𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖙
JUJUTSU KAISEN !
smaus
sending jjk men "i know what you did" texts | part two
asking jjk men "ass or tits?" | part two
"my bed is so lonely without you"
"i had fun last night. oops, wrong person."
calling them "bro"
"your face is pretty, can i sit on it?"
jjk men when they're jealous
"she's busy rn" | part two
"i fantasise about you all the time if you were mine"
jjk men reacting to borderline possessive reader
jjk men in the sassy apocalypse
jjk men + reader on their period
satoru gojo
suguru geto
kento nanami
yuuji itdadori
megumi fushiguro
soft and lightweight (latest smau!)
bf!megumi texts
toge inumaki
unhinged!bf!toge text
choso kamo
bf!choso texts
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On Daenerys, Colonisation and Race Discourse within the ASOIAF Fandom
This has been on my mind for a good long while and honestly, as much as I would like to leave discourse in the pits, it has been bugging me intermittently over the past few weeks.
Far too many of you get on here and call people who like the fictional dragon-riding family, neo-Nazis and that sentiment is so prevalent, that white people feel comfortable telling me a black woman that I am a neo-Nazi for rooting for Daenerys Targaryen. I am upholding neo-Nazi power fantasies for wanting to see a little girl live at the end of a story. I am a neo-Nazi for wanting to see the rape survivor have the family she aches for and children with the man (or men) she loves.
Then, those same people go on spiels about how the systemic erasure of those who sing the song of the earth and other old races is not colonialism. That their removal from their home is not displacement but an agreement between two equal parties. The fact that the only place where those who sing the song of the earth exist in the present timeline is north of the wall, surrounded by the bones of their dead, is not a travesty. That the expulsion of the old races from their home isn't that bad and should not be condemned.
Instead, people argue, completely seriously, that the harm that the First Men and Andals have caused is centuries in the past, so essentially the slate has been wiped clean. The logical leaps that are required to arrive at such a boneheaded conclusion are truly mind-boggling, and those who make such arguments are not good people.
I am unsure how one could read those books and come away with the impression that the old races do not mourn the loss of their home. I am unsure how one could read The Last of the Giants[1] and Ygritte’s reaction to both the song and Jon’s dismissal of the ethnic cleansing of the giants then believe that the old races and the free folk have moved past their displacement.
In Westeros, from the Wall to the broken arm of Dorne, they all speak one language despite the fact they are all different ethnicities and they all landed on the shores at different times. That is not the case in Essos, we have been introduced to at least six languages and in A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion notes that the Valyrian spoken in the Free Cities has evolved into nine distinct dialects, and they are well on their way to becoming different languages.
How would a continent as large and diverse as Westeros maintain its hegemony over the people if not for forced assimilation, discriminatory practices and violence? The brutal repression required to keep one house in power for thousands of years is nothing to sniff at. The suppression required to keep the vast majority of Westeros worshipping one (or seven) gods. The systems in place ensure that language does not grow or evolve amongst the highborns at least.
Centuries before Aegon's Landing the maesters were the definitive educational authority and even now centuries after, nothing has changed. The grey rats still decide who learns what and when they learn it. There's one in every highborn home, all correspondence passes through them, they are the healers and the councillors.
The circular logic gets even more blockheaded when you factor in the fact that Daenerys is far from the only white character in the books. She is not the only character who wishes for home. She is not the only character who draws strength from her ancestors, her bloodline and her magical creatures.
Cersei draws strength from her family’s iconography, and the Stark children (Jon included) all draw strength from their direwolves, their home and their blood. Sansa, Arya and Bran wish to return home and their home was built on the indiscriminate murder and displacement of the indigenous peoples. Their home is built on centuries of rape, murder, exclusionary practices and sexual slavery.
However, if we give the nonsensical argument that time erases crimes air; the Starks, Lannisters and Tullys are warring to settle personal grievances in the present timeline. As a consequence of that war, thousands (a modest guesstimate) of small folk, minor nobles and even some major ones have been raped, tortured, maimed and killed.
Despite all this, no one writes meta after meta about how Sansa and her siblings must surely die for justice to be had for those who sing the song of the earth, the free folk, the giants and all the old races that fled beyond the wall.
People write meta about Cersei and how she must die, but those are typically more misogynistic nature. They typically argue that she must die not for the “crime” of being Lannister, but for the “crime” of being Cersei and “ruining” Jamie.
I would not mind criticisms of Dany and her peace-focused approach to ending slavery because the approach is naïve and she gives the slavers far too much ground. However, she is learning, growing and self-critiquing. At the end of A Dance with Dragons, she has decided to embrace fire and blood, her knight is breaking the false peace which is a necessary step forward.
What I find offensive is people saying that she should have planned better before she abolished slavery. And that the death, violence, and sickness that arises from her quest to eradicate slavery is somehow worse than the death, violence, and sickness that already existed in Slaver’s Bay.
This argument often downplays the horrific conditions and suffering that exist(ed) under the slave system in Slaver's Bay. Such arguments are often in poor taste and prioritise the lives and comforts of the slavers more than the people they have enslaved.
I would not mind criticisms of Dany if people applied that same critique even-handedly. The same people who believe that Jon and Bran have done much to rectify the evil that their ancestors perpetuated believe that Dany has not done anything to right the wrongs of her ethnic kin. They praise them for the non-existent steps that they have taken, but in the same breath, they condemn Dany for not being able to immediately end the plague that is slavery.
It is perfectly alright to not like fictional characters, no law requires you to like certain fictional characters over others. However, what is not right is making broad accusations about those who do, it is beyond the pale. It is disgusting, and annoying, and trivialises real-world issues to score cheap points against fictional characters.
Equating the survival of a teenage survivor to the restoration of a fascist house or neo-Nazi power fantasy when such designations do not exist in the world of ice and fire is strange behaviour. Saying that the teenage survivor will eventually be manipulated and raped (again) before ending up dead on her manipulator's blade is also strange behaviour.
Dismissing the horrors of colonialism, especially when the text shows you that the involved parties are still affected by it, is not normal and often veers into real-world imperialism apologia. While criticism and analysis of characters and their actions are valid and even encouraged, it is essential that we do not resort to sweeping generalisations about other people and that we keep criticisms of characters grounded in the text.
[1]
Ooooooh, I am the last of the giants, my people are gone from the earth.
The last of the great mountain giants, who ruled all the world at my birth
Oh, the smallfolk have stolen my forests, they’ve stolen my rivers and hills.
And they’ve built a great wall through my valleys, and fished all the fish from my rills
In stone halls they burn their great fires, in stone halls they forge their sharp spears.
Whilst I walk alone in the mountains, with no true companion but tears.
They hunt me with dogs in the daylight, they hunt me with torches by night.
For these men who are small can never stand tall, whilst giants still walk in the light.
Oooooooh, I am the LAST of the giants, so learn well the words of my song.
For when I am gone the singing will fade, and the silence shall last long and long.
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Hey all. So for Pride Month, I wanna talk some about butch and femme identities.
Specifically, the false dichotomy that's been made out of them.
If you've spent any time at all around multigender people, you know that manhood and womanhood are not oppositional or mutually exclusive. If you've spent any time at all in healthy general trans spaces, you know that masculinity and femininity aren't, either.
So then why are butch and femme (and futch, when it's remembered), treated as such?
My main identity is butch, because every aspect of my identity is masc in some way. It has to be, for me to feel comfortable and safe in it. When I am a gender in the feminine spectrum, I am masc in presentation, affect, performance, and other similar aspects. When I am masc-gendered, I actually tend to be more femme, though, because the mascness is safely cemented in my gender! When I am an abinary gender, it can vary and that's actually when I tend to be more neutral, but there is still less femininity than masculinity.
I could go into why (double dysphoria over people assuming both the wrong gender and the wrong sex, since I am intersex) but I will leave it other than that parenthetical. But even aside from being a system, on an individual level I am butch AND femme. Queer masculinity is a stronger part of my identity than queer femininity, but that doesn't erase the queer femininity. It doesn't erase the way I am so rarely a masculine man that I basically joke my two binary genders are femboy and butch. It doesn't erase how when my gender approaches one binary, my relationship with genderqueer expression and existence always queers.
To be clear, for some people individually, the two are separate and oppose each other. I'm not saying they have to adjust their understanding of their OWN identity, but just to recognize that theirs is not the "one right way".
I am butch AND femme. Both are important to me. Sometimes they are even contradictory. I'm multigender and intersex and a system and many other things besides. It happens. My identity doesn't have to make sense to everyone. But it is valid and deserves to be treated as such.
(Also, since it's been brought up that degendering or regendering typically masculine things still counts as butch - it absolutely does. Using anything you or anyone else considers masculine and queering it in any way counts as butch. I'm not a prescriptivist.)
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