umm

I feel pretty much the same about this negative perception on SU being popular. I do feel like the discourses and drama that happened, especially the 2015 incident, played a part in that in a big way even though at the same time i feel it's not entirely the show's nor Rebecca's fault those happened since that is unfair but it does seems people see SU in a unique way when it comes to the negative that people probably don't care

Well, yeah, i kinda agree on that. Some fans on this website were treating Zami070 like she was a dictator over her drawing style. But that's what happens when you lack zero awareness and don't reflect on your actions. For a show that was trying to teach "love and tolerance", many fans seemed to completely ignore these lessons and used it to push their own agenda:Ships,headcanons,bullying and harassing...

It's not suprising there was so much discourse when the episode "Bismuth" came out because some fans had the same type of mob mentality that Bismuth had. The difference was that at least with Bismuth you could understand why she acted the way she did. These people? There was almost no explanation. So, its no wonder why they missed the point of the episode and got angry when they were proved wrong.

It's not SU's fault or Rebecca Sugar's fault that for a long time this fanbase was considered one of the worst cartoon fandoms. She tried to stop it many times but the infighting and bullying went on and on.

As for the negative perception that Steven universe has: Many people were ready to tear down this show apart before it started airing back in 2013. I don't know if you haven't read Introvertceleste posts about Crewniverse members talking that there were already people complaining about Garnet's design and how she's was "an awful role model" or Steven being a "straight white male" despite being different from your classic stereotype and sometimes acting as a trans metaphor (see Diamond's days arc).

For a few years the series was well- received. Animation fans and reviewers liked Steven universe a lot. Then in 2016-2017, a few videos rants on youtube started to pop up. Some of them would get tons of views. This made other youtubers say "Hey, let's do this thing, it's going to gives us hundred thousands of views" and that's how SU hate train started.

SU youtube rants start getting recommended, each one more spreading false rumors and more missinformation than the last because they were desperate to "destroy" a children cartoon.

Then you have the "Steven universe critical" thing that while they started pointing some issues the show had over time it developed into nitpicking, harassment to other fans and writers over ships and right down making up bullsh*t to make SU or the creators look bad.

They started calling Rebecca Sugar every name under the sun and making look like she was the next Hitler. The funny thing is that Rebecca was actually nicer than most of these so called "SU critical" and probably she didn't have any idea that they existed in first place.

She didn't encouraged harassing, she didn't say that SU was only "for lesbians and women" (in fact she created this show for a boy demographic but those who wanted to gatekeep the show seemed to forget about that).

As why this happened i can think of two reasons:

1)Cartoon Network's horrible schedule: The haituses of SU were ridiculous.We only got 3 or 4 episodes every 6 months. This made fans become more and more frustrated or many just dropped the series.

2) The purity culture that this website has: It's pretty common for cartoon tumblr to put on a pedestal shows that have representation but in the moment it does something wrong,everyone stars hating on the show. It's always the same thing. I think the exception to this rule is Kipo and the Age of wonderbeasts as it didn't get very popular.

I swear, just wait half an year and people are going to start hating on The owl house which is only on its first season And calling the creators horrible things. Right now its happening the same thing that happened with RS and Noelle: She's being treated like a god and the moment she says or does something wrong,bang! She gets cancelled. That's how it works.

The issue is that creators that are LGBT and minorities often get more hate for putting representation on their shows than those who don't. Many are afraid of writing their own stories out of fear of being harassed and acussed of transphobia and homophobia. It's counterproductive and very bigoted.

The most frustrating thing about this for me is when i see cartoons fans putting SU on the same level as Voltron. You know? The show that did a "Bury your gays trope" by killing one of the few gays characters? All this while Steven universe being the show that really cared about putting LGBT couples in first place. And this is something that many cartoon fans fail to undestand: No, it wasn't She-ra 2018, Kipo, The owl house or Adventure time that started all this. It was Steven universe, yet they ignore its cultural impact most of the time. It's very frustrating.

I think there’s a few things here:

1. My grandma shuts down discussions of whether someone in our lives has depression by saying “What would they be depressed for? They ain’t got NOTHING to complain about!” One thing you can say here is that sometimes people do seem to be depressed for “no reason”—for the sake of argument, we will say that there are hypothetical people out there who don’t have any reasons related to their lives that would cause depression, but that the problem is related to their body and brain and doesn’t have anything to do with how perfect their lives seem. That’s one explanation.

2. The other explanation is that it is sometimes hard to see what problems someone is having in their lives, especially if one is very opposed to admitting hardships and to considering that someone might be mentally ill (like my grandma), or if we go off of a limited model of what a perfect life looks like (someone might wonder why they have depression because they’re white and they have rich parents so what do they have to be depressed about, but might fail to factor in the fact that those rich parents are verbally abusive, for example). And one example of my grandma saying “What do they got to be depressed about? They don’t need a therapist!” was an angry reaction to suggesting that my grandpa should talk to a therapist...at the point in his life when he was dying and we all knew that he was dying. So.

3. You ever seen some raging transphobe on the internet act like trans people are inherently disordered because we have higher rates of mental illness and suicide attempts than the general population? Any trans person can easily tell you, “Uh, those things are because society makes it incredibly difficult to be trans—it’s caused by transphobia, not by being trans in itself.”

4. Psychiatry very literally was and is used to control marginalized groups. If you look into the history of schizophrenia, it is genuinely chilling—it was used first to control white housewives who weren’t being submissive enough, and later its reputation changed to a much “scarier” mental illness when it started being used to control Black men who weren’t being submissive enough. Even today many people who have been institutionalized can tell you terrible things that have happened to them—for example that Black CAH employee who was forcibly institutionalized in a very racist way and was told there by a white psychiatrist that he was having, like, paranoid delusions related to racism, rather than him being a victim of racism in a very real and terrifying way.

There’s...a lot going on here. Psychology and psychiatry are still pretty new fields and I think we forget about that and I think people act like we’ve got mental health all figured out when we really, really, REALLY don’t. To say we have psychiatry figured out is like saying we have cancer treatment figured out—Uh, no we don’t, we have some treatments that we throw at everybody and the treatments help some people recover and doesn’t help other people at all, and some people recover forever and others only recover for a few years...we don’t have it figured out. We don’t. Each edition of the DSM has some “hey we decided since last time that this is a mental illness now” new entries and some “hey we decided this actually isn’t a thing so we took it out” entries that are removed.

People want to act like psychiatry knows what it’s doing because the alternative is terrifying. There are changes in psychiatry all the time and some of those changes are motivated by “whoops we realized this was super disgustingly bigoted so we fixed it” and other new changes are still very bigoted. That history is very real. We need to keep in mind that anything that would represent a huge shift in thinking in the scientific consensus about mental health (or what you perceive the consensus to be) could very well be...correct. We have no guarantee that psychiatry is always going to look kinda like it does now.

Make me play awful games!~

A cool idea to both provide you some laughs and help me pay off my broadband debt! If tumblr bloggers can get paid to eat a crayon then maybe i can sell my pain at playing awful video games?

Request me the worst, just goddamn trashiest games you can even imagine!

The consoles i'm able to record on are pc, ps4, 3ds, ds, gba, ps1, ps2 and any android game that can run on a european phone. (I'm still so mad that Dragalia Lost is america only!!)

And yes i will do ALL kinds of awful games! Low funds means i dont have any objection to Suffering Online, yknow? But i mean even if its torturously bad itd be less awful than it usually would, cos i'd be able to laugh about it with my friends!

Games i will otherwise NEVER play on my channel, but will play for money: horror games (cos im a huge wimp), anything with n/s/f/w content (cos i'm asexual AF lol), really extreme gore or something, really really fuckin awful bigoted depressing trash i.e racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, lo/lic/on, abusive relationships/consent issues/homophobia/all the common bad stuff in dating sims that i'm always vigilant for because this genre has such a weirdly high proportion of trash. ALSO: platformers and shooter games. Not because they morally disgust me but because i have shaky hands and poor spatial awareness while i have my glasses on, so i fail sooooo bad, lol! It could be fun to watch!

Only rule is that you need to give me a vague idea of what kind of bad is gonna be in the game, so i can at least mentally prepare myself. Yknow, not film the SUPER bad ones on a day when i'm already depressed? It doesnt have to be a big explanation cos avoiding spoilers would make my reactions more funny lol. But just like i dunno "it has some abusive relationships somewhere" or whatever.

Also, i think maybe prices depend on the Suffering? Like if you request a game that's just Bad aka glitchy or awfully written, then i might do that for free cos it'd be fun, yknow? But stuff with heavy sex/gore or really dark personally offending content would be a "no i'm sorry i'm not doing that without getting paid".

I dunno how much people usually charge for this sort of thing but i was pretty much thinking "throw me £1 and i will be your dancing monkey, i am just that desperate". And a fiver to make me suffer the worst of the worst, lol! Tho of course thats for free to play games or stuff i can emulate, itd kinda ruin the whole purpose if i was losing my own money in the process. Tho i think after my financial dilemma is over i might keep doing this as a "if you can pay at least half the cost of me buying the game, i will play it for you" thing.

Also everybody who's previously donated to help me with my bills, you get free requests for life! Even the maximum suffering!! After all, i'm only making this post cos i felt so bad that people were kind enough to give me money for nothing. I cant think of anything else i can give you guys that would really earn it, yknow?

Oh and just to add that i do already have one or two ideas i could do for this. There's a legendarily awfully disgusting l/olico/n game i got once in a steam sale due to the goddamn game description NOT SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT HAVING HORRIBLE CHILD NUDITY IN IT! I got fuckin jumpscared by lil girl panties!! And the worst part is that the game actually had really good gameplay?? I was enjoying it for like an hour before The Thing Happened, and my eternal rage will never cease because i hate thinking that a good budget went into this grossness. I wish i could steal all of its ideas and make them wholesome!! Srsly i really like "raising a daughter sim" type games and theyre so rare that i was excited to find one that looked decent and then ABORT ABORT ITS ABOUT RAISING A CHILD SEX SLAVE! So yeah i'd love an excuse to basically rant for three hours about how much this thing traumatized me and how awful the developers are. Also i originally noped out at just the first sign of horrible perviness so you guys can laugh at me dying at the no doubt even worse stuff that is probably there!

Also i'm sure this goes without saying but i'll be covering all the horrible sex stuff with censor bars. I don't wanna get kicked off youtube and i dont want you guys to feel the full awfulness of that game, just to enjoy my reactions to that awfulness. Also DUH i dont want any actual pedos to get off on it and follow my channel thinking they'd see more, that'd completely destroy my will to live...

I probably wont censor out other kinds of bad stuff tho? Maybe gore? Does youtube have a rule against gore? I just wanna play it safe. I wanna give you guys the fun of seeing me Die Inside instead of making you also Die.

[ Top: Them: I thought you were empathetic?

Bottom: Me: Sorry, I used all my empathy on people actually deserving of it. ]

So, I’m a hyperemapthetic autistic. I hear babies cry in a television program, and I curl up in a ball bracing for a breakdown myself. I get severe second-hand embarrassment when I can see someone else handling a situation so poorly, and I have to leave the situation before I turn to self-injury (head hitting) in response to this embarrassment. I imagine the pain animals go through so well that I cry because it hurts badly to be thrown away like trash, knowing there is no love. My hyperempathy is so much, that I’m talented in rationalizing everyone’s thought processes, even when I understand that there are actions that can never be excused with a simple explanation. It kinda makes me a big crybaby, heh.

But, ohhhh, do I have limits.

I grew up in environments where bigotry was explained away, and anyone wanting to do away with it needed to “calm the f*** down” because we were “ruining the fun,” we needed to “be polite, respect everyone’s views,” and all that other stuff. I was in a group of friends from high school who advocated for the removal of gay rights, excused a girl who had no problem flaunting blatant bigotry (body shaming, racial slurs) like it was something to be proud of, spoke casually of their discomfort with “special-needs kids” in front of me… And they always made it into MY FAULT for getting upset, because I was being “rude,” and I wasn’t “respecting their perspective.”

And I fell for it! My mental illnesses were aggravated with the thought that I was a horrible friend because I couldn’t tolerate their bigotry, like friends are apparently supposed to if they want to be mature (like a trusted adult always said). It persisted into young adulthood, with only a single person backing me up (who I will now marry sometime next year, because they’ve been the ONLY person to EVER really hear me out and make an effort to advocate for me, for us, for the people).

Well, after a while of dealing with this, I decided enough was enough. After many attempts to speak to these people, and getting shut down and laughed at into silence time and time again, I cut off almost all of them. There was just one left, who consistently shares Right-Wing sentiment on Facebook (you know, Trumpism) and claims it’s “friendly political debate.”

After numerous failed attempts to reason with him, made by myself, my partner, and another friend of ours, I unfriended him. He tried to convince me that we could still be friends in spite of our differing political views, and I told him I disagreed. He insisted that maybe he just wasn’t wording his perspective right in text, and I told him I couldn’t imagine how it would be any different in person. He didn’t have much to say to my long explanation of why his views were painful, so we left it at that. Finally, after seeing from a friend’s Facebook Feed that this “friend” had shared an infuriating counterargument against #BlackLivesMatter, I went for the block. And I’ve blocked everyone else who would try to defend this kind of behavior.

My partner tells me they wish they could do what I do, because seeing this person’s activity is debilitating on my partner’s mental health. It’s disheartening to know that someone we grew up with, someone we thought was a good person who would genuinely fight for us (said person is in the military), could be so hateful. My partner says they would feel guilty if they unfriended this person, as much as they can no longer stand this person, because they can imagine how he might feel being unfriended. My partner isn’t so hyperempathetic like me, but I think that’s why I can cut people off so easily.

I spend so much time thinking about all the horror stories I read on Tumblr, all the stories of abuse faced by the marginalized, all the stories that are minimized into “trivial affairs” by the privileged. I go back and forth between wanting to give up on this cruel world and wanting to save everyone from oppression. It makes me sad and it makes me furious, all of it. It becomes all the more infuriating if I know people who don’t care that there are people suffering, because it’s something they’ll never have to worry about. This military friend of ours would never have to worry about transphobia, homophobia, racism, colorism, ableism, any of that. So it was easy for him to dismiss our plight.

I put myself in everyone’s position and, while I won’t claim to feel everything they do, I can put myself in a position where I know what I would feel in such situations. And it hurts. It hurts so bad that it’s debilitating. My mental illnesses worsen because I know it would hurt more if I was actually living it.

Given all the energy I unconsciously use in feeling for these people, I find that I have nothing left for the people who would dismiss this pain. It doesn’t bother me that I might hurt someone’s feelings if I block them so I don’t have to deal with their abuse and bigotry. I don’t feel bad when I imagine them incapable of realizing what they did wrong, because I feel like it should be screaming-in-their-face obvious. People can scream at me for being cruel to cut off friends all they want. I don’t care how long we’ve known each other, how many good times we’ve had, how nice they may seem to me. The moment they show any bigotry, any eagerness to stomp on the marginalized people, I have no problem cutting them off. I’ve said all I can to these people, and still they laugh like I’m the one in so far in the wrong.

Yes, I have a great amount of empathy. It’s the reason behind my passion for social justice and compassion for all. I just don’t have enough to spare for the people who are okay with this suffering.

ALSO TO FIX EXCELLUS

Because tangeants again lol

Recognise that its fuckin stupid and bigoted to expect us to believe someone is a villain INSTANTLY after seeing that they're queer, before they even do anything. Don't spend your entire damn game having the characters go "eww its that disgusting person of ambiguous gender we should kill them because gross" rather than.. Yknow.. "Excellus fuckin murdered those people". Recognise that literally doing this is gonna make your character LESS villainous and MORE sympathetic long before you finally get to goddamn showing them do anything bad except say "ohoho i wanna be a princess". And it'll make bunni REALLY PISSED OFF because nobody wants to feel sad for an asshole murderer yet THAT SADNESS IS FOREVER ENGRAINED IN MY SOUL NOW

Seriously fuckin hell it even made the heroes look less heroic! I felt like Excellus was almost justified in becoming a murdering selfish monster if she spent her entire life being treated that way by both sides in this big good or evil conflict. Why the fuck should she give a shit if she's being degraded? Like FUCKIN OBVIOUSLY murdering people and wanting to conquer a random japanese country as a mad dictator is not a remotely logical reaction to being misgendered. But like they could have changed some stuff and made a perfectly good sympathetic villain who gets manipulated by the bigger bad because of her sad past of being treated like shit and like she feels like this is her only option to be herself. And then maybe you can reignite her hope in the world and her self esteem and moral centre and help her redeem herself and team up with you to take out the real horrible fucks with no sympathetic motives. Instead she's friggin played as THE one who's evil cos she has no sympathetic motive. Like that's her whole Thing, she's supposed to just be selfish and greedy and horrid. Your damn bigotry somehow failed your own story as well as failing all trans people ever!

Or like yknow.. If you want an asshole fuckboi then actually write an asshole fuckboi. Scrubby scrub the trans = bad shit from this plotline and you do indeed have a selfish monster who murders a bunch of innocent people and gets his just desserts. You had a ready made simple character archetype and you were so preoccupied shoving your transphobic screed into your game that you fucked it up!

So yeah i think either make this goofy ohoho trans auntie a good character, make the asshole ohoho bad character a cis man, do both at once, or like even i'm not opposed to having a trans villain exist but like seriously make them a synpathetic villain. If they're the only trans character in the plot its already gonna send a bad message if theyre in the role of "worst most underhanded jerk villain", even if it WASNT also transphobic as fuck. So a sympathic trans villain or adding more LGBT characters so it doesnt seem like this one individual was designed to make a statement on your entire feelings for a minority.

ALSO

like seriously please do not do this stupid thing of mooshing every stereotype together from every LGBT identity and acting like theyre all the same thing?? Like man i fuckin HATE that anime trope that yknow.. The gay man says all this trans stuff cos he's ~just that flambouyant~ Like being a drag queen is what 100% of gay men are, 24/7, and anyone saying theyre a trans woman is just one of those drag queens who's really getting into character. Or just.. I dunno. I cant even wrap my head around what train of logic must have led to that stereotype in the first place! And its so fuckin annoying as a queer person trying to talk about why this is bad queer stereotyping, it just makes me extra sad to straight up not know what pronouns to use for the character so i feel like i'm being just as horrible to them as their creators were. Like man i've only settled on going for "she" for Excellus cos after years of looking into it it does seem like the original japanese was indeed specifically using stereotypes of trans women and not trans men or nonbinary people. Though all languages do seem to call the character male it seems pretty strongly to be a "i believe that trans women are men and can never be women" kind of thing, rathe rthan the character herself calling HERSELF male. She calls herself a woman in both english and japanese, and its just that the english has everyone else use male pronouns for her and added the non-canon "explanation" that she only acts like a trans woman because she has something wrong with her balls. (Ugh!) And in japanese on top of calling herself a woman she also uses feminine (and specifically trans/drag queen coded) variants of "I", and other common speech pattern traits used for negative stereotypes of trans women. Though again we do have other characters calling her a disgusting perverted man instead. Sigh!

Ok ok ALSO BIGGEST FUCKIN FIX! dont draw the character like a horrible distorted cariacature goblin in an entirely different art style to everyone else. Seriously its so annoying how they tried to make you agree with "excellus is disgusting just for acting queer" by LITERALLY DRAWING A DISGUSTING CHARACTER. If you take away the weirdass overdetailed horror movie monster face, there is nothing ugly or even "manly looking" about her! She's just like somebody's perfectly normal chubby aunt or something. You could go out in any street all over the world and see five of her! I hate it cos its almost like psychological manipulation or something? Like i've seen so many lets players who arent bigoted but merely oblivious still agree that excellus is ugly and disgusting and comical because of it, cos all the implications of transphobia/homophobia flew over their heads and all they saw was a character drawn to look monsterous. And just.. This is so common. Its the overwhelming japanese stereotype of trans women. Draw them looking INFINATELY MORE MANLY than the cis male characters. So manly that it really hammers home how "obvious" it is that a man in lipstick or dresses "just looks wrong" and of course there's NO way they could ever pass and ha ha look how deluded they are that they think they look pretty. It's horrid. It really is. Seriously I like to point at Tabitha from Pokemon ORAS for a good counter example, cos he's also an ambiguously transgender character from a game that came out around the same time and by some weird coincidence they look very similar. Except for the literal entire face. The literal entire exact same face, just its drawn hideous and distorted on the one who's supposed to be a negative trans stereotype, and drawn exactly like everyone else on the positive one. And there's not one example in the whole game of anyone calling Tabitha ugly because he looks trans, or even insulting his weight or anything. Same damn character design, just drawn without bias and treated like a human being. I mean seriously right down to them having the small "evil eyes" but with Tabitha he's always drawn with them in a perpetual sort of happy face and then his pose with them looking similar to Excellus is supposed to be a BADASS MOMENT of this comic relief villain showing his worth! And hw literally has red eyes on top of it! His design is even MORE "evil" yet just not drawing it as a stereotype entirely changes the player's perception and he became beloved by many. Whereas with Excellus even the trans people in the audience couldnt relate to her and just felt fuckin sad.

Oh also i guess Excellus is implied to be a trans woman and Tabitha is implied to be a trans man? But i don't think game freak was trying to say anything about trans men being more valid or whatever, cos the first canonical LGBT character of any sort was a trans woman npc in the battle maison. And tabitha being trans isnt really confirmed as clearly as she was. i hope someday theyre able to confirm an LGBT main cast member but until then i will forever hold onto the glimmer of hope that was given to me by Beauty Nova.

Also seriously Tabitha and Excellus both also look EXACTLY LIKE ME IN REAL LIFE so I kinda took Excellus extra hard and latched onto the Tabitha headcanon so much more because it was good healing after all that nonsense. Tho I also did considee nonbinary Tabitha at the time, because his japanese name is a gender neutral one that's merely like 75% female, rather than a 100% feminine one. But then his old RSE design was very masculine so i think maybe a trans man is what they were trying to imply if they did indeed do it on purpose. Anyway i probably would have translated his name as Ashley cos it has the same "technically neutral but more popular with girls" aesthetic while also keeping the same fire pun as Homura. I have no idea how on earth Tabitha is supposed to be a joke, honestly. Tho i meam maybe he's just the one type specialist on the entire poke-earth who doesnt have a joke name?

ANYWAY thank you terrible transphobic stupid manga i read today for reminding me that i love Tabitha. And also the developers love Tabitha. And also all the characters in universe love him, like seriously the only difference between the devon dialogue of him and Shelly is that they mention the other scientists nicknamed him tabitabi. And its so cute how seriously they said it too?? Its like "our boss tabitabi,the most feared and respected genius man".

Lovv dat tabb