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gracegrove · 11 months

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Whether you're talking about a fictional character (Billy) or an actual person...

How can you say, "I don't think his abusive, racist, misogynistic behavior would have improved with time--because he didn't see it as a problem. You have to want to change."

How did you know he didn't want to change? Why are you so damn certain he's incapable of change? He's literally only 18 and has the rest of his entire life to change. You think he's honestly gonna sit there and be like, "nah this is fine. I'm set. I like everything just the way it is." And never once contemplate or attempt a change.

Every person attempts change on some level. Not everyone makes big ground shaking changes. Not everyone gets to a point that is satisfactory to others. That's not the point.

When you are around real people and/or work with real people and use this language guess what happens? It makes them feel incapable. It feels undermining. It helps solidify and corner them into a box they may not want to necessarily stay or be in.

I've worked with clients with records. Clients who've said outright sexist and bigoted things in front of me and at times directed towards me. But I continued to work with them. Guess why? Because if I were to leave in that instance, I'd only be proving a point. A single point. That again there's this giant narrative of "no one believes in you", "you clearly don't want help", "you're irredeemable", etc.

You don't kick someone when they're already down and then say, "gosh well, you don't even wanna get back up do you? You have to really want it?" Why should they want it or try harder when they're expecting more people like you to kick them right back to the floor again. Google "labeling theory", it might be helpful.

There's an therapeutic approach called Motivational Interviewing, and its main tenant is that change is facilitated by and comes from the client alone. It helps a client who is already well aware of people around them telling them to change, or societal expectations, or maybe more simply they have considered personally making changes themselves whether it's something like smoking cessation, substance use /harm reduction, emotional management, or wanting to make other behavioral changes but they haven't because they're not sure what such a change would mean or look like in their lives. So they sit on the fence. They become ambivalent.

The only job the therapist has in this is to help the client lay all this out. To discuss it and weigh each side. To examine what making changes or no changes would mean. Ultimately the goal is to help the client reach a state of active change. So that the client can begin new parts of their life and continue moving forward. But if someone isn't ready, then they're not and that's also ok.

If you immediately shut down on a fictional character because their story wasn't insightful enough for you to glean any empathy that they were capable of change, how do you or will you tolerate the overall change process that real people have? Because it's an arduous one. It takes time, it doesn't sprout up overnight. And half of it is because those people themselves were repeatedly told that they couldn't change either.

So stop contributing to the ambivalence or the stagnancy and start contributing to the change.

#the soapbox #dont tell people that you don't think they can do things #dont be a naysayer you walnuts

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boombaux · 8 months

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#i keep forgetting i have tumblr #boombaux art #fanart #sketch #comic #dave strider #homestuck #hs #karkat vantas #based on dialogue from the soapbox by MisPronounce_and_MisAccent on ap3 #ao3 #its a really good fic lol #the soapbox

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soapkid · 4 months

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non furries are so annoying about the semantics of calling something a furry. "erm wouldnt that be like.. a feathery???" its an avian and its still a furry. ok yes you can call the slug a slimy thats funny. but these are all fursonas. unless theyre not. i hope this hurts you

#casey's soapbox

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featuresofinterest · 4 months

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god i hope the cpsc takes the shot. i think this would dramatically change their entire business model. amazon makes so much money by selling defective or mislabeled or just plain dangerous products and then faces little liability because this stuff is actually being sold by random third-party sellers that don't get vetted at all and can be hard to prosecute because they're in china or wherever. this is a big part of what makes amazon so powerful and it would be good for everyone if they were forced to bear more responsibility for the damages caused by the crap available on their website

#anyway. i'll get off my soapbox now

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milfsisyphus · 5 months

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EARNEST POSTING. while everyone is still working on new year’s resolutions i want to make sure everyone knows about the FREE serial reader app.

if you are trying to read more classics/public domain works but for whatever reason struggle with incorporating reading into your daily life, or you’re just intimidated by huge books, serial reader is a great tool to make reading more approachable. it works much like dracula daily in that it sends you one excerpt at a time (usually about 10-15 minutes of estimated reading time). awesome for commutes, lunch breaks, quick bedtime story, etc.

it’s very customizable. you can change fonts, themes, and you can even take notes and highlight. you can also sync with other reading apps like goodreads (no storygraph yet……. we can hope!). the base app is completely free, but there is a one-time optional upgrade fee of $2.99 USD if you want some extra features. this is all developed by one guy, so the money goes to supporting the creator - although i’m sure apple takes their cut 😑.

there are a ton of works to choose from, currently something like 800+.

you can now also add your own .epubs to break up your own books into daily serials! very cool, serial reader!

this was the best app i added last year so i just want to pass it on. happy reading! :)

#UP ON MY SERIAL READER SOAPBOX: michael i love you. and your application. :)

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faultfalha · 6 months

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The wise man knows that knowledge is power, and through knowledge one can achieve things that some might deem impossible. Eric Adams is a man of great ambition, determined to unlock the hidden secrets to gaining financial freedom. His approach is novel and his cause is noble, but only time will tell if his path leads to success. With his ideas, he stirs up both hope and concern amongst his peers. He has been seen as both a leader and a threat, but one thing is clear - he is transforming the game, and no one knows what the outcome will be.

#The Soapbox #Politics #New York City #Eric Adams #Turkey #Recep Tayyip Erdogan #Foreign Policy #kleptocracy #influence peddling #fault #financial independence #oppressive kleptocrats #unique take #revolutionary/danger

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aspharah · 7 months

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hey bro can we like adopt paralleling themes and symbolize opposites but in a two sides of the same coin kind of way? it doesn’t have to be weird. wait what do you mean thats gay

#swear 90%+ of my favorite ships r like this #for example #stevebucky #moicy #blackbonnet #ineffable husbands #and um. can i say it #kavetham #haikaveh #beiguang #xingyun #wriolette #anyways bye #soapbox #txt

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sonarsunbeam · 1 year

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fandomification and shipping is fucking up how some of yall consume media and i mean it

#soapbox #continuing in rb

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azuremist · 3 months

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TME and TMA as intersexist terms: as written by an intersex transfem

I’ve had a few different people in my inbox asking me why I view these terms the way I do. In particular, why I claim it’s intersexist. So, I thought I’d lay out a few examples, so everyone can understand where I’m coming from.

Imagine an intersex woman. She was assigned female at birth by her doctors, and was able to go about her childhood as a woman with no inclination that anything was amiss. Sure, she didn’t experience certain parts of puberty, but puberty was different for everyone, right?

But, later in life, she learns she has Turner syndrome. This is an intersex condition where a woman has only one X chromosome, rather than the usual two.

Soon after she learns this, she finds that laws are being made to attempt to keep trans women out of women’s spaces (often specifically sports) which use chromosomes as a defining factor of womanhood.

Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected”? She has been raised as a cisgender woman with no problems regarding being ‘clocked’, but she is also a direct target of transmisogynistic laws. She lies in a gray area.

Now, let’s go to another intersex person. Imagine an intersex man with PAIS. AIS is an intersex condition where babies are born with testes and XY chromosomes, but their body is immune to or can’t respond to androgens (which includes testosterone). Intersex people with partial AIS (PAIS) often develop a vulva and clitoris during puberty.

This intersex person identifies as a man, and he was assigned male at birth. However, his body does not produce testosterone, and he went through a feminizing puberty. To the average eye, he appears to be a woman now because of this.

Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected?” He was assigned male at birth, and now appears to be a woman, much like many transfems. However, if many saw how he looks now, stating that he is a male, they would probably clock him as transmasc. He was raised as a boy until puberty, and then faced astrozcization from his peers when he began a puberty that feminized him. What he was facing was a form of intersexism where transmisogyny was playing a huge part. Does his childhood matter? Can one become TME over time, when they were TMA as a child? Again, he lies in a gray area, where the answer is not quite so simple.

What about the “opposite”, per se — an intersex woman who had a masculinizing puberty? She has aromatase deficiency, which means that many ‘male’ hormones (which would usually be converted to ‘female’ hormones) would remain unconverted. She identifies as a woman, and was identified as a female at birth and was raised, until puberty, as a female. But now, she would be clocked as a trans woman upon looking at her. What does that make her? Is it different from the previous example? How and why? This intersex person also lies in a gray area. How she should be described with these terms is not clear.

And keep in mind, these are all relatively simple examples. All of the examples I listed self-identify as cisgender. But there are intersex people who are trans in any direction you can imagine.

If that last example identified as a trans woman, because she is now clocked as one, would you be able to say she’s wrong for that? What about if she identified as transmasculine, because of her experience with puberty? What if she’s multigender, bigender or genderfluid, and says she’s both transmasc and transfem because of her complicated experiences? Would that make her a TMA transmasculine person? But I thought that transmascs were all TME? That’s how it’s so often framed, anyway.

The reason why these questions are so difficult to answer is because these terms were not made with intersex people in mind. Very real intersex transfems were pushed to the wayside in favor of centering the perisex view of transgenderism. Intersex people are nothing but an inconvenient little afterthought, annoying perisex people with their demand for “inclusion” and “consideration”. (As per usual.)

You cannot simply make a new gender binary and say, “No, really, this time everyone fits into these two categories! Forcing people to confine themselves to these two rigid labels which are shown as opposites, and as never interacting, will definitely include everyone this time!!” No matter what the contents of the new binary is, it’s not going to work, because sex and gender alike are too complicated for that. There will always be people in the gray area.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that these terms, for all intents and purposes, seem to have been popularized by and associated with the Baeddelism movement around 2017, which was essentially “Radical Feminism 2: We’re Trans Women, So It’s Fine!” This movement is known for chronic villainization of trans men and non-binary people who aren’t transfem. (They act like this with cis people too, but noticeably less so than they do with non-transfem trans people. How curious.) Think along the lines of how regular radfems treat all men (and who they deem to be men) as inherently morally disgusting scum who deserve to be attacked.

Methinks that maybe these terms aren’t the neutral, fact-based descriptors of oppression that many people nowadays tout them to be, considering that.

So, yeah. “Transmisogyny exempt” and “transmisogyny affected” as terms: not even once. Listen to intersex people, stop trying to make sex and gender into binaries, and for the love of God, stop drinking the queer seperationist koolaid!

#intersex #intersexism #lgbt #transgender #actually intersex #long post #azure does a thing #i’ll get off my soapbox now #btw if you’re gonna argue with me on whether or not it’s intersexist you’d Better be intersex #or so help me god i will (REDACTED BECAUSE TRANSFEMS CANT JOKINGLY THREATEN VIOLENCE APPARENTLY)

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stormsthatrage · 5 months

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It bugs me that so many people's default example of published fanfic is 50 Shades of Grey.

What about West Side Story, a famous modern AU of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet?

What about Dante's Inferno, a self-insert RPF if I've ever seen one?

What about Wicked, a pre-canon AU of The Wizard of Oz?

Hell, what about Percy Jackson? There's definitely an argument to be made that that's a modern AU of various Greek myths.

Humans have been writing fanfic as long as they have been telling stories. In about the year 20 BC, our dear Roman poet Ovid wrote the Heroides, a series of aggrieved "letters" from the female characters of famous myths to their respective male heroes. Are you telling me that Ovid, writing a letter from the perspective of Queen Dido to Aeneas -- Aeneas, whose fantastical adventures were put into poem by Virgil -- wasn't writing an outsider-POV fic? A fic that is, in fact, translated in Latin classes world-wide today!

There is so much famous fanfic out there, but people tend to forget that it is fanfic once it becomes mainstream enough. And as a consequence of that, people who aren't into fandom don't see how beautiful fanfic is, and some members of fandom feel shame associated with writing and reading fic. But fanfic is beautiful, and it is something humans have always done, and it is nothing to be ashamed about.

So if you ever find yourself in a situation to give an example of published fic, think outside the box. Remember that published fanfics hide in plain sight; once they're famous enough, we no longer think of them as fanfic. And never forget that fanfic is a very, very old human tradition, and your ancestors who partook in it would not have wanted you to feel ashamed of it.

#my soapbox

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gracegrove · 10 months

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There is a monumental difference between holding a head canon, preference, or interpretation of a character's behaviors/mannerisms/mental health/trauma history on a personal level (while leaving room and space for others to enjoy their own and other characters as well)...

Vs.

Insisting only your said interpretations are correct about the character in question while at the same time dragging down another character and maligning them with the same mental health interpretations you don't want your character to have.

Displacing perceived unwanted characteristics, mental health diagnoses, or traumas onto another character perpetuates an oppressive mentality. A narrative of "I'm not mentally ill/broken/wrong/diseases/etc... Because if I was I would look like John. No one wants to be like John." It classes and categorizes people into groups or even castes of who is acceptable or palatable to the community and who is not.

You could be St. Thomas Aquinas and struggle with psychosis, it doesn't make you better or even less than Tommy Two Shoes who only has ADHD and difficulties with math and reading.

Don't hold up one mental health status, recognize that another is demonized/marginalized, but then simply say "well this is why my blorbo and I aren't marginalized, so *phew* thank God to that amiright?"

If you want to hold space for these interpretations of mental health and trauma, make room and realize that there's always going to be someone whose views don't match yours. It isn't about making sure you're "at least I'm not that guy". It's not about being more important or better. It's not about being "right".

#the soapbox #tw fandom critical

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britomart · 1 year

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⭐ britomart Follow

not a big fan of those gimmick posts tbh [¹][²][ᵃʳᵉ ʸᵒᵘ ˢᵘʳᵉ?]

References [ edit ]

^ Britomart, V. (2023) "not a big fan of those gimmick posts". Internet: Tumblr.[ᵃ]

^ Britomart, V. (2023) "Drafts". Internet: Tumblr.

Notes [ edit ] a. ^ Have you heard of Inception?