Hi, please don't encourage murder ok? Ok.

If you are in therapy it would be wise to discuss this with your therapist or counselor. If you are not in therapy you should really consider it. Have a good day :)

👆🏻 ways to notice someone's new here and came from tiktok 👆🏻

Honestly, I feel at times that a lot of people don't know or realize how traumatizing it has been to identify as pan, online, these past few years. I've identified as pan since about 8th grade? Freshman year? I'm a college Freshman, and it's been one of my most consistent labels ever since I discovered it.

I joined Tumblr on the tail end of the ace discourse, about 2018, which also means I joined around the beginning of pan discourse - something that is still ongoing. The ace discoursers got bored, and so they moved on to their next closest target. The mspec community as a whole has always been the target of harassment for decades now, but this episode of it has been horrific.

The claims that pansexuality is biphobic, transphobic, racist (yes, this is an ACTUAL claim), predatory, immoral, and more started to gain a lot of traction. And, with it, a lot of pan people started to get a lot of harassment, attacks, smear campaigns and more put onto them. We've been made into jokes, slandered with horrible, unfounded claims of our identities, forced to prove ourselves that we aren't what the exclusionists claim us to be. We even had exclusionists try to change our flag multiple times, because the creator doesn't hold their views.

As recent as 2020 and 2021, you couldn't scroll far in the pansexual tag before you found someone saying we aren't real, aren't valid, that we should kill ourselves, that we deserve to be murdered, that we should be wiped out, converted, killed, assaulted, that we're biphobic in one way or another, and so on. It was horrible. It still is horrible. Panphobia is still rampant - it has always been rampant. But very few people care to listen to us, it seems.

It's been traumatizing. Actually, genuinely traumatizing, to identify as pan in this day and age of discourse. I've grown the habit of searching every blog I ever come across for mentions of pansexual, pan, bi + pan, and so on, to see whether they want me dead for merely existing under a specific label or not. Because I've often found, unfortunately, that many bi positivity posts that gain traction or often spoken from poisoned, exclusionary lips - even if the reblogs are from inclusive people, the source of the water is tainted nonetheless.

Discourse is traumatizing. Having your community and safe spaces be filled with violent vitriol against you and people like you is traumatizing. People telling you and trying to convince you into thinking "it's not that bad", "it isn't important", "[I'm] just trying to always be the victim", "Panphobia isn't real", and more is traumatizing.

Showing support to mspec people and labels is important. Thinking critically of posts before reblogging them is important, when one had the energy to do so. Not platforming those who seek to spread harm under the guise of love and care is important.

I've got a riddle for that Anon hater who accused you of misogyny:

Imagine a CisHet Man. Imagine this CisHet Man has a long and well-documented history of making sexist, racist, antisemitic, biphobic, and even occasionally pedophilic jokes, on panels, tweets, cameos, podcasts, and interviews. Imagine this bigoted CisHet Man works for a Capitalist Corporation that named themselves after a homophobic slur, a company that ALSO has a long and well-documented history of producing content riddled with sexist, racist, antisemitic, biphobic and even occasionally pedophilic jokes, and also happens to frequently land itself in the news as the working place of people who do things like *use their positions to groom and take advantage of fans, some of them underage* or maybe *try to murder their wives after abusing them for years.* Imagine that this Capitalist Corporation is so infamously toxic and produces work so infamously bad that people have said it's considered a strike against them to include working there on their resumes. Imagine that the CisHet Man has been with this company for over a decade now, but instead of being 'trapped' there, he's among the many figures that have been named as part of the problem. Imagine that the CisHet Man gets his paycheck from the Capitalist Corporation, and the Capitalist Corporation gets their profit from the work done by the CisHet Man. Now imagine that this CisHet Man, working for this Capitalist Corporation, joins with other people who have similar - if less loud - pasts, and that together they produce a "Girl Power!" series that is riddled with just as much sexism, racism, antisemitism, biphobia, and even occasionally pedophilic content that you'd expect from the creators.

Now imagine a woman. Not working for anybody, not expecting to gain anything, not in this for profit, not doing anything that could possibly suggest any ulterior motive; just some random everyday average woman. And imagine that this woman has a tumblr that has been openly advocating for women's rights (and the rights of other groups as well) since long before she started talking about the show written by CisHet Man and Pals and produced by the Capitalist Corporation.

Now that we've got the pieces in place, here's the riddle:

Who is the most misogynistic? The CisHet Man and Pals who write the show produced by the Capitalist Corporation, the feminist woman who criticizes it without anything to gain from her words, or the random asshole who attacks her to defend the man?

For real! I think part of the problem comes with a combo of people who fail to recognize the humanity of the people they meet on the internet and are out of touch with reality enough to mistake fictional worlds, events, and characters for anything other than fabrication invented by flawed human people.

Ruby feels more real to them than I do, I think. They look at a screen with Ruby and fail to recognize the majority men controlling her actions and words and movements, and therefore say ‘you’re criticizing a woman doing her best’ instead of recognizing that I’m criticizing the writers who control her every word, action, and movement. And then they look at me and are like “um why would I not attack the Max Goof icon?”

The fact that they think they have the moral high ground is hilarious to me. Me criticizing a group of majority men who are trying to earn money and fame off of a product, while I’m using tags specifically so that anyone who doesn’t like criticism and doesn’t want to see it can filter it, is somehow more misogynistic to them then sending direct attacks to a woman’s blog in a way that they know she sees. And the thing they’re attacking me for is saying “characters and situations should be nuanced!” Do you know what I find misogynistic? When men are very capable of writing nuanced stories with hard questions and hard choices, but can’t manage to or don’t want to make their woman characters nuanced too and therefore backtrack or cheat in order to give them wins without writing them to do much for the majority of a season and having men solve the majority of her problems. Ruby isn’t real and her team isn’t real and Ironwood isn’t real. The events that we see happen in RWBY aren’t predestined fate or some divine tale that the writers were enlightened to and had to dutifully recount as it ‘actually happened.’ They’re fake, the story is whatever MKEK wanted, they contrived a situation where Ruby sat there in a mansion drinking tea while people died and Jaune and Oscar were doing things in a whale. They contrived a situation where Ruby launched Amity while weirdly assuming that’d somehow save Atlas in less than a day and then fell to pieces and was plagued with indecisiveness for episodes when it didn’t work. They contrived a situation where Jaune and Oscar’s team took on Ironwood while Ruby’s plan with Ambrosius literally wouldn’t have worked according to the writers if Ambrosius hadn’t liked her and let her cheat his apparently not necessary rules. And it wasn’t me that made Ruby do things that weren’t one hundred percent perfect (because rarely anything is,) and then just pretended it was perfect, made doubting anything she does into a Bad Action boarding on betrayal, and tried to keep her from natural growth and consequences by whatever means necessary. It wasn’t me who did those things, I’m just pointing them out.

It’s Early Women’s Equality 101 to say ‘critically examine how women are portrayed in media and realize that a lot of man written ‘girl power’ is steeped in the unchecked or even internalized misogyny of the writer.’ People often try to get woke points by making ‘powerful women’ without bothering to ever examine or deconstruct their own misogyny. So saying ‘um the girl fights and also wins, so what’s the problem’ is a very juvenile and frustrating way that people are looking at RWBY.