tw mention of rape threats, aphobia, racism towards asians, misogyny

I know there were only a few who confessed about this here but to anyone else who has experienced getting harassed, received rape threats, aphobic comments, were called a racial slur for asians, and received general misogynistic name-calling for:

1. Shipping their female and/or feminine-presenting nonbinary OCs or self-inserts with Eclipse or Solar

2. Headcanoning Eclipse or Solar as aroace while shipping them with your aroace female and/or feminine-presenting nonbinary OCs or self-inserts

Are any of you interested in making a discord server just for all of us? A server where we support each other, have a safe space and be unapologetic about femininity, gush about our OC or self-insert x Eclipse or Solar ships, share with or make art/fics for each other about our ships, and talk about our headcanons and AUs.

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AITA For Not Tagging a Work?

I, 32F, write primarily for my own enjoyment, my main platform being AO3. I currently have a multi-chaoter series that includes several major plot twists, including one that includes non-con. To avoid spoiling it, because I believe my stories deserve to be read with as little background info as possible, I only tag it as "Creator CHOSE not to Include Archive Warnings". Which is, as I hope is obvious, is not synonymous with "There Are No Warnings". The point is, I don't use the Rape/Non-con tag. Recently, I got a very upset reader in my comments complaining about how triggering that chapter of my work is, and that's where I have a problem. I believe the corporate obsession content warnings pervading even fanworks to be a major problem. I don't want to sanitize my work, but I do get that they contain pretty heavy themes. But I feel like I seriously do give my stories a disservice by adding labels on them, and maybe I am the asshole for this, but I value my pride and joy (my work) over strangers online. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

Radical feminists are against rape until it happens to trans people

A few months after arriving, she said, she was raped by the man who wrote the letter of invitation that had gotten her out of the war zone.

“She was sleeping and he woke her up and roughly dragged her into his room,” says Olga Udovichenko, whom Svetlana later approached for help at the Volunteer Help Center for Refugees from Ukraine in Haifa. “She suffered deeply from both the war and the rape — but here she could barely get any assistance from the authorities. Instead of help she encountered a maze of bureaucracy and lost any motivation she had to hold the man to account and seek justice.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is estimated to have killed more than 40,000 civilians and displaced up to 30 million more. As the war surpasses 300 days, 17.7 million Ukrainians around the world need humanitarian help and protection, according to the United Nations.

Svetlana is one of over 47,000 Ukrainians — the vast majority of them women — who traveled to Israel since the start of the invasion but who are not eligible for citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return, according to Israel’s Welfare Ministry. Of these, only approximately 15,000 currently remain in Israel, with the rest having chosen to leave. Not a single Ukrainian fleeing the war has been accorded refugee status by Israel.

A Times of Israel investigation has documented cases of rape, sexual harassment, workplace exploitation and other abuses faced in Israel by these women, many of whom have had their homes destroyed and lost their livelihoods. At least one of the women’s lives ended in death by suicide.

Many of these abuses remain at best under the radar of the authorities or at worst willfully ignored, leaving the victims in a cycle of violence and poverty that only deepens the trauma they have endured to date. The perpetrators remain free to commit further crimes.

AITA for going "too far" in an eRP?

Me (19F) and a friend (almost 16F) have done a sizable amount of erotic roleplays (we mostly do sfw ones don't call me a creep). Around a week ago I asked if I could do a twist on our usual scenarios and she gave me the go-ahead. We started like usual until I brought up that the twist would be that it would be noncon. Suddenly she lashed out at me, asking "what the fuck is wrong with you" and immediately ceasing contact. I've tried messaging her saying what she said really hurt me but she hasn't responded in 4 days. Was I the asshole for not knowing something would upset her THAT bad?

What are these acronyms?

1st rape cases have been debunked to death

2nd I call it 75 years of oppression against the Palestinian people leads to violent resistance against an apartheid state and of which no one is to blame but the terrorist state, which is the Israeli regime, for allowing this to go on and then have the audacity to victimize itself and murder 20.000 Palestinians under the pretense of self-defense.

3rd I hope Israel knows no peace for the amount of blood it spilled to keep the settler state alive.

Visiting a gallery of Edgy Feminist Student Art has reminded me how much “kill your local rapist” skeeves me the fuck out

Like, my sister in Christ, think for ten seconds about the past and present of vigilante violence against alleged sex criminals

Richard Dawkins' meltdown in the early 2010s was so prophetic for what would happen to *gestures at every old British celebrity* in the past few years. Within just a few years he went from quietly respected to giving interviews where he ranks which types of rape are the worst, calling a Muslim teen wrongfully arrested for playing with a clock a "ISIS child soldier", and repeatedly trying to shut down feminists by using Muslim women as a blunt object to say they don't have it so bad so stop complaining, all while doing a lot of "I don't believe [bad thing], I'm just asking questions, y'know" on the side

Confirming all that I learned that he promoted a conference run by evangelical Christian Nationalists in 2019 since, while he "didn't support their religious beliefs", he did support their speaker's rants about "post-modernism", which. That checks out tbh

haphazard assortment of thoughts on the unwanted guest:

firstly, it really does have to be said—crazy good, probably my favourite of all the tlt short pieces, and i say that as someone who lost my mind over as yet unsent for like a week. excellent conceit and excellent execution, just a really gorgeous piece of writing. the play format of course reminds me of what abigail says to harrow in htn—that the river bubble is a ‘play [she’s] directing’—the inside of one’s head as a stage in which other actors can intervene & whereby mileage can be gotten out of Symbolism as immediately “real,” tangible presences that the kind of realist baggage that a more quotidian prose form would usher in would probably falter in accomplishing. it’s a lot!! i think even if i wasn’t already a tazmuir writing style defender (contra the insistence that she’s yknow homestuck fanfiction serial numbers filed off hack) then this would have had me floored anyway. 

the play format also works in the way that muir’s general dexterity in form and willingness to really make use of craft as a technical space where discourse can be generated always works—i’m talking about the ‘fanfictiony’ voice in gtn which manages to say something both about fanfiction and about the text itself, the use of the dramatis personae as a space where atmosphere can be established and plot points hinted towards (thus blurring the lines between what is and is not diegesis), the drastic shifts in style between different close thirds, the shifting from third- to second- to epistolary first-person, the use of poetry both diegetic and not (the noniad, the epigraph poems…), the mimicry of the ‘voice’ of the king james bible in the nona epilogue—she never stays in one place for too long and she never seems to stick to one central style or form, and it really works in her favour. insofar as tlt as a whole is a very ‘patchwork’ kind of work, building itself up from its big big index of references and intertexts and memes with hugely variant levels of ‘prestige’ or legitimacy attached to them, the ‘patchwork’ use of form really works in muir’s favour. however i am also fuming because i was right in the middle of writing a tlt fic which jumps into a play format two-thirds of the way through and now my idea doesn’t look ORIGINAL but ANYWAY—

& i really do need to flag my good friend vee’s mercy/augustine fic, which makes use of a similar conceit and pulls it off masterfully—i am deeply jealous of vee’s talent and i think the unwanted guest makes this piece (from 2021!) shine even more, if anything.

i am DYING to see where muir is going with the use of hamlet, of all things—dulcie quoting it to palamedes immediately catapulted my mind back to abigail’s reference to ‘that undiscovered country’ in htn. obviously muir likes to drop contemporary (or contemporarily canonical) references and turns of phrase all over the place, but the attention drawn to the quote as diegetically referential (“I like that. Is it from something?” / “Yes. It’s complicated.”) has me wondering about a) the survival of ‘pre-res’ literatures ~over the river and like WHY and b) what a thematic interlocking of tlt and hamlet can do, here…….real aveheads remember cytherea ophelia theory where i tried to use ophelia as a point of reference for teasing out some arguments about cytherea and death and aesthetics and white femininity and whatnot. all of which is to say i need to sit with this hamlet reading a lot more but i love it, i am so here for it.

of course ‘kissing or feeding, we can’t be sure’ calls to mind ‘how meat loves meat,’ alecto biting harrow’s mouth by way of a kiss…and the general thematic throughline of, you know, certain practices of love as practices of consumption, naberius later being figured as the ‘meat’ in question contains echoes of this eroticism which ofc guides the contours of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, eroticism as a currency of power, we know all of this stuff because it’s all over the text but i am just thumbs-upping it from the sidelines

the coffins had me thinking of utena’s black rose arc, which is a fun link to make considering the equivalent moment in the main body of nona is also referencing utena, ie. with the ‘rules’ of the duel being that cam has to get the handkerchief out of ianthe’s pocket as kind of an equivalent to skewering the rose. i feel like the tlt/utena overlap is pretty self-explanatory but it’s just fun to see the fingerprints all over lol

i think a lot of this was treading old ground thematically (erotics of consumption, dog motifs, we’ve seen it already!) but i will say that i did Yell Out Loud over ‘who's she got dawdling behind her but that creature—tugging visibly at her leash like an overeager dog.’ reminded of the other memorable use of ‘leash’—’even the devil bent for god to put a leash around her neck’—and, of course, the endless parade of commonalities between gideon & alecto. anyway there’s not really anything in this line that we didn’t already know about gid as a character, thematically speaking, but i point it out because it inflicted +100 psychic damage when i read it. gideon as a ‘creature’ is particularly slimy, & sort of puts me in mind of ianthe's tendency to talk about what appears to us as 'butch masculinity' (as opposed to the more effete masculinity of augustine or even babs) with a notably derogatory slant (the 'hurtful threats of sexual violence' line comes to mind); i don't know that i have much to say about it here specifically but it's an interesting one that i think informs the kirianthe dynamic pretty heavily (especially when held up against, like, harrianthe ... ianthe has a kind of respect for whatever harrow's gay and stupid gender is Doing (at least insofar as she can mould it to her own desires; i'm thinking of the dios apate forcefemme scene lol) in ways that i don't think she has for kiriona? but this is v off-topic, lol).

i have never been especially taken by dulcie as a character but i think this may finally have forced me to fold and admit that she’s great. her haters!!! her agonies!!! camilla would have to cook!! the balance between levity and sincerity was really well-managed. & i love the double meaning of “unwanted guest” as both palamedes intruding on ianthe’s mind palace and naberius setting up shop inside of her.

i need a week to sit with where this idea of the consumed soul as being literally ‘digested’ such that it can begin to ‘inhabit,’ however immaterially, the host body, or like to alter the characteristics of the host body such that to carry out such a consumption is to kind of kill yourself as well, slots in with lolita theory. or like, i need alecto right now. i am however reminded of chew, a short story that muir wrote in 2013, which also plays with these ideas of sexual assault as a forcing of a part of yourself meaningfully ‘into’ another person, and cannibalism as the reenactment of such a process, figured in the story as kind of a reclamation or at least an assertion of permanence—“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.”—which the unwanted guest seems to kind of, play with in reverse? i don’t know, but i’m interested—as ever—in where muir wants to take these ideas of rape and consumption and absorption that she’s got in her hands.

i keep returning to…i hesitate to say ‘parallels’ because i think that imposes a narrative onus that i’m not actually that convinced by, but these, like, commonalities between babs and gideon. gideon is played off against so many people (cristabel, loveday, alecto being the big ones) that it feels kind of inane to add another person to the pile, but like…they’re the two who get got in canaan house, they’re both ironically ‘false’ cavaliers and expressions of the ‘truest’ or most paradigmatic form that cavalierhood ‘can’/’should’ take, they both have unconventionally gendered names (‘babs’ is a shortened form of ‘barbara,’ it is a typically feminine name imo) and (by our standards) somewhat unconventional genders (gideon is butch, babs effete)—and of course the unwanted guest places a lot of emphasis on the coercive ‘making’ of cavalierhood (the reference to babs being ‘fixed’ were he to have a disability! ianthe’s glib ‘society really is to blame’ comment—ironic, obviously, but not wholly untrue) not dissimilar to the emphasis that gtn puts on cytherea moulding gideon into the state she comes to be in at the end. babs and gideon as the two possessed corpses in nona, obviously. two wildly diverse but ultimately converging trajectories! a dialectical tension between their fundamental ‘opposition’ (as by-the-book cavalier vs whatever gideon is doing) and their fundamental ‘sameness’ whereby the dialectic is resolved in their mutual deaths. also just, of course, continuing the throughline that muir has had going for a while now, of gender/gendering as a set of coercive enforcements loyal to a hegemonic structuring of the world.

that’s all i’ve got, i think. just. really good everyone say thank you tazmuir

Far be it for me to kinkshame a dragon. But perhaps this is an indication that 2024 should be the Year of Sexualize That Old Man. Put Him In Situations

AITA for joking about someone on the other side of an argument getting r@p3d

I (17F at the time) didn’t really like the proship community that much. After they harassed me for a bit i felt that I should just be one of them. I saw a X post about an antiship person being hateful and joked about that person getting r@p3d. the proship community proceeded to say that “all antis are freaks” including me, who wanted to be on the correct side and not be mean just because people liked r@p3 or ¡n€e$t. so that’s why i did it. my X account is suspended now because they mass reported it when i wanted to improve and become one of them. i no longer like the term or anyone in the community for this reason. but if i see them again i will defend them no matter how much i hate them because i want to be a good hearted person.

AITA?

What are these acronyms?

I’m really fed up with the mentality in the queer community of “you weren’t oppressed in the same way I was oppressed so you aren’t oppressed at all”

So I’m grateful there seem to be some people pushing back against it

Very much agree. It’s an aphobia classic (along with other flavors of exclusionism). In transandrophobia discussions, it typically manifests as saying transmascs aren’t particularly oppressed because they aren’t hypervisible and aren’t murdered at the same rates as trans woc. Not factoring in things like the way they’re subject to a special level of medical mistreatment wrt their reproductive systems and medical misogyny, and how they have the highest rates of sexual assault of any gender category and are sometimes raped specifically as a form of attempted detransition. Murder isn’t the only way oppression manifests; there are other types of violence and other negative outcomes that groups like transmascs and aspec folks face. I think we need to start creating and/or spreading terms about the phenomenon to hopefully avoid the cycle from continuing with another group once transmascs aren’t the fashionable target anymore.

replaying ARR has made me really desperately curious to know how much got changed/added in translation/localization... because i know some crazy stuff was done - for example, the original english text for the moenbryda minion had the implication that urianger made the minion as a sex toy (???!!!!!), and luckily this was later fixed to be closer to the actual japanese text. but that is such a dramatic example of a translation choice made in very poor taste. there's of course the infamous hien dialogue where he calls yotsuyu's trafficker a good guy in english. one thing in ARR that stunned me is in the part where you're gearing up to rescue the scions from castrum centri, and the guy helping you REALLY hates the garleans - and eventually it's revealed that he's from ala mhigo, and he and his family were put into labor camps, and his mother & sister were made to be comfort women for imperial soldiers! holy shit! that's fucking horrible! gaius was the viceroy of ala mhigo and set up its occupational government - did gaius condone that? with the context of the actual historical japanese empire's atrocities, that makes the sorrow of werlyt storyline really, deeply suspect! but also - i don't know if that's the original intended text, or something that the english version added to make the garlean empire look bad that then came back to bite it in the ass later on (from my first 2 examples, one could surmise that the english translation has a tendency to introduce weird sex stuff that wasn't in the original japanese text - but it also desexualized certain things, such as haurchefant). and i don't know what other translations/localizations added, subtracted, or changed. especially because there's sooooo much text in this game. but also translations/localizations have lives and characters of their own - they are not inherently inferior versions of the text. i don't have a thesis statement here, im just thinking out loud. such is blogging

@ihatemenandtherearereasons

@maledepravityarchive

not to get angry and vague about of some post i saw, but holy shit i just saw a post that claimed buffy was the villain of season 6, argued that every time buffy said "no" to spike before seeing red, that was actually her way of consenting and therefore it was totally ok for spike to ignore her, and essentially argued that while spike did nothing wrong until seeing red, buffy was nothing but a coldhearted abuser the entire time, and is therefore responsible for destroying the safety net she had with spike, leading to his actions in seeing red. in other words, this person is essentially blaming buffy for being sexually assaulted, ala the incredibly sexist fandom narrative from 15 years ago that led to so much buffy hate at the time. but op used modern progressive language to express this, which is why literally no one in the notes took issue with such an obviously ridiculous, bullshit misogynistic take.