genuinely horrible how aave has been twisted into either “teen slang” or something absolutely Horrible and Ridiculous and it’s made out like these quirky white people made it when it’s existed for YEARS. it leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. especially when our language becomes a meme and something you say to b funny when this is just everyday speak for a lot of us. the shit with sus and “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler” or whatever stupid shit makes me go Oh. okay. y’all will just say anything ig

the amount of restraint it takes for me not to physically react to nbs butchering shit they heard online is. immense.

going to a majority non-black campus has given me my fair share of antiblackness through "haha i learned a funny word on tiktok!!! rizzler pookie!!! my deadass is so silly, no cap!!" LIKE SHUT THE HELL UP!!! SILENCIO!!!

even ppl that ive made friends with start doing this (slay, banger, etc etc) and its such an awful jerk to my fucking mood bro. NOT EVEN TO MENTION...ARE YOU TRYING TO TALK TO ME WITH A BLACCENT BECAUSE IM BLACK OR ARE YOU SO DETATCHED FROM THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THESE WORDS DO YOU GENUINELY NOT KNOW?? SHOULD I SAY SOMETHING AND RISK GETTING SHUT DOWN OR...??

part of me is glad that i went to a black-centric highschool cause idk id rather not be furthered conditioned into uncomfortable silence when a nb mf decides that a random word ive scarcely use even myself becomes their favorite buzzword of the month. it feels like EVERYTHING mooches off of black culture and it manifests through the smallest shit. im so close to blocking ppl atp but what sucks is that even then--a lot of folks genuinely dont know and would likely change their behavior if you just asked. BUT ALSO A LOT OF RACISTS DO IT TO PURPOSEFULLY!!! DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH PARANOIA THAT GIVES ME??

and the words that get butchered are just...some of the most random shit??? like theres too many regional dialects of aave for me to recount but. rizz??? thats the word yall are going to mutilate next??? YALL HAVE KIDS SAYING RIZZ??? "standing on business""??? LIKE THESE ARE WORDS/PHRASES IVE HEARD AND USED BUT NOW MY BRAIN IS GOING TO PERMENANTLY ASSOCIATE THEM AS MEME BUZZWORDS??? "ASF"??? I FEEL LIKE IM IN AN EPISODE OF ATLANTA!!

JUST THE LACK OF RESPECT AND UNDERSTANDING FOR REAL LANGUAGE IS SO SURREAL BECAUSE IVE RARELY HEAR ANY NB SPEAKING THIS WAY UNTIL SUDDENLY IT BLOWS UP ON SOCIAL MEDIA!!!

i dont know any other way to describe it then just the background surrealism episodes of atlanta give off. like the ultimate gaslighting of shit that is obviously off-putting and weird but the majority of niggas doing the harm in the first place either want to convince you its ok or dont realize the effect of their actions. and you dont know which.

Twitter doomscrolling

CW: heavy topics such as mental health issues, transphobia, physical and digital self harm, and are all mentioned (sometimes in an irreverent tone/black comedy)

I have no idea how to use tumblr or how to tag things so if this is sloppy I apologize.

I realized recently that twitter is quickly becoming a digital self harm machine for me. I originally signed up for it to post about my now defunct yt channel and twitch. It slowly evolved into a way to discover new artists, memes, and be a goblin with people. I would never retweet furry art for fear of friends finding out my interest in that stuff and get hectored for it, then suddenly peoples likes appeared on the tl which indirectly outed me as a furry. oops :V

Anyway point is the ratio of chill and doom scrolling was skewed heavily towards posi-vibes, and when there was some terrible news it would be sprinkled between memes and thicc furry women. It was sparce enough that I wasn't overwhelmed by it, and If it was a big deal I would look into it later on my own and/or talk about it with friends.

Somewhere along the line the ratio flipped. To be honest, this is mostly my fault. I somehow ended up following over a thousand people who are all mostly like-minded politically. After I got over my big brain enlightened centrist phase- which I got over very quickly after I put my money where my mouth is and genuinely tried to listen to both sides and learned that a lot of the far right are, as the kids say, "mad cringe"- I realized I was left leaning. I'm also bi and like when PoC aren't being systemically racist upon'd (?), so I naturally gravitated towards like minded people. Especially furries. Like, a lot of furries.

I'm not bringing up political ideologies to call out everyone that disagrees with me as being shrimp brained dildos (they are though, especially about video game and cartoons), I need to paint the landscape of my timeline for you. I'm sure if you've read this far you either figured out where this is going or have a similar twitter experience; Hundreds of people retweet the same tragedies, doom posts, or some kind of calls to action to cancel or unfollow someone for reasons ranging from something as severe and legitimately concerning as grooming to something as meaningless as they're an artist that *checks notes* gave someone's shoulders and knees a uh... slight blush/warm red glow...?

It's too fucking much, but I still blame myself. Despite the toll it takes I keep opening the app, I keep scrolling through my timeline wading through it all for a crumb of muscular orc gf art or a meme about a dude eating dirt or something. I know what's there, I know its going to upset me but I keep doing it. Recently I started keeping track of who was liking and retweeting all this shit and I noticed a pattern; a shotgun blast of bad news, all retweeted within a minute or two between each other by the same account. It read something like this:

TRANS PERSON MURDERED IN HATE CRIME

LIST OF CONTENT CREATORS THAT GROOMED MINORS

HEARTBREAKING: GUY YOU HATE HAS ABSOLUTE DOGSHIT OPINION

Cat pic :3

AI ART, VOICES, AND DEEP FAKES ARE RUINING LIVES

POLITICIAN SERVES 2 DAYS HOUSE ARREST AFTER DRUNK DRIVING THROUGH A SCHOOL

soft cute art uwu

THREAD WITH PICS OF 27 MORE TRANS PEOPLE WHO WERE MURDERED

ELON MUSK MAKING THE WORLD WORSE

ANDREW TATE

I wish I was exaggerating when I say this, but copy and paste that 52 times from different people and that's my timeline. It's affecting my mood and my energy but I can't stop looking. I have no other social media outlets because ironically I have issues socializing and putting myself out there. It's now at the point where my brain now focuses on who is posting it.

I'm very cynical due to being afflicted with what therapists call "heavy lore", so I can't help but wonder; are the people retweeting this stuff even reading it? Do they think about it? Like I said four tangents ago, that pattern was retweeted by the same person in less than a minute. So.. what is this for? Clout? Have we gotten to the point where it is now a social obligation to retweet shit like that to let everyone know "Hey I care, I'm not a prick, please don't unfollow me!" or "As an empath, everyone needs to know I am capable of empathy, lest they neglect to like comment and superscribe". Maybe it stems from a feeling of powerlessness. Almost like they figure there's nothing we can do, so let's shove it in everyone's face in the hopes that it reaches the very few that actually have the power to get the train moving.

I'm sure people with the reading comprehension of a toothpick will think "Guess you hate all those people who died/suffered/are in need huh? Sorry to disrupt your furry porn with the REAL WORLD, BRO.", but the reality is that I do care. We all do. The issue is that shoving it in each others' faces to affirm that yes, we all agree that this is terrible and deserves to be rectified, but it is exhausting when it's coupled with the fact that we lack the power to make lasting change alone, and those who have the power to make a change refuse to do it.

We do it in the hopes it reaches new eyes and ears, but... we are all within the same circles. Sure, it might reach someone outside of our normal circle, but chances are their circle overlaps with ours. We're creating a feedback loop that is inducing some kind of social energy debt to a social circle that ultimately already knows and agrees that the bad thing that happened is bad. We are all allowing what is arguable the lamest and most infuriating kind of vampire sink it's crusty teeth into us, and its not at all hot like it is with actual vampires, and all it does is remind me how truly powerless I am in the face of these tragedies.

I know other people feel it too, because I never see people rally and take action to change systemic issues that matter. I watched people use more energy to get rid of cartoon characters they deemed problematic -in shows they don't even watch- than they have on anything actually useful. I know it sounds like I'm being judgy and harsh, but I will be the first to admit that I am plat II in slacktivism just like every other terminally online person I know. But again, I can't even blame them. They are using what little power they have to do something they feel is making some kind of change for the better.

I've reread this, and I think I figured out my problem. It's not that the problems themselves are insurmountable and unending, it's the unending avalanche of tragedy that is my timeline that makes it seem like these issues can't be conquered. The progress the world has made despite the misguided people that stand in the way is substantial despite the long road we still have to walk. That being said my mental health is on a steady decline and I need to mute or unfollow some mfers cause they seem to feed on it. I spoke with some friends about it and they gave me a new perspective on it. When you're depressed, the easiest emotion to access is anger. In a weird way we are all participating in the perpetuation of an anger economy just to feel fucking anything. This might sound weird, but I think I'm substituting physical self harm with digital self harm. It would explain why I can't stop despite it siphoning what little energy I have left from day to day life. I'm confident in this theory because I've physically hurt myself before, and all of this evokes similar feelings of both anger and guilt.

Whatever the case it's keeping me from seeing friends' art and posts, furry stuff, and terrible memes, and I think we can all agree that is the most tragic part of all of this.

KOOKIE I HAD THE BEST DAY TODSY WTF?!

OK FIRST I HAD MY FIRST FULL PERIOD WITH MY SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHER

OMG HE’S SO GIRLBOSS 😤😤😤😤😤 HES A FEMINIST, ANTI RACIST, ANTI SEXIST, ANTI HOMOHOBIC, ANTI MISOGYNY 🤧🤧🤧🤧 NOT TO MENTION HE HAS A PRIDE FLAG WITH ALL THE COLORS AND A BADASS SNAKE TAT 🤭🤭 🫶🏽

He’s Asian American, or half Filipino and half American. AND HE DOESNT SUGARCOAT HOW BAD AMERICA IS LIKE TWO MINUTES AFTER WE WALKED IN HE STRAIGJT UP SAID “WE STOLE THIS LAND FROM NATIVE AMERICANS AND I WILL NEVER FORGIVE AMERICA FOR THAT.” LIKE HELLO?! YES STAN!!!

He’s so SOCIALLY AWARE about cultural incompetence and appropriation!!! He appreciates black brown and Asian communities so fucking much and it’s like, yes!! FINALLY!! He also has so many Roe v Wade posters BECAUSE HE BELIEVES ABORTION IS A HUMAN FUCKING RIGHT‼️‼️‼️‼️ he talked about how rock and roll is literally from Black women, a church sister moved really fast on her guitar and BAM ROCK AND ROLL and he outright admitted that white people appropriated the heck out of it and made it a “white thing” 😨

Since he’s half Filipino, he has this fish hook (?) necklace and tattoo because it honors his leadership. And he said when people ask him “omg u have a Maui necklace” he feels bad because his culture is reduced to a cartoon character!!! And I made so many connections with him in terms of cultural disrespect. I said that it’s sort of like jasmine bc I said “when I complain that there’s no south Asian representation in media someone and their mother has to tell me ‘what about jasmine/Aladdin’ these media are never culturally accurate. Bc aladddin is literally made of Turk, Desi, and Arabic culture mixed in to one to give white people “ a taste of south Asians 😜😍” and I said that and he was like “RIGHT, ITS SO FRUSTRATING BEING REDUCED TO SOMETHING THATS NOT CULTURALLY ACCURATE.” AND I WAS LIKE?! HELLO HE’S SO AWARE ABOUT CURRENT MEDIA LIKE MY OLD HISTORY TEACHER COULD NEVER 😩

NEXT WE WERE READING THESE POEMS AND THE TOPIC KF MISOGNy and you wanna know what he told the boys?!

“All you little boys here, if you wanna be a REAL man in the future then being a REAL man is not putting down women. Women have to right to speak up and put you in your place if you’re being rude, which men have a long history of doing. If you ever disrespect a woman gouge your eyes out and be ashamed. I don’t wanna see that Andrew Tate behavior in my classroom. I also don’t thing your mothers will be happy you spend your life on sexism and misogyny, so If you don’t wanna explain your actions to your own mother, i demand you change your mentality if you haven’t already.”

LIKE HELLO?! HE KNOWS ABOUT ANDREW TATE?! I JUST KNOW HE WOULD EAT UP THAT H0E IN SECONDS

He’s my new fav teacher no questions asked.

Also my playlist KEPT PLAYING MY FAVORITE SONGS?! Like it must be that I followed you and realized that your so amazing that I got all this good karma 🥵🥵🥵

ANYWAYS ILYSM KOOTI FRUITY 😍😍😍😍🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽 HOW WAS UR DAY?!

KUMA. IM GOING TO SNEAK INTO YOUR FUCKING SOCIALS CLASS. IM ON THE WAY RN BROOO UR TEACHER SOUNDS AMAZING AGHHHH HE SOUNDS SO COOL ???? LIKE ITS SO RARE TO MEET AN ADULT LIKE THAT IN GENERAL AGH IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU IM JEALOUSSSSS 😭😭

bro just the name andrew tate makes me furious i’ve only seen a few clips of him because i genuinely cannot listen to the shit rhat comes out of his mouth 💀 so happy he got his platform taken away BUT AGHH UR TEACHER SAID NOTHING BUT FACTS. SO TRUE BRO ESPECIALLY ABORTION. ANYONE WHO THINKS ABORTION SHOULD BE ILLEGAL NEEDS TO GET TF AWAY FROM ME LIKE ABSOLUTELY NOT 🥰🥰 as he should he would be my favorite too ☝️💯

OMG YES WHATRE SOME OF UR FAVORITE SONGS I’D LOVE TO LISTEN TO THEM 🫶🫶 and yeah that was actually me i personally told ur playlist to play the bops!! 💯🥰 ur welcome!!

ILYT KUMIE WUMIE 💖💯🫶 MY DAY WAS GREAT IT WAS SI NICE AND SUNNY AND AND IM SO EXCITED CUZ SPLATOON 3 CAME OUT WHICH IVE BEEN WAITING FOR FOR OVER A YEAR. IM GONNA PLAY IT ALL DAY MWAHHAHA

Review: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

Content warning: this review will discuss misogyny, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia and ableism.

It appears I am having terrible luck with reading this year. I should have known when the gap between by last book I finished and this one (not counting the two graphic novels I blazed through in like two hours in between) has been six months. I started reading The Murdstone Trilogy in January/February time, after the disappointment of Empress of Flames. I hoped that the things I heard - a Pratchett-esque satirical take on fantasy literature, full of good humour and entertaining challenges of the clichés we all know - would make this a fun and easy read, lighthearted and quick.

Oh God, I was so wrong.

Not wanting to pick up another book and brand my 2022 reading a two-for-two of DNFs has meant I haven’t really read in six months. I did not want to finish this book. It sat on my bedside table like a piece of set dressing, collecting dust, seven chapters in and I was loath to pick it up again. But what is it that’s so bad about this book?

Well, let me tell you. It is utterly devoid of heart. It is a book so concerned with cynicism, with belittling others, with being removed and aloof and bitter, that it removes any fun it might have had. I wondered if, perhaps, the use of an ableist slur twelve pages in meant that this book wasn’t for me. Maybe, I thought, trying to be generous, it was from the early 2000s, some time where the R slur got thrown around casually without thought for its actual cruel ramifications. Where the hatred of disabled people was challenged only really by disabled people themselves, where the publicity surrounding not being a fucking monster to minorities was nowhere near what it is today, where the “woke mob” is decried every time someone famous and beloved is revealed to be a fucking monster.

Unfortunately, this book was published in 2014.

And it only got worse from there. Aside from the frankly disgusting way the protagonist talks about women - any women, as often as possible - there’s also the use of transphobic slurs and casual discussion about if a gay man with social power sexually assault the male protagonist, he should just smile and not make a fuss. It’s funny! Queer people existing - trans people, gay people - are actually a way to show off how weird and not like good old Blighty the USA is. Queerness is a side-effect of modern-day image-obsessed celebrity culture, and considering how bitterly and viciously this book rails against the progression of the world through technology and social media, it is distinctly not a positive thing.

Now, I know. Books do not have to be moral. Protagonists can be horrible people, I know. I’ve read books with horrible protagonists, and loved them. This book felt like a gut punch, over and over. How far did I make it into it? Seven and a half chapters. I reached a point where I realised I wasn't enjoying myself, and I did not need to martyr myself to this bitter and dull piece of shit book for the sake of proving that no, I do understand that flawed protagonists exist and can be good to read. I have a Masters degree in literature. I am required to prove nothing to no one, thank you.

BELOW ARE JUST A FEW OF MY “”FAVOURITE”” PASSAGES. THESE WILL BE MISOGYNIST, ABLEIST, RACIST TRANSPHOBIC AND HOMOPHOBIC, AS WELL AS CONTAINING A MENTION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO READ THEM, PLEASE SKIP TO “FIN”.

“It made Asperger’s cool” (page 11)

“You’ve made that whole area, you know, boys who are inadequate, your own.” (page 11)

“No one wants to publish another book about sensitive retarded boys” (page 12)

“It’s about a sensitive adopted boy of mixed race with learning difficulties who’s good at football and believes his real father might be a Premiership footballer” (page 12)

“He picked at the wrongly hinged boy in the wheelchair whom Minerva had pointed out” (page 71)

“Viscid filaments stretched between his lips” (page 72)

“The boy’s eyes swivelled and his buckled fingers clawed the air” (page 72)

“His teenage son is a tranny” (page 76)

“He’s as gay as bunting, and if he cops a feel of your bum I want you to promise me you won’t make a fuss, OK? It won’t come to anything.” (page 77)

FIN

It was at this point, having slogged through ableism and transphobia and more misogyny than would be practical to list in the above section, but trust me, this protagonist is an incel through and through, than I threw the book down. I had only picked the damn thing up again after months of not touching it because I was waiting for my phone to update and couldn’t be asked to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to go to my laptop. What a vile, sad, disgusting little book. What a waste of ink, what a waste of my time and money.

There is one, final thing I’d like to touch on, before I hurl this mistake of a book to the winds. It’s less…skin crawling, shall we say, than the rest of the above bullshit. But it hurt me very personally, in ways different to how the ableism and homophobia and transphobia hurt me.

I do LARPing. For those who don’t know, that’s Live Action Role Play, like a renfaire or cosplaying your own OC, but with plot and worldbuilding. I run LARPs and I play them. They are tremendous fun, and require a level of unabashed love for what you’re doing, authentic and honest and joyful. I love fantasy in the same way, the way it is so often unabashed that yes, the evil in the text can be defeated and we will come home, the world saved but we irrevocably changed, but we won, we won, we won. Fantasy is a genre of pretending and refusing to allow that to be strangled out of you by common sense or grown up nonsense. Mal Peet does everything he can in this novel to strangle it out of me. He is cruel and dismissive. Murdstone calls Tolkien “pretentious escapist nonsense”, as if The Lord of the Rings was invented out of nowhere so Tolkien could feel clever about himself, as if there isn’t a rich history of fantasy being written in reference and reverence to texts that have come before that goes all the way back to Beowulf and beyond - a history I have personally studied at university. Books, and fantasy, is all capitalistic nightmare foolishness, according to this book. The publishing industry churns out only what sells, and writers write only what sells, and there is no joy or authenticity in it, only cynicism and money.

It’s no wonder I quite literally tossed it aside 77 pages in.

Mal Peet, I’m sorry your protagonist is so much smarter than the rest of the world. I’m sorry that this book was marketed as a fun romp through fantasy tropes, something that I picked up hoping for just that. And I am so, so sorry that it led to me not reading anything for six fucking months because I thought I should at least have the decency to try and finish it.

To the bin with it. I move on to better things.

Verdict:

A cynical and bitter, boring book that has the additional gall to be cruel to minorities. A lot. A waste of my time and money that I could never recommend to anyone. 0/5, 0/10, whatever rating you choose, I hated it.

.

So I know absolutely nothing about Leverage except what I've been seeing you post lately and I have to admit you're making it look tempting to watch! Can I ask what are some of your favorite things about the show/reasons you would suggest people watch it? And is there really a poly relationship that is canon?

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I am going to do my best not to just “asdfghkjl” at you and answer coherently.

In a nutshell, Leverage is about 5 people. 4 are criminals (Parker, Hardison, Eliot and Sophie) with different and unique skill-sets and 1 is an ex-insurance investigator (Nate) who, at one point or another in his career, has tracked down (or at least attempted to) the other 4. The whole show is essentially: man reluctantly reforms 4 criminals to use their criminal powers for good and 4 criminals move into man’s life and stubbornly refuse to leave because, goddammit, now they have morals. 

I’ve got a lot of favourite things about the show but the main ones are as follows:

1. Found family. And I’m not talking about loners who come together to fight crime and happen to co-exist to the point where they realise they happen to have found themselves a family. I mean, Nate and Sophie are the Drunk Uncle and Wine Aunt who somehow become Mom and Dad to 3 beautiful criminal children. Mom and Dad love their criminal babies and the kids love them (as well as each other, but we’ll come to that in a moment). You get amazing family moments such as: Mom and Dad packing the kids lunch before sending them out to kick corporate greed’s ass; Mom and Dad giving the kids ridiculously expensive and personal Christmas presents causing their most Grumpy Kid to go very very quiet and soft as he runs off to gleefully play with his new murder toy; the kids interrupting Mom and Dad’s big Movie Style Kiss to ask if they can please keep their new underground layer and huffing and puffing when Dad tells them no.

2. Found family: the OT3 edition. To answer your question, the OT3 is indeed canon, confirmed by the creator. Now, usually, “confirmed by the creator” infuriates me because most of the time it’s a way for a creator to be seen as “progressive” without doing anything to actually be progressive. That isn’t the case here. The OT3 are built up carefully and while it is obvious the creators didn’t originally intend for all 3 of them to become a relationship in the romantic sense, by mid-season 5 we are given a very clear picture of where Parker, Hardison and Eliot are heading in their relationship. There aren’t any kisses at the end to signal this but there are solid marriage vows in not only one but two episodes. (And by marriage vows I mean literal equivalents of marriage vows: “for better or worse” and “’til death do us part”. I’m not even exaggerating). The OT3 also doesn’t need explicit romantic narratives to convey how much they love each other. Their love is laced through the whole show, from the way they teach each other things to the way they respond to each other and work as a unit. The way they fiercely protect and admire each other. Like someone once said, if you need characters to kiss or say I love you to let the audience know they love each other, you are writing them wrong. 

Aside from that, each of the parings in the OT3 are just. Gah. They are so well done, with friendship being the solid basis for them all. The creators never expect the audience to assume anything about them or fill in the gaps. They give us their relationships on screen and reference many things off-screen to show us how these relationships continue to build in between episodes.

Hardison and Parker are a canon couple and date in the show: it’s approached slowly and they are so goddamned sweet. They are basically every fluffy slow-burn trope with a healthy dash of mutual pining in the mix. They are basically that quote “love is patient, love is kind”. (I would like to add their romance never becomes the focus of the show or overrides the importance of any other relationship they have with the other characters, especially Eliot.)

Hardison and Eliot are the Old Married Couple and from day one are already bickering and looking at each other/making comments that are found in every UST fic ever (not to mention Hardison has a very good knack for making Eliot grin like a little kid, when usually he’s basically an Angry Little Chef Man). They argue, they play, and love each other plain as day. 

Parker and Eliot are more subtle but every bit as wonderful. They have an unspoken connection and understand each other on a level no-one else can. Parker and Eliot are not good with giving themselves over to affection for different reasons (and Hardison plays a central role in helping them realise it’s okay to want it and have it- that boy has endless patience) but there is something so beautiful in the way the two of them come together on their own and develop their own special bond that works for them. Parker and Eliot are that trope where the characters don’t need to speak to understand each other perfectly. They just do. Their love language is a lot of the time non-verbal but speaks volumes. (Parker also likes to annoy the hell out of Eliot and Eliot....just.....lets...her. Because he’s soft. The softest, grumpiest boy.) 

I could go into so much depth for each pairing and their dynamics as a 3 but that's for another post.

3. Subverting stereotypes. There is the occasional hiccup in the show regarding stereotypes but ultimately, Leverage gets an A+ when it comes to writing characters and making them 3 dimensional people who are not defined by certain characteristics or events. Nate could so easily fall into the White Man Pain trope where he uses the trauma of losing his kid as a reason as to why he is entitled to act like a dick. Nate is a dick but he doesn’t use his pain to excuse it and I appreciate that. Hardison is a black man who is soft and nurturing. Easily the most empathetic and patient of the group. He’s nerdy, an actual genius, and has the biggest heart of all the characters. Nate is maybe the glue but Hardison is definitely the heart. Media’s usual aggressive, amongst other, racist stereotypes can fuck right off. Parker is canonically autistic (I am sure this was confirmed by one of the creators) and she is not defined by it. It’s not written as some kind of singular personality trait. It’s part of what makes up Parker but it’s only one facet of who she is and not once is her actions, thoughts or feelings treated like a joke. Sometimes people don’t understand why she does and says the things she does but it’s met with patience and fondness over the course of the show. Equally, it’s not met with over-caution. Parker is just Parker. No-one tries to change her. The other nice thing is Hardison, who always makes sure Parker knows she’s amazing because of who she is and not in spite of it. Finally, Sophie is in her 40s. She’s not treated like she’s past her prime. Ever. She’s sexy, smart and never is she pitted against or compared to Parker (who is younger) for anything. Sophie is amazing and there’s never even a conversation of “I may be older but I am still *insert adjective typically associated with younger women here*”. Sophie is possibly the first female character I’ve ever seen who isn’t just unapologetic about her age but has never had to apologise for her age. It’s a non-issue and that’s that. The women on the show are written so well, right down to secondary characters and it’s beyond refreshing.  

4.) It’s just fun. The show has a “monster of the week” type format. Except instead of a ghoul or a ghost, the monster is some corrupt wealthy and powerful individual or organisation. The show draws on real-life individuals to do this and therefore closely parallels real-life people and events. It addresses important political, economical, social and environmental issues while at the same time remaining fun and light-hearted. The characters constantly get the chance to play dress up and by GOD do they have fun with it. You get to watch Eliot beat up bad guys in the most delightful of ways, usually after a witty non-sequitur and with a weapon you’d never think could be a weapon. The dialogue and back and forth between the characters is everything. And finally - my favourite thing- the team can never resist striking a dramatic pose after they’ve taken down the bad guy, making sure the bad guy sees them. I mean, they COULD just walk away, satisfied they’ve taken the person down, but nope. They gotta be dramatic bitches 24/7 and pose like they are models for every single month of this year’s Criminal Calendar.  

5.) Competence Porn. So. Much. Competence Porn.  

Honestly, I could list a thousand reasons for why Leverage is amazing but to list them would to be spoiling so many amazing moments you’d get to discover for the first time on your own if you do choose to watch it. It’s the kind of show you can watch with an eagle-eye and sink your teeth into. But it’s also the kind of show if, you would prefer, put on in the background for something entertaining while you do something else. Each episode is about the job at hand but it’s made up of so many moments between the characters that show how much the creators and writers care about them. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll do whatever it is you do when something Soft and Wonderful happens that makes your heart melt. I am so beyond grateful for Leverage. It’s everything I always wanted in a show. Nearly every show I’ve watched in the past 10 years has disappointed me in some way, usually either because the writers run out of steam or characters who I love are treated poorly or given some kind of unnecessary “shock value” arc. Leverage doesn’t do that. Leverage is what it says on the bottle. Fandom isn’t something I joined because I needed canon fix-its. Fandom only enhances and celebrates an already excellent canon. 

Wayne's statement on the racist caracatures in last nights stream and the makeship plushie

Image ID's under the cut

hey everybody. last night's stream was a weird one. the things that went down when we tried to play Bullet Roulette were not great. it made us as a team realize that we need to put our foot down and make a statement. about last night, and a lot of other things. what you're about to read is not only my words, but those of the entire team.

the first thing i should get out of the way is this: the caricatures that appeared in Bullet Roulette suck, and we're all disappointed that one of our favorite old VR games has that bullshit in it. we all made the fact that we thought it was shitty as clear as we could last night while we were playing. we tried to reset the lobby 3 times to fix the bug that forcibly made us all be that model. it did not work. we tried to keep playing it for a little while and then give it one last try. which, of course, did not work. what took place afterwards is what we'll be talking about here.

the reaction a small group of you had to these events was disappointing, and in some cases, unacceptable. we are not upset with native americans who were uncomfortable with the caricatures, we are upset with those of you who instantly demonized us for not 'turning off the game immediately'. the reason we as the streamers and the mods repeatedly asked everyone to 'move on' is because we acknowledged what we had just experienced in the game was wrong, and condemned it. we expressed how we felt about the models out loud multiple times. while unproblematic media exists, there is a lot of media that has problematic elements in it. it's not great, but that's the way things are. things are not always black & white. the expectation that the moment an unsavory concept is encountered in something on stream that we drop what we're doing and shut off the program is absolutely unreasonable.

if we run into problematic content, do not assume we automatically endorse it just because we did not remove it from the screen immediately. we can still experience it as a whole while acknowledging what's wrong with it. take LISA, for instance. I loved what I played of that game, and I know a large majority of you guys loved those streams too. LISA has problematic shit in it. early on in those streams we encountered a character that was a racist caricature of a black man. we acknowledged that it fucking sucked, and we kept playing. and both the crew and chat were able to continue maturely while acknowledging that the content was problematic.

while this is only somewhat related, i might as well also address the makeship situation, and those of you who came after me for deleting their initial statement. I deleted it because it was bad. that e-mail was an apology from the worker to me, not meant as a public apology. it didn't approach the situation properly. I was scrambling to get something up to address the concerns while i was in the middle of a 24 hour multi day road trip (one whose existence I had to hide for the stream gag), I just took whatever makeship would give me. when I actually had a little bit of time to sit down and read it, and read what some of you had to say about it, I realized that it didn't actually mean anything. I deleted it, and spoke to my handlers at makeship, and informed them about the biggest issue with that shitty anti-centrism plush: what was essentially a masked swastika next to a star of david. if you look up the original designs of that stupid ball, you can find that it actually had a swastika on it, and the creator hid that fact from team members at makeship by changing it in the concept art he shared with them. it might be hard to believe, but their team genuinely did not know about this. and they did not consider why that plushie was as shitty as it was. after I informed them and talked it over, they removed the plushie from their website completely and decided to not work with that creator going forward. their team thanked our campaign for bringing them to the realization that they need to more properly vet the creators they work with and the origins of their designs. what disappointed me in this scenario were those of you who assumed the worst about me just because i had not made a statement about it while i was doing my best behind the scenes to work things out.

we also know that being publicly accessible artists & entertainers comes with a fair amount of vulnerability through exposure, however the amount of invasions of privacy and harassment a lot of us have experienced in the past year is worth taking note of. we are people. what if you woke up to dms from people saying they found your name and your phone number? what if you got a text from a stranger saying they found your information? how would you feel? these are questions you need to ask yourself as a viewer even if you've never gone that far. these are things that have actually happened to us.

being a fan comes with as much responsibility as being a creator; just because you are consuming what we make does not make this a one way relationship where you're invisible. what you do and say is being felt by actual humans, and the information you share or try to get not only affects us but the people we know. it has at times been so invasive and ridiculous that some of us have considered stopping completely. as a fan and a viewer, your responsibility is to respect us as much as you would respect any other human being; putting us up on pedestals to the point where some of us get treated like objects or things is the absolute opposite of respect and we've mentioned this a few times. we will be taking much stronger action on these matters from here on out; please observe how you view us and ask yourself if you'd look at a friend or family member the same way. if you wouldn't, reconsider your relationship with what we make.

some of you hold me and the crew on a pedestal in a way that makes us deeply uncomfortable. this isn't the first time we've experienced something like last night. it has happened on other team member's streams. the hostility we are met with when we encounter something unsavory on stream is ridiculous. after shutting down the game, seeing a few of you in the chat screaming at us, attacking our characters, invalidating all of our values and past deeds as a team over encountering unexpected bigotry in a game and condemning it, not perpetuating it ourselves, is infuriating. to all of us. you do not have the right to harass us over something like this. coming into our DM's and repeating yourselves, accusing us of lying about values and calling us awful people is harassment. it is extremely immature. and it is behavior we no longer want in this community. we are human. we aren't meant to be your perfect social/political pillars.

when these things happen, you know it sucks, we know it sucks, we all know why it sucks, and while we will always point it out when we see it, the expectation of us to derail our show and explain to you why its bad and apologize for it being on the screen is not an expectation we will meet. acknowledge, and move on. a statement does not always need to be made. going forwards, we'll be increasing moderation measures in regards to the harassment of crew/staff and the mitigation of events like these in the future. thank you for understanding.

- All of Radio TV Solutions & The WRTV Mod Team

I am against the "Americanization" of fandoms.

What this applies to

Holding non American characters (and sometimes even fans) to an American moral standard. This includes

Refusing to take into account that, first things first, America is NOT the target audience, so certain tropes that would or would not pass in the west are different in Japan.

Like seriously, quite a few of the jokes are just not going to pass or hit, because they require background information that is not universal.

Assuming all American experience is standard. (This could mean watering down just how much pressure is placed on Japanese youth irl by saying that sort of thing is universal (while it is, to a degree, Japanese suicide rates are pretty fucking high because of how fast paced and work heavy some of their loads tend to be), and it's really annoying and rude when someone is trying to speak out about how heavy and harsh the standards are placed on them to succeed just for some American whose mom occasionally yells at them to do their homework dropping by to say "it's like that everywhere")

Demonizing (or wubbifying) a character using American morals, including and up to harassing fans over their interpretations or gatekeeping whether or not a character "should" get development (while you shouldn't do that fucking period, it's rude and annoying- this is specifically for the people who use American standards without acknowledging the cultural gap between them and, you know, the fucking target audience) ((Like seriously, saying "It's different in Japan" is not the end all be all excusing someone's actions, but sometimes the author didn't immediately think that maybe (insert vaguely universal thing) was that bad or that heavy of a topic before they put it into their media. If you don't want to see things like that? Pick a different series and stop harassing the fans))

Getting mad at or making fun of Japan's attempts to satirize their own culture. (A good example is Ace Attorney! To most of us, it's just a funny laugh can you imagine if courts were actually like that- guess what? Japan's are! (Not that America's are actually that much better, they just look good on paper))

Making America/American issues the center of your fan spaces

(Usually without sharing or bringing light to the issues that other countries are going through)

Your

Experiences

Are

Not

Univseral!

Seriously, very few things across America, even, are universal. Texas things the hundreds are nothing while Minnesota's like "oh it's only thirty degrees below zero"- so for fucks sake, stop assuming that all other countries work in ways similar to America.

It's good and important to share Ameican issues with your American followers, but guess what? America isn't the only country out there, and it's certainly not the only one going through bullshit. Don't pull shit like "why's no one reblogging this?" or "why should I care about what's happening in (X country)?"

Don't assume everyone lives in America.

Stop assuming everyone lives in America.

America is not and has never been the target audience for anime, and it's certainly not the only country outside of Japan that enjoys it.

Like I said above, sometimes Japan attempts to satirize its own culture. We can't tell what is and isn't meant as satire, because it's not our culture.

Social media activism can be tiring and maybe you don't have the energy to focus on things that are out of your control, but, if someone tells you about the shit they're going through, don't bring American politics up.

For the neurodivergent crowd out there thinking, "But why?" it's because a lot of social media, especially, is very heavily Americanized- sometimes to the point where people assume that everyone is American. Not to mention, it's disheartening. I'm sorry to say, but you're not actually relating to the conversation, you're often diverting the focus away from the topic at hand. Even if you mean well, America is heavily pedestaled and talked about frequently, and people from other countries are tired of America taking precedent over their own issues.

Don't divert non-American issues into American ones. Seriously. It's not your place. Please just support the original issue or move on.

Racist Bullshit

This especially goes for islanders and South Asian characters, as well as poc characters (because, yes, Japan DOES have black people)

Making "funny" racist headcanons. Not fucking cool.

Changing the canon interpretation of an explicit character of color in order to fit racist stereotypes.

Whitewashing or color draining characters. Different artistic skill sets can be hard, yes, but are you seriously going to look at someone and say "I don't feel like accurately portraying you or people that look like you, because it's difficult for me." If someone tries to correct you on your cultural depiction of a character and/or their life style, don't be an ass. (If possible, it would be nice for those that do the corrections to be polite as well, but it does get really frustrating).

Seriously, no offense guys, but, if you want to persue art, you're going to need to learn to depict different body types, skin colors, and/or ethnic features.

On that note, purposefully, willingly, or consistently inaccurately portraying people or characters of color (especially if someone in the fandom has "called you out" or specifically told you that what you're doing comes across as racist and you continue to do it). If you need help or suck at looking things up, there are references for you! Ask your followers if they have tutorials on poc (issue that you're having), whether it be bodily portrayal, facial proportions, or coloring and shading. Art is so much more fun when you can depict a wider variety, and guess what? Before you drew the same skinny, basic, white character over and over, you couldn't even draw that!

Attempting or claiming to DEPECT CULTURAL ACCURACY within a work or meta, while being completely fucking wrong. ESPECIALLY and specifically if someone calls you out, and you refuse to fix, correct, or change anything.

*little side note that the discussion revolving art is a very multilayered conversation, and it has quite a few technical potholes, which I'll bring up again farther into this post.

Fucking history

Stop demonizing or for absolute fucks sake wubbifying Japanese history because UwU Japan ♡0♡ or bringing up shit like "you know they sided with Nazis, right?" It's good to recognize poor past decisions, but literally it's not your country keep your nose out of it. And? A lot of decisions made by countries were not made by their general peoples. Even those that were, often involved heavy propaganda that made them think what they were doing was right.

Seriously, it's not your country, not your history. Unless you have some sort of higher education (but honestly even then a lot of those contain heavy bias), just don't butt in.

^^^ this also goes to all countries that are NOT Japan (specifically when people from non American countries talk about their history while in fandoms and someone wants to Amerisplain to them why "well, actually-"). When we said, "question your sources," we didn't mean "question the people who know better than you, while blindly accepting the (more than likely biased) education you were given in the past."

What this does NOT include:

Fanfiction

FANfiction

FanFICTION

FANFICTION.

Seriously, fanfiction is literally UNPAID WORK from RANDOM FANS- a lot of which who are or have started as kids. ((No, I'm not trying to excuse racist depictions of people just because they're free, please see above where I talk about learning to grow a skill and how it's possible tone bad and get good, on top of the fact that some inaccuracies are not just willful ignorance))

"Looking it up" doesn't work

"Looking it up" almost never works

Please, for fucks sake, you know that most all online search engines are heavily biased, right? Not to mention, not everything is universal across the entirety of Japan. You want to look up how the school system works in Hokkaido? Well it's different from the ones in Osaka!

Most fanfiction is meant to be an idealized version of the world. Homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and racism are very prevalent and heavy topics that some fan authors would prefer to avoid. (Keep in mind, this is also used by some people in those minorities often because thinking about how relevant those kinds of things are is to them every day).

A lot of shit that happens in writing is purely because it's an ideal setting. I've seen a few arguments recently about how fan authors portray Japanese schools wrong- listen, I can't tell you how many random school systems I have pulled from my ass purely because (I need them to interact at these points, in these ways). Sometimes the only compliment I can think of is 'I like your shirt' or sometimes I need character A to realize that character B likes the same thing as they do, so I might ignore the fact that most all Japanese schools require uniforms, so that I can put my character in a shirt that will get someone else's attention.

Sometimes it's difficult to find information on different types of systems, and sometimes when you DO know those things, they directly rule out a plot point that needs to happen (like back on the topic of schools (from what I've seen/heard/read- which guess what? Despite being from multiple sources, might still be inaccurate!) Japanese schools don't have mandatory elective classes (outside of like gym and most of them usually learn English or another language- I've seen stuff about art classes? But the information across the board varies.), but, if I need my character to walk in and see someone completely in their element, I'm probably not going to try and gun for accuracy or make up a million and two reasons as to why this (non elective) person would possibly need something from (elective teacher) after school of all things.)

Some experiences ARE universal- or at least overlap American and Japanese norms! Like friends going to fast food places after school doesn't /sound Japanese/ or whatever, but it's not like a horrible inaccuracy to say that your characters ate at McDonald's because they were hungry. Especially when you consider that the Japanese idolization of American "culture" is also a thing.

Also I saw someone complaining about how, in December, a lot of (usually westerners) write Christmas fics! Well, not only are quite a few of those often gift fics, with it being the season if giving and all, but Japanese people do celebrate Christmas! Not as "the birth of Christ," but rather as a popularized holiday about gift giving (also pst: America isn't the only place that celebrates Christmas)

But, on that note, sometimes things like Holidays are "willfully ignorant" of what actually happens (I've made this point several times, but (also this does by no means excuse actual racism)), because, again: plot convenience! Hey what IF they celebrated Halloween by Trick or Treating? What if Easter was a thing and they got to watch their kids or younger siblings crawl around on the ground looking for tiny plastic eggs?

Fanfiction authors can put in hours of work for one or two thousand words- let alone ten thousand words, fifty thousand words, a hundred thousand words. And all of these are free. There is absolutely no (legal) way to make money off of their fanworks, but they spent hours, days, weeks, months- sometimes even years- writing. It is so unnecessary to EXPECT or REQUIRE them to spend even more hours looking up shit that, no offense, almost no one is going to notice. No one is going go care that all of my combini prices are accurate or that I wrote a fic with a Japanese map of a train station that I had to backwards search three times to find an English version that I could read.

Not everyone has the attention span or ability to spend hours of research before writing a single word. Neurodivergent people are literally a thing yall. Instead of producing the perfectly pretty accurate version of Japan that people want to happen, what ACTUALLY happens is that the writer reads and reads and reads and either never finds the information they need or they lose the motivation to write.

^^^ (This does NOT apply to indigenous or native peoples, like Pacific Islanders or tribes that exist in real life. Please make sure that you portray tribal minorities accurately. If you can't find the information you need (assuming that the content of the series is not specifically about a tribe), please just make one up (and for fucks sake, recognize that a lot of what you've been taught about tribal practices, such as shit like human sacrifices or godly worship, is actually just propaganda.)

Not to mention, it often puts a wall in front of readers who would then need to pull up their OWN information (that may or may not be biased) just in order to interact with the fic ((okay, this one has a little bit of arguability when it comes to things like measurements and currency, because Americans don't know what a meter is and no one else knows what a foot is- either way, one of yall is going to have to look up measurements if they want to get a better understanding of the fic)). However, a lot of Americans who do write using 'feet, Fahrenheit, dollars,' also write for their American followers or friends (which really could go both ways).

On a less easily arguable side, most fic readers aren't going to open up a new tab just to search everything that the author has written (re the whole deep topics, not everyone wants to read about those sorts of things, either). Not only are you making it more difficult on the writer, but you're also making it more difficult for the reader who's now wondering why you decided to add in Grandma's Katsudon recipe, and whether or not the details you have added are accurate.

Some series, themselves, ignore Japanese norms! Piercings, hair dye, and incorrectly wearing ones uniform are frowns upon in Japanese schools- sometimes up to inflicting punishment on those students because of it. However, some anime characters still have naturally or dyed blond hair some of them still have piercings or wear their uniforms wrong. Some series aren't set specifically in Japan, but rather in a vague based-off-real-life Japan that's just slightly different (like Haikyuu and all of its different prefectures). Sometimes they're based on real places, but real places that have gone through major changes (like the Hero Academia series with its quirks and shit).

Fandom is not a full time job. Please stop treating it like it is one. Most people in fandoms have to engage in other things like school or work that most definitely take precident over frantically Googling the cultural implications of dying your hair pink in Japan.

Art is also meant to be a creative freedom and is almost always a hobby, so there are a few cracks that tend to spark debate. Like I said, it is still a hobby, something that's meant to be fun (on this note!)

If trying new things and expanding your portfolio is genuinely making you upset, it's okay to take a break from it. You're not going to get it right on the first try and please, please to everyone out there critiquing artists' works, please take this into account before you post things.

I'm sorry to say, but, while it gets frustrating to see the same things done wrong over and over again, some people are genuinely trying. If it matters enough for you to point out, please offer solutions or resources that would possibly help the artist do better (honestly this could be said about a lot of online activism). I get that they should "want" to do better (and maybe they don't and your annoyance towards them is completely justified- again, as I said, if this becomes a repeated offense and they don't listen to or care about the people trying to help them, yeah you can be a bitch if it helps you feel better- just please don't assume that everyone is willfully ignorant of how hurtful/upsetting/annoying a certain way of portraying things is), but also WANTING to do better and ACTUALLY doing better are two different things.

Maybe they didn't realize what they were doing was inaccurate. Maybe they didn't have the right tutorials. Maybe they tried to look it up, but that failed them. Either way, to some- especially neurodivergent artists- just being told that their work is bad or racist or awful isn't going to make them want to search for better resources in order to be more accurate, it's just going to make them give up.

Also! In fic and in writing, no one is going to get it right on the first try. Especially at the stage where we creators ARE merely in fan spaces is a great time to "fuck around and find out", before we bring our willfully or accidentally racist shit into monetized media. Absolutely hold your fan creators to higher standards, but literally fan work has so little actual impact on popular media (and this goes for just about every debate about fan spaces), and constructive criticism as well as routine practice can mean worlds for representation in future media. NOT allowing for mistakes in micro spaces like fandoms is how you get genuinely harmful or just... bad... portrayals of minorities in popularized media that DOES have an impact on the greater public. OR you get a bunch of creators who are too afraid to walk out of their own little bubbles, because what if they get it wrong and everyone turns against them. It's better to just "stick with what they know" (hobbies are something that you are meant to get better at, even if that is a slow road- for all of my writers and artists out there, it does take time, but you will get it. To everyone else, please do speak up about things that are wrong, but don't make it all about what's wrong and please don't be rude. It's frustrating on both ends, so, if you can, please try not to escalate the situation more.)

Anyways, I'm tired of everyone holding fictional characters to American Puritanical standards, but I'm also tired of seeing every "stop Americanizing fandom" somehow loop into fanfiction and how all authors who don't make their fics as accurate as possible are actually just racist and perpetuating or enabling America's take over of the world or some shit.

Fan interpretation of published media is different than fan creation of mon monetized media. Americans dominating or monopolizing spaces meant for all fans (especially in a fandom that was never meant for them to begin with) is annoying and can be harmful sometimes. Americans writing out their own personal experience using random fictional characters (more often than not) isn't.

Fuck you and all your little brain washed rats sending people hate because you cant take responsibility for your actions!! But go on stay silent like you always do, pretend its nothing of your business, keep being a fetishizing racist delulu like you love to be while pretending to be the best blog on tumblr!!!

NOT like anyone will see this but YOU will so LET’S GOOO!!!~~

TW: mental health and more (if you feel like this can trigger you, pls don’t read this, breathe in and out and listen to this HERE and remember I love you), loads of tea and Mimi NOT being a friendly and kind ghost. 

funny enough: 

I never pretended of said I was the best blog. But I guess the fact that you say it might be because you heard it frequently? Thanks for thinking so^^

I sent hate to no one and u r the one sending it to me rn ^^ In my whole 4 year journey on Tumblr I received a lot of love but also worse hate that you can imagine. Yes you are saying now you are receiving hate ... funny how it’s bad when It’s addressed to you but when it’s at me and my dear followers it is not. Still, I never told anyone to go hate on you. You were the idiot that tagged my old blog and as soon as my blog was gone pple searched me and found out you were the reason behind this. But as you keep hating on me. Let me tell you I am kind but don’t mistake that for me being a coward.

I am not into insulting others and I don’t care much if you insult me. BUT don’t YOU DARE touch my dear followers. Insulting ain’t hard. Let me try: The only rat here is you hiding in your hole as an anon. I went and compared your writing with this ask and previous hate asks. And it was you~ Good for you~ the sewers smell just like your filthy mouth spilling sh*t left and right. So on brand. However, I know who you are @hobisbeautifulass Hi ^^

Me racist? HAHAHAHAH you truly know NOTHING about me nor my ex-blog’s message. It was a place when you were welcomed no matter your skin color, religion, gender ... proof? well it got deleted thanks to you. but ask around this time and search for who reblogged my posts as they were always the top of the tags (even if I don’t trust how bad you are at research). I supported the BLM movement and still do and will always do but I did so veeery early without anyone telling me. Not for the notes but because of my humanity. I wished my dear followers’ happy holidays no matter their religions. And never cared about those things. Why judge someone on something based on religion or how they were born. As for the LGBTQ+ community, I was always and will always be there for love being love. I talked about mental health and opened venting nights. I helped left and right and when I was receiving hate because of people like you spitting lies about me. What did I do? Did I go online and called people bad? No. I looked back at myself and asked myself if I did anything wrong. I tried to educate myself and apologized sincerely when I had to. I read books and watched documentaries to learn how to become a better human. AND never repeated a mistake twice. You tend to forget that our cultures are different and sometimes you grow up to see some things as normal when they are not. This is not an excuse tho, so I always believed that I was lacking and if someone had something to say against me, there is a chance they are right and just in case I should reflect on myself. But for your case it was pure nonsense. ME? a stalker? how can I stalk when I have social anxiety and at that time couldn’t even leave my room? I am even afraid of taking public transportations and just the other days I was crying from joy when I took a taxi alone. they said I was in Japan stalking Jimin and Jungkook and took a pic when I was NEVER EVER was on that land. You put me on the same list as people who bought info about BTS’ flights to be on the same plane as them? I was stalked before and let me tell you it ain’t cute and fun. I am even scared of the idea of being followed. that’s why I never shared openly my age, country, or anything about me on my blog. that’s why I have no personal social media to this day and that’s why making my ex-blog was some sort of miracle in my life. 

Silent? yes I was silent when I received hate and didn’t even vent to my dear followers or pointed fingers. Why? because I thought as my day was hell I shouldn’t make anyone’s day worse. I was worried about my dear followers with mental illnesses being triggered. I tried to take my life so many times I lost count but I still came here and smiled. It was my safe place and you took it away. Yet, I should pity you? You hated on me first for no reason and you know it deep inside but right now you are trying to convince yourself that you are the angel and feel no guilt. Compared to you. I pointed fingers at no one and didn’t name you when my blog was gone. Why? because compared to you, I thought you will not be able to manage the hate and what was done .. I didn’t want you to suffer the same way I did when you are the one who made me suffer the most the past couple of days. But the kind Mimi is someone you will never remember because you dared touch the friends I love and calling them names. I don’t mind people insulting me but don’t you dare touch my people. I know myself best. My dear friends/followers know me best. I thought ... I could leave without this mess but you keep barking in my ask box and it’s annoying. I left this backup account just to talk to my friends and yet you are here to ruin things again? I should stop being kind to the ones who deserve non of it. I ignored you when I had so many followers and you went silent too because you were scared of me. But as soon as I lost my blog because of you, you went, edited and then reblogged that stalker post. How can I be a stalker? do you even know the definition of a stalker? do you even know shame? well .. I don’t think so.. you said it yourself. You are NOT ashamed (and you reblogged that so many time lol). 

Death threats? this is no competition but thanks to people like you I have been there and wish no one to be there not even you. The only difference is that you almost killed me for real. You were not the sole reason? Great job walking away from you beloved word: RESPONSIBILITY. And I didn’t get just anon hate, I got literal tagging by people like you, DMs, and people pointing guns at me. That’s why I didn’t mention you. I was worried about the one who took away what I worked for for 4 YEARS. I was more sad and concerned about the ARMY fandom here. Do you know how many rely on my updates? do you know how many people said I helped them? do you know any of that? do you think 200k people were “rats”? Do you think if I did and say wrong thing I will not be questioned by those people. I always told my dear followers: “friends, if I do or say anything wrong or share anything that hurts anyone please tell me. I am willing to learn from everyone.” But what did you know? what did you do? Well ..  guess you love notes? As the most notes you ever got and the most attention was when talking about me? 

Love how you talk about fetishing when my blog was what people call “family friendly”. I also like BTS. I love them for their music, talent, personalities and the happiness they give me. I also enjoy BTS’ bond and love their interactions. I posted content of all kinds of interactions JM X JK, JK X V, V X JIN, JIN X SG, SG X JH, JH X RM, RM X JM ... If you are calling this fetishing asian men just because I scream over BTS as a fan and love their bonb. Then aren’t you against the idea of being an ARMY? I was a clear OT7 and you were told that you weren’t right: 

 Then you answered this without even explaining the nonsense about me: 

idk .. I am trying to find sense in your nonsense so .. wait wait let me look at the definition of fetishism first. 

Fetishism /ˈfɛtɪʃɪz(ə)m/ noun: a form of sexual behavior in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, activity, part of the body, etc.

Then .. judging from your URL alone hmmm ... cute. I won’t even talk about the SMUT you write that is full of kinks and fetishism. Well I have no problem with fan fiction but the irony you spit is out of this world.

Also, I made money out of mimibtsghost? HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH no lil one. I worked day and night for FREE. At some point when BT21 just came out and there were no products on AMAZON or anywhere but S.Korea, someone reached out to me to offer 20% off or something for my dear followers. When they asked what I wanted I said what about international giveaways for my dear followers. Basically, made gifs, found content, updates, analysis, edits, and so on for free. Again, w-wait .. Aren’t you the one asking for commissions? Well .. It’s not wrong. But again THE irony. 

So, I went to see that post you made about me with “PROOF” and it was just another person who was salty as I got them blocked I can’t even recall who they were but oh well. Their arguments according to YOU and many should be taken as FACTS just because they said them?  You said HERE that your first comeback was MOST:7 that came in just last year (2020) SO what the hell do YOU know about what happened years before you came when all the proof you pointed at where baseless without any backing?

Let’s see this so wise person you used to delete my blog and what I have done ^^

The gifs: There is a story to this. The first week I came to Tumblr, It was my first time on this site and the first time I share anything. I shared some content and my analysis had a lot of notes for a small creator that started just a week ago. But I made a mistake, I found a gif and posted it while crediting the gif maker. At the time I had NO idea it was wrong. I logged off and after 5 hours I log in and there was a WAR for that ONE gif. The big blog had me blocked and her friend was telling me to take it off. As soon as the person told me I did IMMEDIATELY and apologized againa and again and told them to tell the original gif maker to deblock me as I want to apologize directly and that they can block me after that. They did and I apologized but they just kept insulting me. Of course it was MY mistake and that’s why I apologized. But for them. for a mere gif (yes I say a mere gif because I made so many gifs and they were used on all platforms but I never thought it was necessary to hate that much on someone like they did to me). That blog was big and had big blog mutuals. Thanks to that, I became someone you do NOT become mutuals with but block and never reblog content from. Without any big mutuals. Without any shoutouts. Only my love for BTS, my dear followers’ support and my hard work.. My blog, became bigger and FAST (I got 10k in less than 6 months after I started) and that brought loads of jealousy and thus more rumors. Even if, I apologized and since then made my own gifs. And I made SO many gifsets that I can’t remember how many there were. What I can recall is at some point I made them daily and many times a day.

Ships Jikook? I posted content of ALL the members interactions. I was here at a time where Jikook stans and Taekook stans where always fighting. BUT I posted about both and even made so many posts to encourage loving all the members and all the interactions. I also used the tags solely used for shipping with other big tags to show that BTS’ interactions are all important and their bond is beutiful. That our fandom shouldn’t hate on a member just because they are not part of a ship we like. And wait .. even if I shipped Jikook? I got called ALL those names by someone who ship the members with readers and write sexual scenes? Like, wait ... I am truly confused. Like, write fanfic and do all you want as long as you hurt no one I guess but why am I getting hurt for doing non of it? Like according to you, the person you should be cancelling is yourself?! I am also not into cancel culture like you so hahah whatever.

Posted stalker pics: well wow the story changes each time. Next thing you will hear that I was the one holding a camera for a member in a Vlive lol. Let me teach you about this update thing I was doing. I follow accounts I trust and that’s how we get info circulating fast. I always do reasearch but sometimes mistakes are made. For example when lately people shared pictures of BTS leaving their virtual concerts and schedules. There was a watermark of a news outlet. Normally we trust those but only later we realized that those people stalked BTS. You clearly can’t know it all. But I still didn’t share many pics related to many events (I will not name those as pple can search them even now because some pple never deleted those). And all big accounts shared many pics then deleted later. This happens all the time but it happened like ONCE for me. However, I am called a stalker for that? 

When Jonghyun passed away ... I don’t even wanna recall that night as the memories just ... when that happened I posted about it and send my condolescences. that post had over 10k notes and was at the top the tag. Why did I do that? I was devastated. Yes, many were but I will talk about me rn: I was suicidal the days before that and one of the songs that I listened to when I was broken where by him. I has been in the kpop world since 2006. And learned about his group since their debut with ‘Replay’. I was never a stan but I still knew of many groups and listened to all the songs I liked. I was very sad when he was gone and ANGRY mostly. Why is this angel leaving? Why is someone like me still here? Why did I not leave instead of him? How much did he suffer? And in the midst I posted a post from twitter that stated how agencies usually put down pple with mental illiness and hide it in the industry. Yes, that was important but NOT at that time. I shouldn’t have posted that and I realized after 5 min of doing so that it was WRONG. So I deleted it FAST but it kept being reblogged and I kept getting hate and people telling me: “Go kill yourself”... the sad part is that I almost did as my answer was “true ... why am I still here?” I apologized and logged off then to this day won’t forget crying at 3 AM while walking outside next to my dad. I was outside as I couldn’t breathe anymore and the idea of seeing the walls of my room was hell. I cried and cried and the teary eyes that my father looked at me with are something I am ashamed of to this day. To add one more thing while I am spilling the beans. I hate learning about someone dying. My grandma passed away sometime before that and it was so shocking to me. and some people came and told me when I was mourning her: Go follow that bitch of grandmother of yours. And for what? At that moment I didn’t think I would live to see the next year but I went to therapy and took medecine that was hurting and made me shake all day just to turn somewhat sane. No one knew tho ... I smiled all day and cried all night.. Even on the blog I fought no one of the ones who hated me. I just blocked them but even that was an insult to them?

Again, you said no one should defend me. Yet, you were ready to fight whoever touched anyone around you. What about changing your URL to beautifulassirony

Also THE hypocrisy. If you are sorry then why are you answering an ask of someone isulting someone you want to apologize to? Just make a post wher you apologize or ignore it from the start?

One more thing but surely not the last. You said you were good with research which you are NOT. So, let me show you what an OG detective ARMY can do. But first, as I was scrolling I saw some of your “work” (let’s not even talk about those gifs) and I am just giving my point of view here: I hate how you painted Namjoon as this horny-idiotic-make-dog. Like I get it it’s a fanfic or Namjoon as a dad but ... Namjoon is such a smart man who is very respectful and ofc he is a human with needs like many but what the hell is this way of portraying a character? Also a character is not cool, amazing, and a strong woman just because they curse and belittle their partner. 

Oh well, only you kept reblogging that as it show 36 reblogs when only 33 as still there when I looked and out of those 13 reblogs are yours? (you might have reblogged it more) but again some people might have liked ... people have different taste ... so ... whatever. 

Let’s continue, shall we ^^. You said you were the victim here when I was the one getting robbed right? How can I believe someone who reblogged the post below and was proud calling themselves an abomination or how the Oxford dictionary defines it:  a thing that causes disgust or loathing. For once you weren’t wrong.

What can you expect from someone who has the “I am not like others” kinda mentality while stating relatable things that everyone goes through?

This is getting pretty long. So to sum this up. You are now telling others that hate is NOt ok and that they should be ashamed of themselves when you yourself is not ashamed of hating on me?

I am not the type that sends anon hate. I might ignore some barking but the past days you came and bite me hard. I face the ones I have to face without fear. I know I am not the bad guy here and I don’t care much what you think about me. Even BTS got haters. This says a lot. BUT do NOT dare talk badely of my dear friends/followers. You said you do research well? Start by deleting the post below that was originally by ME from your blog ... oh how meticulous you are. From your baseless receipts to your twisted logic. Indeed people on the internet can say anything and it will be FACTS. You painted me as the devil and painted yourself as this researcher? What’s next you receiving a Phd in ‘pity me’ after your MBA in lies and irony? Whatever~ 

Whaaatever~ Karma will have upcoming talks with you. No need for you to apologize. I never cared about you and you only got attention using me. But I am not here anymore how will you get that blog running now? Are you gonna add me in a fanfic next? No need for you to send me my appearance fee when you do so~ And no need for you to apologize to me just apologize to you conscience if you have any left.  As for me @hobisbeautifulass​ you are just someone I will forget soon anyway~~ 

And because according to what you said HERE when you described the things you hate about people and I thought that was VERY close to how you treated me. Thus, you might really not stand yourself rn.

Do.Not.Worry. BTS are starting the Love Myself campaign again and just in time for you to jump in (you are good at jumping to conclusions about me so I won’t worry about you). I know you don’t like me or my friends but be sure to love yourself at least ^^ 

You are a Hobi stan? Then learn from Hobi to share some sunshine not bring the storm. Have a good day~

// im going to start this off by saying that this post will be talking about police brutality, racism, and the death of daunte wright. now, im unfortunately a couple days late to this due to my own mental health issue at the moment and staying off most social media. apologies for that, but i have been educating myself on the current situation and feel educated enough to talk. i like to make sure im not spreading misinformation before i post things like this, because i know that can be almost as damaging as not saying anything at all. 

with all of that said, yet another black man has been murdered by police, and there are once again protests which are being met with police violence.

daunte wright was a 20 year old black man who was pulled over by police on april 11th, and was killed when officer kim potter (who has since resigned along with police chief tim gannon) drew her firearm and shot him once in the chest. 

the officer claimed she mistook her firearm for her taser, and that she hadn’t meant to shoot him, let alone fatally. 

lets talk about why this is a ridiculous defense, and also very likely a flat out lie. 

first of all, the officer in question has over 20 years of police experience, and was responsible for training other officers, and yet she managed to ‘mistake’ her firearm for her taser? if she managed to be an active officer for 26 years and still didn’t pick up on the differences between the weapons she carried, she shouldn’t have been allowed to carry them anyways. that is already negligence and incompetence on the part of the officer.

even if we look past the fact that a glock and a taser weigh and feel differently, there are still multiple differences that should have alerted the officer of her mistake.

her taser was kept on the opposite side of her gun, was bright neon yellow, and her glock has a safety which must be switched off before the discharging of the weapon. not to mention the differences in which a firearm and taser (which again, sat on the opposite side of her belt) are fired, pressure wise.

are we really expected to believe that a 26-year police veteran managed to draw her glock from the opposite side as her taser, switch off the safety, aim, and fire all while still thinking she was holding her taser? disrespectfully, that’s fucking ridiculous. again, if you can’t tell the differences between the weapons you are carrying, you should not be permitted to carry them at all. 

she also broke protocol multiple times during this incident. firing a taser at someone operating a vehicle is not allowed, nor is aiming your taser for someones chest when other, less lethal targets are visible.  

even IF we look past all of that and say that okay, maybe she did make that mistake, that is still manslaughter, and the officer should not only have been fired immediately, but also arrested. instead, she was placed on administrative leave. the fact that she was allowed to resign (the two sentence email in which she did so containing no remorse for the man she had murdered, and only detailing her enjoyment of her job.) peacefully is ridiculous, and once again shows that murder is fine as long as you’re carrying a badge. apparently she is due to be charged, but the fact that it will most likely be a manslaughter charge that she might not even be jailed for is ridiculous, and frankly sickening. 

now, the protests. 

once again, protests have been met with police violence, as well as the national guard being dispatched only a few days in. tear gas and pepper spray were used again protesters despite a restriction against the use of tear gas and chemical irritants being passed by the city council. a rule that was broken by police almost immediately, which honestly, does not surprise me at all. the police are using banned measures to disperse protests, arresting protestors, and a curfew has been put in place which you can now be arrested for violating. these are measures we have seen before in effort to stop protests from happening and suppress the voices of black people who are tired of seeing their community torn apart by cops who think they’re above the law. i will say it again. the police are continuing to use banned measures against protestors. they don’t care about what they’re not allowed to do, they just want to silence you. for those at these protests, be safe. make your voices heard and if you’re white, protect your bipoc friends and fellow protestors. you have privilege, use it. 

what hurts even more is how close this all occurred to the place where the pig who killed george floyd is standing trial. the amount of police violence against black people is genuinely sickening and i can’t imagine how scary and depressing the current state of america must be. if you’re a bipoc, please do take care of yourself during these times. i can’t imagine how damaging this must be to see constantly, and i only wish there was more i could do to help those effected by this violence. 

another thing i feel needs to be addressed is the fact that daunte wright was resisting arrest, and attempting to flee. this has been used by pro-cop people and the right to justify his death. i feel the need to remind people that fleeing, resisting, or otherwise panicking during a high stress situation should not be a death sentence. it is a natural human instinct to attempt to flee or fight when faced with any potentially dangerous situation, and expecting scared, unarmed citizens to remain calm while you allow trained professionals to use the ‘i panicked’ excuse again and again, murder after murder is pure hypocrisy. 

daunte had a warrant out for his arrest (not something the officers were aware of when they pulled him over) but that still does not justify the fact that he was murdered. cops are not judge, jury and executioner. resisting or trying to flee is not an excuse to kill someone. 

i don’t care what excuse the cop, or her boss wants to use. i refuse to believe that she wasn’t aware of which weapon she was holding, and i refuse to believe she holds any remorse for daunte or his family. i think she did what white cops love to do. she murdered a man. a black man who was just scared. the police system is, and always will be a racist system made to oppress people of colour. how many times does this have to happen before people realize that you can’t reform a system that’s rotten to its core. the police are not your friends, and the fact that they continue to break the law that they claim to uphold and get away with it should prove that. they are not on your side, and there is no such thing as a good cop. 

i will be reblogging any resources i can find, and if you would like to contribute please do. feel free to add to this, especially with advice for the protestors or anything i may have missed. however, i will not be engaging in debate or argument with anybody under this post, or on any other post. if you are pro-cop, part of the right, or think that the deaths of black people at the hands of police are acceptable in any way, don’t bother coming anywhere near this post, you will not get the attention or argument you want, you will simply be blocked. 

please direct me towards any petitions, resources, or places to donate so that i can spread them. i can sign petitions however i am unfortunately not in the financial place to donate. i will be spreading places to donate and i will be encouraging those who can do donate, but i do wish i could do more. 

stay safe, and remember, the police aren’t your friends, and there is no excuse for continued police brutality like this. 

take care of yourselves and make your voices heard.

ok new followers:

heres my carrd

DISCLAIMER: if you receive any sort of ask mentioning @ poobit or @ pespillo or mentioning @ kindestegg and going on a tangent about me hating all transmascs and wanting to kill them or something , this anon is a transmisogynist and a transphobe in general that insinuates im not really a trans man and that im some sort of “misandrist” man hating transfem, i never send any sort of hate or threats against people in general and im outspoken about supporting trans people. This ask has been copypasted for what seems to be over a month, i advise to block the anon and ignore it completely, i have no idea who this person is yet and what even started this harassment spam.

- i hate incest/pedophilia shippers and also i hate anyone who admits to be attracted to minors in any way so get the fuck out if you identify as some “non offending” pedo or some shit, because i will absolutely report you. if you are a minor with issues like that and thinks in some way like this, get out social media n seek out some type of help, anti-anti´s also get the fuck out or ill kick you.

- if you identify with t*ruscum ideology or t*erfs in any way, get the fuck out as well.

- if you draw/look at graphic child gore or have irl pics of kids in a gore/guro/nsfw blog, GET the fuck out before i punt you.

- ask before following if you have or your main is straight up a nsfw/gore blog, do not follow or interact if your interests revolve around literal rape porn or related to d*ddy/m*mmy kinks .

- dont bring ace discourse into this blog, i support ace/aro people as a grey-aro and youre welcome here to be yourselves.

- i am a latino mixed man who is south american n lives in argentina, if you are racist/antiblack/xenophobic ill kick you.

- dont request fnaf content from me umprompted, much less if i havent talked about it first, i dont draw for it anymore.

- you can ask me to tag whatever you need me to tag as long as its not prejudice motivated aka: asking me to tag lesbians, pda of gay people, people of certain races,etc

- please dont flirt with me or send me invasive questions or ask me to draw content for You (requests that arent art trades or commissions) , if i dont know you personally , sorry but i am not your friend i am just a dude. 

dont reblog this since its just a post to let new followers understand how things are here. thats all

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

This is probably very pointless and I'm sorry but I do not enjoy JKR (the person) too much anymore. I don't have the same respect for her I had as a child. I still love her books. But there are quiet a few things I don't like about her anymore. The main thing is probably that she despite saying that Dumbledore is gay didn't include a gay scene in the movie with him and Grindelwald. That's not a crime. Just a little shady in my opinion and made me stop idolizing her. Not more, not less.

There are a lot more examples and probably a lot of worse things. But that was when I realized "Okay. Yeah, she just said that." It doesn't make her evil. Again. But I don't consider her to be someone who actually cares about the LGBT+ community. I also can't follow the link maybe I should have said that first. I just wanted to say something. So sorry to bother.

Don’t worry, you’re not bothering me! I know exactly what you mean, I must have made a couple of angry posts about JKR myself over the last few years. And I have to admit it, I can’t imagine what it’s like being a Zoomer or a young Millennial. When I was growing up, we didn’t know anything about writers or celebrities. My books generally featured a couple of lines on the back cover, kind of “[Author] lives in Upton Snodsbury with her husband and two llamas”. That was about it. Our newspapers would never mention a YA author (or even a ‘proper’ writer) unless something truly awful happened (think “Neil Gaiman drowns thirty children and drives self, puppy off a cliff”), and without the internet, that was pretty much the end of our world. Once or twice I wrote to this or that writer in a dictionary English, but of course I never received any replies. In our lives, any leftover questions we had about books, any curiosity on how a real, beloved writer lived his or her daily life - we could choke on that. Quite simply, there was no way of finding out.

Now, of course, everything’s changed. It must be quite weird for kids to have such an unfiltered access to their favourite celebrities. And while it’s gratifying to find answers to literally everything going through your mind, the downside is that writers are revealed as real people. In some cases, the disappointment that ensues is simply down to a generational divide. While Zoomers grew up with this system, most writers are Old People, and this new idea you need to ‘have an online presence’ and ‘keep in touch with your readers’ can be truly overwhelming. I’ve worked for a handful of YA writers, and about half of them had real trouble connecting with a live audience. They write these wonderful, engaging, insightful books, but when a child asks them anything about them, the answers are vague, monosyllabic bullshit. Some are shy, some uncertain, some dislike the whole process. Others, of course, love meeting their fans and are very good at it - but still, that’s one factor younger readers should consider: writing a book and talking to people are two very different skills. 

And then there’s the other thing - that quite simply, your favourite writer may not agree with you on everything, may have some legit opinions you’d never share, may even be kind of an asshole or objectively wrong about a lot of issues. Lots of adults have trouble accepting their favourite celebrities do not ‘live up’ to their standards; it must be way harder for kids, especially those who don’t have reliable adult figures in their lives. So I understand the grief and burning disappointment of younger fans whenever something bad happens. Cancel culture, in a way, is the perfect equivalent of a social rule we used to have in our primary school: “I don’t hear you anymore”, we used to say, whenever someone taunted us or bullied us or said something truly unacceptable. So, yeah - I understand that impulse, but I still think adults should find a way to keep enjoying their favourite stories and especially to keep recognizing the cultural significance of artistic works, historical facts or political figures beyond a strict good/bad moral lens.

And: people should stop talking over others and considering themselves the spokesperson of any community. Just to pick one example, Harry Potter was well received in Israel (there were the usual midnight queues), its Yiddish edition sold out in two days, and both JKR’s writing and her stance on antisemitism was praised by Jewish media. Ignoring these facts means disrespecting the very community you claim to be fighting for. 

On the whole, whatever its flaws, that series is about love and courage and the defeat of a segregationist, wizards-first dictatorship, and studies show reading Harry Potter makes you less likely to be racist later in life and more empathetic towards minorities. In my opinion, reducing it to ‘rich jock prances around with white supremacist friends while abusing enslaved creatures’ misses the point by a fucking mile.

Cop-thing-anon here:

(I don't believe in the blue lives matter thing by the way)

I do get where you're coming from. I guess I see the thing about cops and cop AUs differently because the police is different and not as fucked up in my country. The thing about the fanart is just..I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the artist really focused on the skin colour of Sokka, I mean, it's a kids show. Skin colour was never really mentioned or important in atla. But Sokka's personality is most likely why the artist was inspired to draw him as a "gangster", with azula (the villain) being a cop. It is kind of insensitive to draw that with the events going on, but I think that a lot of people in the fandom take some things way too seriously, for a kids show back in the late 2000's anyway.

hey anon, I say this with love and I am being sincere. I'm gonna need you to rewatch the show if you think skin color didn't matter. and it doesn't matter where you live because there is no part of the world, no culture, that isn't shaped by colonialism. I don't mean to be condescending so please bear with me, I truly believe in educating people as a part of allyship and anti-racism.

Anon, please know that I am not angry or anything but sincere in what I’m about to say. Just bear with me because I know that unlearning shit is difficult and can be painful, but we’ve gotta do it. I do appreciate you wanting to have this conversation at all. And I’m not writing this just for your benefit - this is for anyone who wants to learn about why A) race is a part of ATLA’s narrative and B) why critical analysis of mass media is actually important. So I’m not assuming you don’t know basic things about this stuff, I’m not trying to be condescending.

Now we’re gonna fix colonialism and imperialism XD wee okay here we go.

No matter where you live in the world you have some awareness of skin color. Your understanding of race might be different than mine, in fact it probably is. Race as we know it today is a social construct that stems from many things (and I wrote several hundred words on it but it was too much and too far removed from the point I’m trying to make so I edited all of that out. Yay.)

You don’t usually see imperialism, one of the major themes in Avatar, without colonialism. Imperialism is slightly different than colonialism - you can think of it like the ideology behind the practice of colonialism.* Imperialism can be used to describe expansionism in general - which has been going on since the bronze age lol humans, I stg - but usually when people today refer to colonialism and imperialism they’re talking about imperialism starting in the 17th century.

Now imperialism is not just a European concept. ATLA is set in a world that we know is supposed to be like a combination of different Asian cultures (with some influences from the Americas). And the Fire Nation is clearly influenced by Imperial Japan. So briefly:

Japan had a policy of sakoku (chained or closed country) which kept it mostly isolated (out of concerns that Japan would fall victim to something like the Opium Wars in China, among other things) from the rest of the world for a couple hundred years until the 1850s when a US Naval commander named Matthew Perry (I am not kidding) forced Japan to open its borders for trade to the United States by gunboat diplomacy, an oxymoron if I have ever seen one before.

Japan ended up signing unequal treaties with a lot of Western countries, and this bred xenophobia and hostility in Japan. The Emperor who signed these treaties died of smallpox, and after some internal conflict his son decided try to renegotiate these treaties. The US and European countries were not interested in renegotiating dick but the mission wasn’t unsuccessful because the diplomats A) exchanged some islands with Russia and B) were inspired by western economic policy and society to “modernize” Japan. Japan began industrialization and it converted to a market economy with the help of the US and other western powers.

So over many years, Japan went to war with China, Korea, Russia (and took back some of the land they exchanged with them), and others. From wikipedia:

Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean.

But ATLA is not a Japanese story. The Fire Nation is not Imperial Japan. The Earth Kingdom is not China or Korea, the Air Nomads are not Tibetan monks, and the Water Tribes are not Inuit. The creators definitely drew heavy inspiration from all of these places and others, but ATLA is a story written by American people in the United States for American kids. It is an American story.

And it was created at a time when the United States was victimizing people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other places) in many similar ways to how the Fire Nation victimized people. In fact, the show starts in the Southern Water Tribe, which represent Inuit people, indigenous people in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, I think it’s safe to assume that the genocide being referenced here is not one by Japan but rather by European colonizers and later by the United States and Canada.

Imperialism is in the show’s DNA. 

And so is racism. In our world they are inherently connected. And visual cues from the show along with things the characters say suggest that we are meant to make the comparison between our world and the ATLA world. Every story has a purpose - it doesn’t have to be political, but for Avatar it is political, it is anti-imperialist.

In this article about how ATLA resonates with us in 2020, Aina Khan of the Guardian interviews Professor Ali A Olomi about using ATLA to teach at Penn State. “One of the things we see with the Fire Nation is the ideological justification for what they’re doing. We are a glorious civilization. We have abundance, we have wealth, we have technological advancement; we need to share it with the rest of the world. That’s almost word for word European colonisation.”

Zuko and Azula both call Katara a peasant. In fact, Azula calls her a dirty peasant. This is one step away from calling her a s*vage I mean come on. While peasant might just be purely classist (lol no) because Zuko and Azula are royalty, um it’s clearly racialized classism because of real life context. There is real history with colonizers calling indigenous people this, dismissing their cultures as primitive and barbaric.

Add into the mix colorism, which is bias against darker skin and privileges fair skin (which is a byproduct of imperialism) and you have clear race shit happening in Avatar.

When I saw that fanart, I was immediately reminded of black lives matter of course, but mainly of the fact that indigenous peoples are also at high risk of being victimized by police. Not just in the US. And how gross it is to depict a colonizer like Azula as an angry cop (representing the state) turning her gun on an indigenous man who is dressed like a gangster which... yike.

Mass media influence everything we do. The messaging we get, our politics, what we want to eat for dinner because we’re hungry and have been writing this stupid essay for three hours LOL. It’s important that people think critically about what they consume. Otherwise you get the goddamn United States with half of our population stanning a racist fraud. You want to know why US Americans are so ignorant? Because our education system sucks, because we don’t have any real media literacy. But apparently the rest of the world has some fucking nerve making fun of Americans** because all of us suck at it. No one is thinking critically about media.

A really terrifying thing about people is our ability to take whatever message we want from stories, even if it is in direct contradiction with the narrative of a story. There’s a movie called American History X which is explicitly anti-fascist, but because it’s a drama and Ed Norton is cut and looks badass and uncucked or whatever LOL, the iconography in that movie is fairly popular with neo-nazis. Yike. This is not at that level of course, this is some random niche fanart for a rare pairing.

For better or for worse, US media and entertainment gets a lot of attention and people around the world eat it up. Maybe you don’t need to know every little detail about US American shit, and I know we tend to dominate media, but black lives matter is not just a 2020 thing. People have known about it for years, since it started. If that fanart was created in 2019, which I think it was, the BLM movement had already existed for six years. If you’re watching an American show like Avatar and you’re making fanart on social media but you don’t know what BLM is in 2019... well educate yourself lmao.

Considering that Black fans have expressed frustration and discomfort in fandoms over and over again, and I am sure indigenous fans have too because fandoms are racist sometimes, it’s important that white fans help make fandoms better. And I am a white fan, and I consider myself an anti-racist. Which means I have to be active about racism when I see it.

btw I found this great essay by @cobra-diamond which you should read if you want more details about the similarities between Japan and the Fire Nation.

* that is very reductive but it’s fine lol

** I am kidding, unless you are english feel free to make fun of americans for non-gun, non-trauma related things pls

I agree with you that the whole political system in the US is rotten to its core. I don't know what it is, but it's not a democracy. And yes, Biden won't bring the structural change that's needed. However, don't you think it'll be easier to get any change at all if after the election we get a blue house, senate and president? (Not to mention the supreme court seats won't fall into Republican's hands.) I mean, at least this way there's a chance progressives can get some of their causes through.

okay, so this is like the only ask i’m going to answer about this because i do NOT want this page to turn into this, this blog is the only part of the entire internet for me that isn’t entirely devoted to politics, organizing, radical education, theory, community-building, mutual aid, agitation, etc. i do that on literally every other social media platform and i do not want to do it here. that said i will answer this ask, i guess, though not exactly in the way you asked it i’m just gonna dump my thoughts on electoralism & this election here and i apologize in advance for how long this is going to be

to your general ask: yes, some people believe that. that is a reason many people are participating in this election (i go into that further down). my objection is not to the idea of participating in this election, the idea of voting, or the idea of voting for joe biden. it’s the entire framing of the situation & it’s the complete disregard for any people who have decided not to participate in this election, or who have decided to participate in this election & not vote for joe biden (i am NOT talking about republicans or trump supporters, that is a party of fascists & white supremacists & i am NOT talking about them, i’m talking about young people and the disaffected left). i’ll explain (under the cut so it doesn’t clutter y’alls feeds & so hopefully i won’t get as much hate because if there’s one thing i know it’s that no one on the internet reads)

what i object to is the framing of joe biden as anything less than an active enemy of the left & progressives. (the left & progressives are not the same thing, but they are both to the left of the dem party so i am putting them together for the sake of this argument but progressives are not leftists, though some leftists do describe themselves as progressives & vice versa, just want to put that out there to start.)

what i object to is the framing of joe biden as an ally. this kind of “at least he is willing to be pushed” “at least he’s already been pushed to the left by progressives” “at least he’s willing to listen & maybe with enough pressure we can get him where he needs to be!” “at least maybe a biden administration will support the policies we want them to!” because he’s not willing to learn, he’s not willing to help, he’s not willing to listen, he’s not willing to support progressive policies to tackle the healthcare/climate/war/imperialism crises or do any of that stuff. his policy goals, his entire campaign is basically to figure out what is the absolute bare MINIMUM thing he needs to do in order to say that he’s “moving the country in the right direction” so he can get elected & so he can get political cover from well-meaning but ultimately extremely sheltered dem figureheads while at the same time actively standing in the way of any real reform, progress, change, abolition, justice, etc. that’s his goal, he’s been very clear about that fact, i do not need to go into all the ways he’s already said & proved that! it’s obvious in his speeches, in the entire dnc (i watched every night of the dnc hoping for someone to lay out a good reason for me to vote for biden & i came up with 0 thanks democratic party), the people he has running his campaign, the donors he has, the lobbyists he hires to write his policy platform, the way he cozies up to billionaires, racists, segregationists, war criminals, and the way he always has in order to ‘maintain the order of politics’ & it’s gross & we don’t really need to go into it. he’s a capitalist, he’s a corporatist, he takes $$ from pharmaceutical companies and oil lobbyists and he is not a good person. BUT! many progressives know this and believe this, & still are voting for him. that is fine.

but we have to remember that joe biden is not our friend, he is not our ally, he is an enemy of the left, he is an active obstacle stopping us from achieving what we want to achieve (liberation, equality, justice, the dismantling of capitalism). so let’s not get it fucking twisted, like we need to be clear about that from the jump. we shouldn’t talk about him like he wants those things, like he’ll help us achieve those things, because he doesn’t, and he won’t, so we do not need to talk about him like he does. it is damaging to the progressive left of the democratic party to talk about biden like he’ll help us achieve any of our goals, because he won’t. we will need to fight just as hard if not HARDER under a biden administration to get the things we want, because we’ll be fighting with the people supposedly in our own party too, and they (along with the political machine they worship & kill themselves to support) are going to do everything they can to demonize and push out the young progressive diverse left, to break their spirits & destroy the political potential of the few politicians they actually do like, because that’s what they’ve always done, because the progressive left represents a threat to institutional capitalist white supremacist power. so our job would not be EASIER under a biden administration. it will just be different. we have to be very clear about that when we talk about what might happen in november.

now, that’s NOT TO SAY that there are not good reasons people have for voting for joe biden. i’m not telling people not to vote for joe biden and i am not telling people not to vote. that’s not what i’m saying. you just have to understand what this country is, what these politicians are, what they want, and what they are going to do to achieve what they want. just don’t lie about it. and only when you understand all of that can you make a truly informed decision about this upcoming election.

you can support joe biden for a lot of reasons. there are a lot of people whose politics don’t align with mine who want me to vote for joe biden, and there are people whose politics do align with mine who are making the choice to vote for joe biden. and the things that the latter group says, stuff that i find persuasive, is stuff like “joe biden is an enemy. donald trump is also an enemy. putting joe biden into office is better for the cause of liberation/leftists/revolution because he is a weaker enemy. he is a weaker opponent. we might be able to do things with him in office to help us tinker with the way our system is structured that will ultimately be for the benefit of the true left wing of this country, which will help future political actors survive in our rigged electoral system and maybe actually gain & maintain political power.” (stuff like abolishing the filibuster, getting rid of the electoral college, packing the courts, systemic changes that we need to make if we want to wrest control of this broken political system from the hands of fascists and white supremacists - many of whom sit inside the democratic party too, so let’s not get that twisted. all of these proposed changes, by the way, it’s important to note (unless i’m incorrect which i don’t think i am) joe biden doesn’t openly support or advocate for ANY of them, so let’s not get THAT twisted either.)

here’s the argument i think you’re making anon, from the mouth of comrade Angela Davis (libs love to weaponize angela davis’ words on biden without comprehending any of her politics or supporting her abolitionist policy positions, also there are other abolitionists who do not agree with davis here but i digress):

“In our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not be so much about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don’t think there’s a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold… if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like Joe Biden represents.”

i don’t know if i fully agree with that argument per se! but i understand it, and i think it’s valid and valuable, and i understand arguments like that, and they are persuasive to me in many ways. because the republican party maintaining power is the way we slow-march into fascism, but also the democratic party getting/maintaining power is the way that we continue to slow-march to neoliberal destruction of the planet. so they’re both bad, obviously. but there are people who think (maybe they’re right! i’m swayed by this argument) that the biden administration would be easier to manipulate, easier to transform, than a trump administration.

(the counter-argument would maybe be that there are a lot of fucking liberals paying attention & even showing up in the streets right now because donald trump is the president, and if donald trump is no longer the president they’re gonna go home and be quiet and go back to brunch and close their eyes and plug their ears like they did with obama, just like they did during standing rock and ferguson and occupy, and be like “oh kamala harris wore CHUCKS on an AIRPLANE look at how COOL she is don’t you remember when there was a COOL war criminal in the white house?” there are people who are going to do that if biden/harris win, and that’s risky to me! like that is a risk we need to be talking about. i see that as dangerous. now, that’s not to say that’s more or less dangerous than what we currently have, it’s just a different kind of danger we need to be cognizant & wary of. and it’s people who post statuses like “fuck you all if you don’t vote for biden you privileged snowflake how dare you look at everything biden’s ever said done or promised he will do and decide that you don’t like that and you don’t want a part of it how dare you you fucking cuck you fucking idiot you support fucking fascists you fucking idiot” who make me lose my mind because like shut up! you don’t know what you’re talking about. there are people who know what they’re talking about who have decided they’re going to vote for joe biden and there’s people who know what they’re talking about who have decided they are not going to vote for joe biden, and you know what they don’t do? they don’t fucking fight each other, they don’t attack each other, they understand & support the reasons their comrades have for taking the action they are taking. and that is just what this is about. stop yelling at people that you don’t know who are making choices you don’t understand just because you don’t understand their choices.)

(this is even assuming biden will win, which is unlikely, or that trump will relinquish power, which is unlikely, or that there will be a peaceful transference of power and not a full-scale right-wing armed militia explosion of violence on american streets after november 3rd, so let’s all really be prepared for what might be coming in the next couple months!!!! all of these arguments mean next to nothing when we don’t even know what kind of violence awaits us in november)

it’s just psycho to think that joe biden is anything but an enemy. he is an enemy. and you can vote for an enemy and you can have your reasons for voting for an enemy, but don’t sell me shit and tell me it’s gourmet.

that’s mostly what i object to. the framing of this. and i’m not telling people not to vote for joe biden i’m not telling people not to vote. i think people should vote, because for those of us who are able & haven’t had that right stripped away from us or stolen from us by our own government, voting is easy, it’s literally the easiest thing that you can do because it’s also the LEAST politically effective thing that you can do. it’s like step fucking 1 because its impact is so low. that’s not a reason not to do it! that is not a reason not to do it. voting is important because any functioning society needs to have an engaged citizenry and an engaged electorate. now we don’t have that here, but you know what i’m saying. electoralism is a conditionally useful tool of enacting change and what we choose to do with that tool is an individual choice and there are people who are making different calculations than you, and they’re coming to different answers. and those people are often radicals, they’re often poor, they’re often black, or indigenous, or undocumented, or incarcerated. they’re often the most marginalized people in this society who are making these kinds of non-voting decisions, and it’s racist and misogynistic to assume that it’s all privileged white kids who are making that choice, because it isn’t, okay? it fucking isn’t.

and it’s so crazy because it’s always white cis libs who are talking about how important it is to get out and vote and to vote for people who aren’t like you and to vote for someone who isn’t you and it’s like, the black radicals i know are not voting for biden! they just aren’t. they do not see the electoral system or the fucking presidency as the thing that’s going to help & protect their communities. so instead they’re organizing on the ground, they’re distributing food & funds & housing comrades & fighting the police & helping elders shop and pick up medicine & making sure kids have internet access so they can go to school and that is what people are doing on the ground. they aren’t all up on instagram or tumblr sharing voting memes & telling people to hold their nose & “just vote for biden he’s the best choice we have” because they understand that for their communities, that’s not what liberation looks like. that’s y’all doing that goofy social media shit.

political power lies with the people always. the people collectively will prove whether or not the biden electoral strategy (of appealing to older, conservative/moderate, white voters in the midwest instead of young voters, poor voters, and voters of color all over the country, but i digress) is successful. whether or not his strategy is successful, the responsibility for the outcome of this election lies SOLELY with the biden campaign, capitalism, voter suppression, white supremacy, and our undemocratic election system — NOT the individual voters. know your enemy & know which system you need to fight. hint: it’s not apathetic or disengaged voters.

vote for whoever you want to vote for. don’t vote for trump, obviously, he’s a fascist do not vote for him. but for people who are not fascists or white supremacists, just try to understand what you’re doing and your position in the world & in this political system & act accordingly. not voting is not an excuse to do nothing; if you are choosing not to engage in electoral politics the expectation is you should be working twice as hard to make sustained impacts and improvements in your community. and if you ARE choosing to engage in electoral politics, the expectation is you should be working twice as hard to make sustained impacts and improvements in your community.

if what you think the liberation fight is is making sure you turn out at the ballot box on november 3rd, if that’s how you think you are being the most helpful, it isn’t and you’re not. you’re doing something, sure, and it’s not bad. like i did this, this was my job for a year, my job was to register voters and get young people to vote. i don’t have that job any more because i don’t believe that’s the solution. i just don’t believe it’s the solution. i don’t believe we should be talking about this upcoming election like it’s a solution, because it’s really just another problem we’re going to have to face and tackle, and we can’t talk about this election like anything is going to be solved if joe biden is president instead of trump because it’s not, and it won’t be, and these people are all our enemies, and we have to treat them like they are. that’s not to say don’t vote for them, if you understand all that & that is the decision you come to! just know what you’re voting for, and know what it means.

whatever, i’m not gonna keep going on this, rant over forever just had to spit that out somewhere and if i put that shit on my Facebook i would get unfriended by every white lib i went to high school with so fucking quick…

to the anon from last night re: maxence

the ask broke the read more again and my reply was massive so I’ve copied and pasted all your messages and my response below. 

side note does anyone know why the html for small text doesn’t work anymore??

[Not been on SM all week as seeing reposts of PoC murders is too triggering for me (I’m a 21 year old French black guy). Reading the stuff people wrote about maxence, all I have to say is that you and others were too focused on telling people off who were calling for action rather than fighting for black lives. People shouldn’t have sent them abuse, no. That was wrong, and most people have been acknowledging that. (Part 1)

[But axel at least uploaded a permanent show of support, whereas Maxence’s support has disappeared to his massive influence. It’s not a pedestal, it’s basic human decency in a time of crisis. Yes he posted petitions but they disappeared. Black lives don’t stop mattering after a 24 hour story. Please don’t police when black people ask for more from white allies in positions of power.

My Instagram posts get 100 likes, his gets thousands, and a permanent show would mean a lot, especially as France has such a racist history and present. Consider why people are asking for more before berating them for it, please. Not all who want to see lasting action are being rude, and while it’s great that he shared petitions, they only existed in his world for 24 hours, but the fight for racial equality lasts much longer. Consider that reality before dismissing critics of “putting celebrities on a pedestal.” It is not unjust for us to ask for action from people who in interviews frequently talk about their support for causes but don’t use the tools that best equip them to help. It’s great maxence went to the protest, I’m not saying he’s done nothing, but his most powerful tool is not his presence but his social media outreach and the thousands he could guide with a permanent link. Racism isn’t temporary. Please really consider this, and you’re own privileges, before dismissing people asking for help as being immature. Don’t lump everyone into the same boat. Don’t tar those with reasonable intentions with the same brush as those shouting abuse. Try and evaluate why your reaction was so blocked off to their plight. It is not unreasonable to ask those with power to help where they can, whether it’s money or SM reach or whatever you are equipped with. We have the right to ask for more.]

Hi anon. I appreciate that you’ve been away for your own health and safety, so I wish I knew specifically to which ask/post of mine you’re responding to. because I got several asks this week that devolved into lengthy responses; I’m hoping it wasn’t just the shortest post because I’d effectively run out of internet steam at that point and it does seem really dismissive outside the context of the rest of my blog/me as an actual person. that’s not my intention at all and I apologize if it comes across that way. I mentioned these things in another asks, but I’m not even sure how to respond to you now without trying to justify or validate my own actions to support the blm movement as an east-asian woman, my personal experiences with racism in canada and abroad – even literally in france as I lived there for a short period of time when I was 21 – or sounding like a jerk when talking about my first career as a teacher and my graduate education in media studies and communication. they frame a lot of my current thinking about the internet and celebrity culture, which I feel really strongly about even outside of this pivotal moment in global socio-political activism and black lives matter. but neither are the point here. to start, I completely agree with the everlasting nature of racism and the power of social media in general (stories vs post with a fucked up algorithm on insta is a whole other discussion, but I see your point in concept). I’m very aware of its impact and I would never purposefully suggest that you had no right to ask for support and allyship from those in positions of power – especially those who are white. I’m sorry again any post(s) of mine implied that. nor do I willfully accuse everyone who was calling for maxence’s more permanent support as being abusive or immature – I’m very able to separate the two and I obviously only condemn the assholes. asks that I personally received justified that behaviour with a ‘right motive, wrong message’ argument and a lot of condescension towards him, which is what I found more problematic than anything else they said. my personal expectations for any celebrity in the area of social justice (or general world awareness, frankly) are absurdly low. but that’s due to the lens of my own experience and education. that’s not to diminish or ignore their very real influence. I’m not sure how to phrase it without coming across like a complete weirdo, hipster, or porch sitting and fist shaking millennial, so I’m not going to try. I would also be an asshole to suggest that you’re objectively wrong in any way, because you aren’t. I have done this same labour for people in my own life, as someone who lives at the intersection of almost every minority qualifier – from woman all the way over to disabled person. but I’m still not a black person. I have a strange semi-privilege as the “model minority” (ugh) in a country where the most predominant and systemic racism is against an entirely different group of people. I feel like anything else I say about maxence specifically is going to sound like defending him no matter what, so I guess I can only talk about myself. social media and celebrities don’t carry real weight in my life. they don’t change the way I view anything besides the actual mechanisms of the internet, mass communication, and an ever-descending opinion of popular culture at large. but that’s a generally weird stance as a 28 year old so I try not to overly broadcast it. but it doesn’t mean these things don’t impact others. I enjoy what and whom I enjoy with a measured amount of critical thinking. I’ve had this blog since I was about your age, maybe a little longer, and this is the first time several people have genuinely come at me for innocuous tags or an offhand reply to a friend’s post despite a reasonably medium number of followers. it was a little overwhelming. that seems dumb to say but it was a hard week for a lot of other reasons, including the obvious, and everything felt a lot more intense than normal.  I don’t send anonymous asks ever, but there’s no other option than to publicly respond when you receive them, which means we have to have these discussions in a very visible way. that’s either great or not, depending on the ask. I’d much rather engage personally, but so is the internet. I would hope that no one who’s been following me since I was 21 would think as poorly of me as you may, or other anons have. but you don’t know me personally at all and that’s okay. it would be strange to say I don’t want asks at all because that’s the fun of community and interaction, but I guess I can only speak to my own thoughts on my own blog and they will be interpreted a million different ways that are out of my control. I accept that. I apologize for my part in detracting from a larger and way more important time in everyone’s life – especially yours. again, never my intention. I hope that you are safe despite everything that’s going on. if you ever need support, I’m happy to offer some. thank you for the conversation.