad boy but he's bad in a good way..." character and deeming characters "immoral" as soon as they do something bad. as soon as that character they attached themselves to isn't what they thought they were, they get super mad about it, even though Jax hasn't really changed at all since episode 1. it's like seeing Jax have more opportunities to be an utterly selfish and destructive asshole put them off from the character entirely because "ohh he's mean now". it's so weird. like god forbid a character has flaws or does objectively horrible things that makes them more entertaining /sarc.

it's kinda like the whole discourse surrounding Pomni "abandoning" Ragatha in the pilot. a lot of people were deeming Pomni to be a terrible character because she did something that could be perceived as "morally incorrect" when 1. she was scared and confused out of her mind and practically in survival mode the entire time she was there, 2. she literally just met Ragatha a while ago and wasn't in the right place to properly prioritise anything but her own survival, and 3. characters are allowed to do """immoral""" things because it's interesting, it makes them more complex and it drives the plot. oh yeah, and they're not real!!! they can't hurt anyone!!! it's so confusing how people will see a character with flaws and then get so enraged about how immoral they are, while completely missing the point as to why a character has flaws in the first place.

i just find it funny how people saw Jax in the first episode, visualised a bad boy version of him in their heads and then got super mad when he was even meaner deliberately in the second one and isn't exactly what they wanted him to be. like you guys just pulled a full 180 and went from loving him to despising him in and instant. characters will have something deserving of a character arc and twitter fandom kiddies will become livid about it.

by the way, i thought Jax being even more of an asshole shined a brighter light on his troubled nature. like,,, to me it seems Jax's asshole-ish attitude is kind of a mask for deeper insecurities, especially when you see his face soften during Kaufmo's funeral, before quickly replacing it with anger and walking away. i think he's grappling with some heavy shit and trying to hide it behind a troublemaker attitude and constantly causing chaos and destruction to distract himself. i think that's why he got so angry and frustrated during the second episode, because he couldn't always have his way. he's definitely hiding something. whether it has something to do with Kaufmo, his situation or both, i wanna see what happens and what's going on with him.

personally, i want Jax to get worse, because it would be a very interesting look at how he deals with the circus compared to everyone else. i want him to get so aggressive and asshole-ish that he does something he deeply regrets (in reference to what a tweet from Gooseworx teases). to me, the biggest allure of TADC is the way the characters react to what's going on around them. each character has such a different way of coping with everything and i think Jax's way of coping, desiring chaos and death and destruction, would be an interesting look into who he is as a character. i want his harmful coping skills to drive him to a breaking point because hell yeah, character development!!! i want to see what makes the asshole into something closer to not really being as much of an asshole as he started out as.

tired of people who want pjo movie references in the disney+ show. "logan lerman should've been-" i don’t care. "poker face in the casino-" actually i hope ms. gaga keeps her entire discography miles away from it. i don't care move on

once again, thee only time dean is reckless with Baby is when he's fucking staring at cas for five minutes straight while driving

forever thinking about how nothing will be the same as before this situation and george won't be the same ever again. i just hope he will take of his mental health after this, no matter what it takes, even if it means he will be far more distanced

anon this is seriously making me suicidal

on a real note i mostly worry about how this will impact his ability to form connections and make relationships with other people. like imagine feeling too cautious to go near non-ccs because oh god what if theyre a secret fan or what if they put something online and ‘expose’ me. but then u can’t go near fellow cc’s either because you cannot tell who has genuine intentions and who just wants to fuck you over later down the line. and none of this is even shit fans like me should even be thinking about i cannot stress enough how none of this should’ve been public and i feel so fucking bad for him that he’s had to be so publicly vulnerable after being so private his whole career.

on another note i suppose dnf will be trauma bonded for life now

How can I express that people saying the “proship vs antiship fandom discourse is useless” and the “proship and anti labels are stupid/useless” makes me want to roll my eyes so far back into my head that I actually get to see what’s inside there without making it seem like I’m trying to start a fight?

because like I get it, I really wanna say this discourse is stupid and pointless and that the “proship” and “antiship” labels should have never been created but unfortunately people’s lives have been ruined thanks to this “discourse” so I don’t think it’s as “pointless” as some people make it out to be.

like…i don’t know what to say other then…cool. Your think the proship and antiship labels are pointless. Cool, you think this discourse is pointless. You want a cookie for reaching that conclusion?

once again feeling very grateful for my curated internet experience bc the only takes i have seen so far on my dash about the AO3 thing have been "this is pretty clearly bad actors posing as another group to stoke racist fears, be smarter and more compassionate than that"

“if the IHs were ideologically consistent ab redemption then they should have let Ankarna kill their parents/middle school class/themselves(?) after killing the rat grinders!!” do you guys hear yourselves

i think ppl who are super online or into fandom should watch/read/etc something without ever touching fandom discourse or making aus or shipping characters just like every once in a while

also i just don't care about the union criticism anymore i feel like that shit drowned out the fact the studio ghosted pomme for three weeks.

I could be really off the mark here, but I thought I remembered seeing you reblog art shipping Tintin and captain Haddock?? Anyway, saw this mural and thought of you

this is one of the funniest asks i've ever received LMAO good mural. thank you for sharing. good for them good for them

Idk too much drama out there. I love fandoms. I love forming a community made entirely because of love. I love people who use their creative skills to create art out of love. I love keysmashing in the comments and "OMG I'M EATING THIS" and "SO REAL SO TRUE" and I love people who draw stick figures and I love people who draw art that wouldn't look out of place in the Louvre and I love people who write 10k essays and analyses and I love people who write short ficlets and I love people who write 50k longfic and I love people who make memes and incorrect quotes and I love people who just lurk and I love people who go "omg you like x? I like x too!! What's your favourite character/song/moment/scene/part???" and I love love love love that fandoms are like a group project I love that you can just vibe or you can use it an outlet for your creativity or even jokes and memes and I love that it's. Community.