It is so weird that I don’t care much for the more popular characters in obey me (Mammon, Asmo, Levi and the twins) but then I fell in love with a background character and won’t shut up about it.

It’s unfair to the characters I know since shit that happened toke when I was younger affects my decisions and I’m skittish, I know it’s just a fake but sometimes how they act bothers me??

Like…I don’t see the appeal and it confuses me???

Like, Asmo bothers me with how flirty he is since I’m asexual and I hate physical contact, especially uninvited contact and that’s ALL he does. Not to mention he treats others kinda like objects and always is talking about himself and fishing for complements.

Mammon…he’s protective and cute, that’s it, he always goes on about how ‘stupid’ and ‘useless’ you are, I know he’s tsundere and it’s supposed to be like that but I don’t care for insults and in all honesty probably would have stopped talking to him after the first interaction given how he literally left us to fend for ourselves on the FIRST DAY. Also, I HATE having people touch my things without permission, and my objects tend to be important to me. So when he sells my shit, I’d honestly use my pact and order him to never come in my room again and to never so much as touch any of my things again. I honestly don’t care for the concept of greed bc personal trauma baby!

Levi…he’s cute and I’m fine with him being bad at social situations, but the insults…I’d definitely get upset and cry. I’d probably avoid him like the plague after the first time he called me a normie.

Beel…literally did nothing wrong I’m just not that attracted to him?? Not to mention the game…just keeps making him seem dumber???? Like he’s not an idiot but the game acts like he is and it confuses me??

Belphie I hate and always will for flat out being abusive physically and mentally. He literally justifies murder by saying he was just mad. I don’t give a shit if he apologized, he chose to murder mc in a violent way to get back at Diavolo. Then he things a ‘sort y’ undoes the damage? Honestly I hate him the most and he don’t even think he’s cute. He’s just?? A jerk?? To everone and because he’s the baby sibling it’s ‘ok’? Dude literally gets away with shit because he’s younger than the others and I hate that.

I literally get upset with a large chunk of the cast because of personal trauma they trigger. It’s not at all intentional and it’s not the characters or creators fault, I’m just generally upset because they remind me of people I’ve been hurt by and it’s stupid

I still love all the characters I’m just venting over stupid shit sorry

spectroscopes:

I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.

Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.

And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.

There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.

The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.

“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.

What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.

The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.

What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.

This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.

Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.

But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.

But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.

The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.

You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.

If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?

What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.

The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.

On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

mrspider:

mrspider:

okay unrelated but what was the funniest red flag in ur worst relationship

the whiplash of these notes

Reading the notes like

I feel so sorry for all of you. How are people out here being like this

The thing about the Nightcloud/Crowfeather/Breezepelt dynamic is that all of it is told from other characters’ perspectives, which means we really can’t get an accurate read on each characters’ true emotions.

Which is really a shame because the whole thing really IS difficult to interpret.

But let’s try to analyze the scenes that we do get and try to come to a reasonable conclusion, shall we?

Breezepelt Thinks: That Crowfeather hates him.

This idea is backed up in universe by:

• The three repeatedly noting that Crowfeather seems to dislike him - These scenes are in the book to serve as an ironic foreshadowing to Crowfeather being their father, and while they do show that he’s an /emotionally unavailable/ father, the worst thing he does in these scenes is scold Breezepelt when he misbehaves and not compliment his catch. That is hardly abusive.
• The Dark Forest Cats literally lying to actively Manipulate Breezepelt, and then Breezepelt parroting back the words that they fed him - These scenes are unreliable because these are DARK FOREST CATS and they are LYING and Breezepelt is BUYING THE LIE. These things didn’t HAPPEN, and Brokenstar of all cats should NOT be the paragon by which we judge anyone’s parenting skills.
• And a collection of other scenes where Breezepelt is scolded for misbehaving by Crowfeather - Which are in the book to establish Breezepelt as a Problem. Also, scolding your child does not mean you hate them or that you are abusive

Nightcloud Thinks: That Crowfeather doesn’t love either of them

• It is, explicitly, true that Crowfeather doesn’t love her. There’s no arguments there. And while that sucks, and Crowfeather is in the wrong for taking her as a mate, he also doesn’t owe it to her to love her. You can’t owe romantic feelings to anyone.
• But there’s really nothing to back up the idea that Crowfeather doesn’t love Breezepelt in Nightcloud’s eyes. The only scene I can think of is one where Breeze(paw) runs around to check the borders, and when he gets back Crowfeather double checks to make sure he checked the entire perimeter, at which point Nightcloud severely overreacts and accuses him of not trusting Breeze(paw). To my eyes this speaks more to Nightcloud’s extreme protectiveness than to Crowfeather’s abuse - literally all he did was double check that his son completed a task at a time of great importance.

Crowfeather Things: That Nightcloud is overprotective and that she is encouraging his son to hate him

This idea is backed up in universe by:

• Several scenes of Nightcloud separating him from Breezepelt - Including the aforementioned border checking, and the Daylight Gathering incident, where he actively tries to help carry and tend to his injured son, and is not allowed to do so by Nightcloud. This scene serves no other purpose than to show Crowfeather’s care for his son and Nightcloud’s refusal to let him.
• Nightcloud’s repeatedly demonstrated jealousy for Leafpool which - while justified on paper - literally leads to her clawing and Crowfeather and yelling at him in front of clanmates the moment he so much as glances as her. ~Which actually IS abuse~ ! Physical and Emotional ! And while these scenes are there to show that Leafpool and Crowfeather are still in love (which is awful for Nightcloud but does NOT justify her being abusive in turn), Nightcloud’s reaction is only there to show her character.

Breezepelt’s view is manipulated by the Dark Forest Cats.

Nightcloud’s view is clouded by her jealousy, which (again, justified on paper) leads her to literally abusing Crowfeather.

Crowfeather’s view is the only one which is backed up by scenes not serving an alternate purpose and is not clouded by an external motivation.

So the dynamic is:

• Breezepelt hates his dad because his mother didn’t let them bond, because he scolds him when he misbehaves, and because literal cats from hell told him to
• Nightcloud hates Crowfeather because he doesn’t love her (fair), so she resolves to set Breezepelt against him and physically and emotionally abuse him (unfair)
• Crowfeather doesn’t love Nightcloud (which sucks), but he does at least try to be a parent to Breezepelt (he isn’t especially good at it) only to have every attempt thwarted by either Nightcloud or Breezepelt, only for the latter to turn around and tell him he was never trying because of the hell cats mentioned above

There is really no reason for us to believe that Crowfeather was abusive and didn’t love his son. What he /was/ is strict and snappy - which is and has always been his personality. What he /was/ is emotionally distant - which is awful, sure, but it isn’t abuse. He wasn’t a good father, but there’s nothing to suggest that he was an abusive father either.

What we can believe is that Breezepelt’s hatred of Crowfeather wasn’t justified (HIS IDEAS CAME FROM CAT HELL) and that Nightcloud was overprotective of Breezepelt and abusive towards Crowfeather.

Simple as.

TW: Topics of abuse

I feel like it’s high time that someone pointed out that abuse shouldn’t be used to excusea terrible character’s/villain’s actions. It should be used to explainit.

Many authors and media developers try to down play heinous displays that their characters exhibit by giving them dark, gritty, abusive, and bloody backstories to rouse pity in the audience, effectively erasing anything they’d hold he/she accountable for.

Dark backstories shouldn’t be given to characters for the audience to pity them and justify everything they do. It should be used to understand them and their motivations and what shaped their identity that we’re shown on screen.

It shouldn’t be expected that victims of abusive backgrounds will automatically become evil or spawns of satan or a brutal antagonist to the protagonist.

Does it happen in the real world? Of course it does. Many individuals who grew up like this end up directing their anger at the world and do terrible things. Does it always happen? No, it does not. There are people out there who rise above their abusive pasts and are motivated to be good people.

Like, it’s so tiring to see people of abusive backgrounds being condensed into this stereotype. There are books, movies, and shows that manage to stray away from this misguided idea, but that doesn’t stop the audience from taking it out of context.

So, the next time you see someone murder a person for absolute no reason other to further their goals, destroy a planet, take over the world, and/or steal candy from babies, it shouldn’t be excused because they were abused. It should understood,explained, and notjustified.

TL;DR I’ve seen this trope way too many times and I think what made it worse are fans defending awful people or label abused people as potential serial killers. If you want to write a villain/criminal/character tat has an abusive background, go right ahead. But don’t use it to defend and coddle them because of their unfortunate background.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

CW for sexual medical abuse, dysphoria, intersexism

And like, people don’t get how I lost my teenage girlhood and most of my 20′s to dysphoria and self hate. I would take two hour long showers as a teenager where I would meticulously make sure to shave every single inch of my body. I would cry if I ever missed anything. I would cut the moles under my lip all the time, and they’d bleed for a literal hour and mess up my ability to put on my full-coverage foundation that I wore to hide any instance of stubble. This started when I was ELEVEN YEARS OLD. I had to teach MYSELF how to shave. EVERYTHING. After kids started abusing me for it. I didn’t tell my mom or ANYONE that this was happening, or that I had started a period then they stopped and never came back, until I was FIFTEEN.

So that’s four years of me knowing I’m a freak, thinking I’m turning into a man, knowing I’m not anything like any other girls around me, knowing I couldn’t ever tell anyone otherwise they’d be disgusted and probably abuse me, going through a high-testosterone puberty while also being an undiagnosed autistic child in an abusive household and like. Once I did tell my mom, she was just mad at me, and it took another year for doctors to stop genuinely MAKING FUN OF MY BODY and genuinely attempting to slut shame me for shaving my body, despite me telling them I’d never had sex. Nobody ASKED why I was shaving. They made assumptions.

My first ever visit to a gyno was when I was 15. I remember being in a dark and cold room, no lighting other than the bright one they had pointing between my legs. The doctor asked why I shaved, while she was lubing up her tools, and I was petrified and couldn’t respond. She went on with the examination, and I fucking swear to you. She called the nurse over urgently, pointed out something, and whispered, “she IS a virgin!” and they both giggled. I know that sounds like total fucking bullshit, no doctor would think hymen = virgin, yea? This was a military hospital, my dad was in the military. The doctors are NOTORIOUSLY scummy there. I used to tell people this story like it was a joke and laugh it off, but it’s fucking traumatic. All that was needed was a blood test. I didn’t need a pap, it was done to humiliate me.

These people did no bloodwork. They did an ultrasound, but not on my ovaries, on my uterus, trying to prove I was pregnant, despite my piss coming back negative. They sent me home with no diagnosis. THE DOCTOR CALLED ME AT HOME. She THREATENED TO TELL MY MOM I WAS SEXUALLY ACTIVE. BECAUSE I WAS SHAVING. LMAO. Eventually another year goes by of shitty doctors and one of them slaps me with “PCOS” after noticing discoloration on my neck consistant with insulin buildup. (Which is also a NCAH symptom) Also no bloodwork, just diagnosed it, and put me on metformin, which made me SUUUPER sick.

My teenage life and early 20s consisted of experiences like these, of not wearing clothes I wanted to avoid showing how masculine I look, of wearing specific things to alter my body shape. I OBSESSED over getting my entire face feminized. I didn’t know what facial feminization surgery was at the time, but as early as 14 I wanted my nose, chin, jaw, and forehead all reshaped to look more girlish. My breasts have always been smaller and saggy, and I fantasized about implants. Around 16, I started fantasizing about hip and butt implants too, and labioplasty to make me look more “normal” and feminine.

I spent an entire year extremely sick with a huge kidney stone because every time I went to the doctor for the nauseating, debilitating pain I was experiencing, they wrote it off as my PCOS and suggested I take birth control.

I’ve had MULTIPLE serious conditions and issues written off as my hormones.

My blood pressure has been dangerously high for most of my life as a result of my condition, but no doctor ever even attempted to medicate me until 2018. Before that, they all told me to lose weight and use birth control to manage my hormones. Birth control RAISES blood pressure. People diagnosed with PCOS put on birth control without any other consideration of their medical health have gone into stroke before.

Even when I was working to “pass” as a woman, there are multiple instances of me getting “clocked” by people who think my intersex features mean I’m amab. I have been called transphobic slurs while actively trying to pass as a woman. I have been threatened violently by these people.

I just genuinely feel like I have to air out my entire life like this in order for people to believe me, cuz as it is a lot don’t and it’s just fucking traumatic being told you’re lying or making up something when you’re being vulnerable and honest in an attempt to find understanding in others lmfao. I know it shouldn’t matter but I’m autistic and I have PTSD and every invalidation weighs more than every hundred nice people for whatever fucking reason in my brain!!! And it’s evil!!

thundergrace:

hatchan:

1john4-8-deactivated20220419:

#wait what happened i need to know

Shelly Duvall was basically abused by the director during the whole shooting in order to get the “best takes” according to him

The magnum opus of his cruelty toward Duvall came in the form of one of “The Shining’s” most iconic scenes — the baseball bat confrontation on the stairs. Kubrick made Duvall and Nicholson shoot the scene in a record-setting 127 takes, something that horror fans love to spout off as a fun bit of trivia. The result of the constant takes were Duvall’s hands were shredded raw from gripping the bat for such a prolonged period of time, her voice was hoarse from crying, her eyes became swollen, and she left the set completely dehydrated. The moments we see on screen of Duvall crying in pain, fear, and exhaustion were not acting, but an actor delivering lines while enduring a trauma response.

Kubrick’s psychological brutalization of Duvall was so severe, her hair began falling out. “To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying,” Duvall said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. In the equally iconic “door scene,” Jack Nicholson destroyed nearly 60 doors to get the shot to Kubrick’s liking, filming this one moment over the course of three days. The scene was mostly improvised, and Kubrick reportedly kept information regarding Nicholson’s choices to tear down the door with an axe from Duvall, meaning her reactions are authentic. This isn’t acting, this is responding to trauma.

Many of Duvall’s lines were unexpectedly cut, she was frequently kept isolated, and she was forced to wait for extensive periods of time before performing her scenes to throw her off. Vivian’s documentary even shows moments of Kubrick not acting alone, but instead requiring the rest of the crew to follow his lead. “Don’t sympathize with Shelley,” he says to the crew. He also made the decision to never compliment her work, and instead criticized every choice or impulse she had for the character. At one point, he encourages the rest of the crew to ignore her and tells them to disregard any needs she expresses. Kubrick is notorious for being a perfectionist, but at what cost?

Kubrick chose to shoot “The Shining” chronologically, which pushed the filming to a whopping 500 days. This means Duvall spent over a year of her life being tormented by a man in an untouchable position of power. Kubrick was already considered an auteur at this point in his career, with his unconventional (see: abusive) techniques hailed as genius rather than correctly identified as harmful. 

Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/726299/how-the-shining-changed-shelley-duvall-forever/?utm_campaign=clip

sapphorb:

i read the sentence “abusers groom their character witnesses as carefully as they groom their victims” (in a comment thread in response to a “but i know [the accused] and hes such a nice man!!”) and it’s blowing my mind a weird amount even though i guess i already knew that

In Which I Have an Idea That Makes Me Very Sad

I was thinking about why Jonathan has so little in the way of concrete development (in universe, not just him being mishandled), and something crossed my mind.

We experience the world of Stranger Things primarily through the lense of the Party. We call the season one monster The Demogorgon because they do, for example. And because of that, we might not have the complete picture of what happens in Hawkins.

In other words, the reason why we might not know just how bad Jonathan had it with Lonnie because he didn’t have the heart to tell Will.

Lonnie’s return in season 4, though, might change that.

What the literal fuck is this nonsense? Who let this bitch practice medicine? Did anyone think to suggest putting some fucking medical evidence in this piece?

One of the most personally devastating elements of the way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom spaces is that every so often someone I considered basically a friend will retweet something from a deranged pro-Depp stan account or parrot misinformation and it’s so like…

There’s the basic element of losing a bit of respect for someone for reposting a ridiculous meme about this trial but it also makes me feel completely unheard and invisible like, do my friends even listen to me or pay attention to me? I don’t know how many times I have said this case and people being totally incurious about it and blindly accepting his side makes me feel unsafe, that I have severed friendships over it in the past, it feels so impossible to imagine that people have somehow missed everything I’ve said about it. Maybe it’s just that because it’s not actually that serious to them that they can’t imagine I’m telling the truth when I say it’s serious to me. But it is so exhausting and upsetting to keep getting put in this position of having to be like, should I reach out and try to talk to this person and risk a potentially really upsetting and triggering conversation, do I just ghost without explanation, or do I just try to pretend I didn’t see it while quietly knowing that they’re not really someone I can trust.

It’s just exhausting and the constant reminders of it are inescapable and people just don’t listen and it’s starting to make me feel like I am the crazy one and I’m tired.

valkyriesexual:

lemme just give u a lil context on some things that might be missing from social media content in the depp v heard trial.  for background, i’m an attorney.  i’m from california.  i’m a certified domestic violence victim advocate.  i work for a domestic violence shelter that provides services to both male and female survivors of domestic violence.

notes on previous cases & the type of legal action johnny depp filed

• this is not a legal proceeding initiated by AH. it was initiated by Johnny Depp.  it is not the first proceeding initiated by Johnny Depp. 
• once a victim ends a relationship and cuts off contact with an abuser, it is not uncommon for an abuser to use the legal system to continue to exert power and control over their victim. it’s called litigation abuse. 
• in the most recent completed legal proceeding (Johnny Depp sued a british tabloid for defamation for referring to him as an abuser), the judicial officer determined that AH had proved at least 12 of 14 alleged incidents of abuse to a civil legal standard, making it perfectly appropriate for a news organization to refer to Johnny Depp as an abuser.
• this is a defamation case, not a case about abuse. its about whether or not AH defamed Johnny Depp by writing an article about *her* experience as a public figure associated with domestic violence, an article that did not mention Johnny Depp by name. 

notes on forum shopping by depp’s legal team

• interestingly, this defamation case was NOT filed in California, the state where AH and Johnny Depp lived during their relationship, and was NOT filed in New York, where the NYT, the publication that published AH’s article, is based. it was filed in the state of virginia.
• you might be asking yourself why virginia, of all places?  well, it’s legal strategy from depp’s team. it’s because of the different laws in virginia. virginia has a comparatively weak anti-SLAPP law (a law that protects people from civil litigation for exercising their first amendment rights), & does not consider verbal abuse to be included in “family abuse” aka domestic violence thus mitigating some of the horrendous things that Depp’s put in writing to and about AH.

“mutual abuse”

• because this trial is about defamation, not domestic violence, there has been a significant lack of expert testimony about domestic violence. let me just tell you a few things about the concept of mutual abuse.
• in california, it is possible for two people to get restraining orders against each other if they have both committed acts of domestic abuse. HOWEVER, this type of legal outcome is heavily regulated because the legislature and judicial system understand that true cases of “mutual abuse” are exceedingly rare.  therefore, california law requires that a judicial officer make “detailed findings of fact indicating that both parties acted primarily as aggressors and that neither party acted primarily in self-defense”. 
• in making this determination, caselaw directs judicial officers to consider the entire history of abuse in a relationship, rather than taking each incident as a single isolated event. this is because, say after 6 months of being choked, threatened with death, and having objects thrown at your head, when a drunk angry partner comes towards you, hitting them first, in and of itself, does not make you the primary aggressor. it is considered “reactive” violence, done in self defense, and can only be evaluated in taking the entire history of abuse in the relationship into account.
• the fact that one party was injured during an altercation, in and of itself, does not make the injured party the victim and the injury inflicting party the primary aggressor. this is based on long established legal principals that a victim of physical aggression can employ reasonable physical force to defend themselves, even if that application of force results in injury to the aggressor
• that AH admitted to striking Johnny Depp, in and of itself, does not legally mean that AH is “equally guilty” of domestic abuse, does not mean that she is not a victim of domestic abuse, and does not negate that Johnny Depp was the primary aggressor throughout the relationship

a few other notes:

• johnny depp is not captain jack sparrow, edward scissorhands, or any other famous character you love. he is an almost 60 year old man with a documented history of frivolous litigation, alcohol and drug abuse, and physically violent outbursts dating back decades.
• johnny depp is a cisgender heterosexual male, a multi-millionaire, a well established actor, and was in his 50s when he married a bisexual woman, an up-and-coming actress 20 years his junior.  there is an ENORMOUS power differential here.  which is not to say that it is inherently abusive, but it is context that needs to be part of the discussion.
• petty but whatever, AH’s lawyer never said she used that specific makeup product brand to cover her bruises. AH’s lawyer said she used a product that did color correction, like that makeup product brand has, holding up their product for visual emphasis in the courtroom. it’s not evidence of any kind of lie and it’s extremely bad faith on that makeup brand’s part to insinuate otherwise
• that lady who diagnosed AH, claimed she doesn’t have PTSD, and claimed that she has histrionic personality disorder and BPD, is NOT a board certified mental health professional, was hired by Depp’s legal team, AFTER drinking with Depp’s legal team, is paid by Depp’s legal team, and spent less than 12 hours evaluating AH in person. Not a credible reputable source of impartial, science-based evidence. 

leosuncancermoonscorpiorising:

leosuncancermoonscorpiorising:

View on Twitter

this thread has all the evidence you could possibly ask for of depp being abusive and it’s not even outwardly biased towards amber it’s just stating the facts of their relationship. the fact that any self proclaimed progressive can defend this man just blows my mind

@luiysiayeshere it is on wayback machine!! idk if it’s the whole thing or if it was archived before she finished it, but either way what’s there is still super thorough and has a lot of evidence

Shereposted this today on her new account too!

spectroscopes:

I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.

Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.

And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.

There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.

The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.

“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.

What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.

The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.

What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.

This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.

Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.

But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.

But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.

The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.

You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.

If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?

What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.

The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.

On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.

@pikasamireplied:

What about the part where Amber’s own therapist said that she hit JD while on the phone with her…? Like who are you advocating for?

I’m sorry for putting this long post back on everyone’s dashboards again but I’m responding to this in a reblog because it touches on something I want to address more generally. But first @pikasami have to say I think it’s interesting that your response to my lengthy analysis of this case is to invoke a single item of testimony as if it debunks everything I have said or contradicts the idea that Amber Heard could be Johnny Depp’s victim. I have to wonder if you even read the post or if this is your kneejerk response to any criticism of Depp or characterisation of him as an abuser.

Anyway, what you are engaging in here is an example of victim-blaming and victim-shaming where you are insinuating that a victim who hits their abuser is themself abusive. Not all violence is abuse. Context matters. That is why the bulk of my post dealt with the power differential between Depp and Heard. It’s also important to note that Heard has never denied hitting Depp. She said in her 2016 deposition that she hit him and that she had at times thrown pots and pans at him in self-defence. She also testified in 2020′s Depp v. News Group Newspapers Ltd. that she had punched him once in defence of her sister. This is acknowledged in the full judgement which I linked in the post you are replying to.

It is so important for me to stress here that a victim hitting their abuser is not abuse. Even if a victim after enduring years of abuse (as Heard had by the time she hit Depp for the first time in 2015) starts to instigate fights that does not make them an abuser. It is extraordinarily dangerous not to mention triggering to victims who did fight back to imply that hitting your abuser makes you abusive yourself and is a significant barrier to victims coming forward and being believed. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this idea kills people. There are victims who have spent years being told they are worthless monsters by their abusers internalising the idea that they’re abusive themselves and deserve the punishment they get who will either take their own lives or stay in relationships with people who will go on to kill them. There are victims who fear being misunderstood because they fought back who will not speak out or access resources because of this fear. This idea is an example of one of the many ways society further punishes victims for being abused, described as revictimisation.

But the point I really want to make and cannot emphasise enough is that the couples counsellor Depp and Heard saw testifying that she characterised their relationship as “mutually abusive” is a glaring example of why you should never, ever go to therapy with your abuser. Couples counsellors are not specialised in abuse dynamics and can be manipulated by abusers into siding with them. Therapy often makes abusers worse and more dangerous by teaching them how to mask their abuse and reframe it to make their victim look like the abuser. Therapists can also carry dangerous assumptions like the notion of “mutual abuse” which, as I said, kills people. Mutual abuse is not real.Just because one person in a relationship hits the other does not make them an abuser; the entire context of the relationship and the behaviour of both parties, history of use of violence within the relationship, and the presence of coercive control (such as Depp controlling what Heard could wear, who she could socialise with, and what auditions she could take) has to be taken into account.

As for who I’m advocating for I figure if you had actually read the post in its entirety that should be obvious.

I have been writing this post for a few days because I cannot stop thinking about the particular way that Depp v. Heard has been playing out in fandom not just over the course of this trial in Virginia but over the course of the past few years. One of my friends commented recently about the way in which fandom can train people to see things which are not there by taking fragments of media out of context and scrutinising them for small ‘tells’ which hint to the ‘real’ story often in support of a shipping narrative similar to the way that fragments of this trial are decontextualised and recontextualised, pored over in minute detail, and tea leaves read to support the idea that Amber Heard is lying, that Amber Heard is an abuser.

Much of what is circulating on social media about this case are outright lies at worst — the idea that Amber Heard quoted The Talented Mr. Ripley on the stand, which Snopes had to debunk — and pernicious victim-blaming nonsense and abuse myths at best.Milani Cosmetics’ decision to wade into the trial by suggesting Heard claimed she had used their specific concealer before it was released (she didn’t, the palette was used as an example of colour correcting concealer palettes) and insinuate that she must therefore be lying about having been abused falls into the latter category. The idea that if someone misremembers what brand of concealer they used over half a decade ago they are lying about being abused is appalling, it’s laughable. And it’s everywhere. This should be disturbing to anyone watching this case who truly cares about victim advocacy regardless of where you fall on the question of who abused who because the mainstreaming of abuse myths hurts all victims. There is no such thing as using an abuse myth to defend a victim or expose an abuser; if Heard is an abuser the logic underpinning that conclusion cannot be abuser logic without causing incredible social harm to victim advocacy.

And I have seen in fandom the way that people engage in wilful misreadings of all sorts of things to support an idea which is contrary to all reality. The prime example of this for me is Loki. Last summer I became unhealthily obsessed with the way that Loki fans who were opposed to his relationship with Sylvie concocted all sorts of wilful misreadings not just of the show itself but of interviews from the cast, writers, director, and even the composer — which would then go viral, racking up thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of likes.

There was a post on here and on twitter which took out-of-context quotes from several people involved with the show to frame them as contradictory and made some joke about people in a group project not agreeing on what it was about. This post got tens of thousands of likes and shares but if you read the quotes in their full context it was plain that all of the people speaking were in fact in total agreement on what the show was about. There was a cohesive behind-the-scenes agenda but it didn’t matter. Natalie Holt, the composer, mentioned in several subsequent interviews that her words had been taken out of context and twisted to imply something she emphatically was not saying. Other quotes were taken out of context and had bad faith readings applied to try to frame Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino, both bisexual women who have expressed support and allyship with the trans community, as transphobic in order to justify online abuse and harassment of them. The same people doing this were simultaneously perpetuating harmful transmisogynistic rhetoric about ‘autogynephilia’ in order to frame the relationship as problematic and twisting Julia Serano’s academic work on the topic to support this even after she had expressly disagreed with this and called it out.

The primary driver of all of this is of course misogyny but if anyone pointed that out the deflection was to gesture towards Sophia Di Martino/Sylvie and Kate Herron being white women, particularly in contexts where the people doing this were challenged on why they didn’t hold Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson to the same standard. The exact same deflection is used to dispel any notion that misogyny might be a factor in the virulence of people’s anti-Heard sentiment: that defending her is “white feminism” and that she is exploiting “white woman’s tears”. This really illustrates the way that people in fandom have — in the words of one of my friends who I was speaking to about this the other day — learned a particular vocabulary but not an analytical toolkit.

“White feminism” and associated terms like “white woman’s tears” were coined to describe the unique tools which white women have at their disposal to (a) oppress racialised people and especially Black people, and (b) recruit others — particularly white men — to do the same. These terms do not apply to dynamics between white women and white men because white women cannot be racist towards white men. Depending on whether the white men in question belong to other marginalised classes white women can be ableist, transphobic, homophobic, or enact other forms of oppression against them but they cannot specifically be racist, so gesturing to their race in order to deflect from questions about double standards applied to a white woman versus a white man is a total non-starter and yet it happens all the time in these discussions. In fact the reason it happens is because (Depp’s struggles with addiction notwithstanding) the white men in question don’t have any other known marginalisations along which the white women might be oppressing them. So we have to make something up.

What’s really disturbing in the case of Depp v. Heard is that gesturing to “white woman’s tears” implies that white women are in fact the oppressors of white men and that they are more likeable and sympathetic figures to the general public. This posits either that misogyny is not real or that it does not apply to white women and is not a factor in the way that the general public assesses alleged abuse, which is not just untrue but actually dangerous. At a certain point the truth of what happened between Depp and Heard becomes immaterial when people are talking about the way the pro-Depp side is presenting and mainstreaming arguments which are extraordinarily harmful to victims of abuse. In fact, the victim-blaming rhetoric which is being pushed under the guise of “advocacy for male victims” is an uncanny echo of the transphobic rhetoric which was perpetuated in Loki fandom under the guise of “calling out transphobia”. What is happening here is that people are removing terms from their original political context where they were used to criticise oppressive power structures in order to support and uphold the paradigms they were coined to critique.

The disconnection of these terms and ideas from the power analysis they’re a product of also means that even when people are able to recognise that particular arguments are harmful they’re not able to see them in their full context as Depp and his team wielding systemic power and privilege to oppress and marginalise not just Heard but anyone identified as sharing a class with her. There are all sorts of posts and threads about the fact that it’s important not to allow Heard’s ‘diagnosis’ of borderline personality disorder to add to stigma that people diagnosed with BPD face with no recognition of the fact that this stigma is the exact reason Depp’s team wanted her characterised as having BPD at all. The argument from them is that she is a bad person and she is an abuser because she allegedly has BPD: they are stigmatising people diagnosed with this disorder in order to character assassinate her. Yet none of the people writing these threads about the importance of not letting this colour your perception of people with BPD have stopped to question why his team even considers whether she has it or not of any relevance and how this relates to the way he could be trying to exercise power and privilege in order to silence her. It’s insane to me that I even have to point this out.

What is absolutely fucked about all of this to me too is the proliferation of “amber heard supporters dni” in people’s bios. A lot of ink has been spilled in fandom on the overwhelmingly performative, virtue-signalling nature of a lot of dni criteria and this is what sticks in my throat when I think about this. People who put this in their bios are largely following the crowd and have done no actual research into the case beyond whatever distortions of the truth that have been leaked by his legal team cross their dashboards and timelines, if that. There is no curiosity about her allegations or her evidence or any desire to understand why people might support her when seemingly the entire internet has decided she is a monster, and what it comes down to is that people are virtue signalling by showing that as a matter of principle they do not stand by a woman who has made allegations of serious physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What is considered virtuous in fandom is close-minded reactionary hatred of a woman who accused a powerful man of domestic violence. It is considered virtuous not to investigate her allegations. It is considered virtuous to declare that you hate her because everyone else does.

This hatred is so completely outsized in response to her perceived crime it absolutely dwarfs any outpouring of vitriol around someone like Harvey Weinstein because it’s not actually coming from any moral outrage about abuse itself. What is fuelling this outrage against Amber Heard is misogyny and victim-blaming, and that’s the fatal irony of all of this. Even though people are mired in cognitive dissonance about “who abused who” many of them show that underneath it all, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, they really do know she is a victim and that he is an abuser or else they would not apply victim-blaming tropes to her nor abuse apologist talking points to him. It’s the fact that we all know, really, instinctively, who is abuser and who is victim, that Depp supporters have to protect themselves so fiercely from this uncomfortable truth by making not just Heard herself but anyone who speaks in her defence or to the facts of the case personae non grata and acceptable targets for harassment and bullying themselves. It’s because we all know, really, in our hearts, that the power differential favours him that it’s necessary for him and his supporters to indulge in pernicious victim-blaming abuse myths to paint her as the villain. It’s because we know this that his supporters have to accuse everyone who questions his obvious DARVO tactics of “not thinking men can be abused”.

Actually, men can be and are abused, including in some cases by women, but abuse is about power and control. This is why the majority of male victims of abuse are marginalised in some way or otherwise vulnerable (young actors getting started in their careers, for example). It is also unbelievable historical revisionism to pretend that #MeToo has only ever been about female victims of abuse. It’s important for a number of reasons to recognise that abuse is a function of power and control and a tool for enforcing power and control but in particular it’s necessary to acknowledge this because otherwise the only explanation left for why there is such a gender disparity statistically between who perpetrates abuse and who is a victim of abuse is the TERF explanation that men are innately more violent, which is not true.

But to believe that Depp is Heard’s victim despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to completely eschew this power analysis of their relationship. It is to believe that there is power parity between a twenty-two year-old just getting started in her career and an A-list global celebrity with multi-million dollar mansions all over the world and his own private island. It is to ignore the reality that throughout their relationship she was surrounded by his staff and his security, that even the nurses who saw her after his beatings were on his payroll. To believe that he is her victim even after it was ruled in the UK to a civil standard that he abused her is to posit the MRA belief that women are always immediately believed when they allege abuse and that this imbues them with massive social power to ruin men’s lives “for no reason”. The fact that people seriously argue that the UK legal system favours women is absolutely astonishing. But not only is it not true that women are not believed in general, it is also not true that Amber Heard was believed! The rewriting of history around this is fucking breathtaking. She was getting called a lying gold-digger from the start. The only person who has ever been hurt by these allegations is her.

But at this point the need for it to be true that Depp is Heard’s victim is compounded not just by a desire to keep loving Johnny Depp but also by years of participation in a movement against Heard which, if she is a victim, is morally indefensible. These are people who cannot accept the guilt and shame of having participated in a harassment campaign which is fundamentally victim-blaming and misogynistic in nature and targeted not just against her but other victims speaking out in her defence. They cannot accept this truth so they choose to look away. The furthest you will get one of these people if they do listen to facts about the case is “well they’re both bad”, which itself is a victim-blaming cop out and dangerous rhetoric which prevents victims from recognising that they are being abused and seeking or receiving help.

The other day, I saw some old tweets between Depp supporters talking about how disturbed they were by the behaviour of other Depp supporters in the wake of his replacement by Mads Mikkelson in Fantastic Beasts 3. This was fascinating to me because in this conversation these two people confidently proclaimed that Depp himself, being a kind and gentle soul, would never condone the harassment of Mikkelson or Mikkelson’s fans. But this is ridiculous and totally disconnected from reality since it’s a documented fact that Johnny Depp’s legal team has been purchasing bots in order to provoke harassment of people speaking out in defence of Amber Heard — many of whom are abuse victims themselves — and it would not remotely surprise me if they had also directed this abuse at Mikkelson and his fans.

You can see this bot activity for yourself in any one of the hashtags his supporters are pushing. This “sweet and gentle man” is haunted by his misogynistic rants in texts to friends in which he describes lurid fantasies about burning Amber and desecrating her corpse, the texts in which he called the mother of his children a ‘cunt’, the property damage he committed in the past. The cognitive dissonance it requires to describe this man as ‘gentle’ irrespective of whether you believe he is a victim must be immense. But it’s also required in order to keep believing that Johnny Depp is who people want him to be, and part of shoring up his image as a gentle man means demonising a woman who was twenty-two and just starting out in her career as an actress when she met him and trying to convince yourself she somehow had the balance of power in their relationship.

If you look at any of the hashtags his supporters are pushing you will also see something even more disturbing, which is the way that supporters of Johnny Depp are also extending the abuse apologist logic and absurd conspiracy theories they spin in defence of him to other abusers. It’s worth pointing out that Marilyn Manson, a close friend of Johnny Depp’s, is now suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation and many of Depp’s supporters are raking her over the coals in the exact same way as Amber Heard and I’m left wondering what is the limit of what people will believe? In five years will I see “evan rachel wood supporters dni” in people’s profiles?

What is amazing to me too is that there are people discussing the ‘fandomisation’ of this trial — the fancams, the memes, etc. — who are speaking about how disrespectful it all is toJohnny Depp as if it’s not precisely the response he and his legal team want. The more people make fancams of him being ‘savage’ on the stand (an odd choice of words given the furore over his racist Dior Sauvage ad campaign, not to mention the fact that he is the subject of horrific abuse allegations) and TikTok videos drawing attention to the disparity in crowd size between his and Heard’s fans the more people are encouraged to respond to this case emotionally rather than logically. People are manipulated into thinking supporting Depp is the popular stance and shown that they will be socially ostracised if they criticise him; people are encouraged to lean into nostalgia around his movies and remember how good he used to make them feel (and feel anger at Heard for “taking Jack Sparrow away”, never mind the fact that Depp had already left the franchise before Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published); people are guided down a path well-worn with misogynistic tropes about lying, gold-digging, perfidious women out to ruin good men’s lives.

The repeated assertion that “she shit in his bed” (proven false, but nobody cares) and associated scatological puns on her name are intended to associate her with disgust. The posting over and over of his severed finger without censorship or content warnings is intended to shock and upset people in order to make the associated accusation that “she cut off his finger” (also proven false but again, nobody cares) stick in people’s minds. These things are fed by his team to the media in order to discredit and undermine her so that nobody is listening when she describes the horrific abuse she suffered at his hands during the fight in which he lost his finger or if they are they don’t believe her. The fancams of Johnny Depp “being savage” and the videos making fun of her sobbing so hard she can’t breathe and reenacting her allegations to mock her for them are two sides of the same coin both of which benefit him and his narrative. He is being lionised and she is being demonised, exactly as he wants. And it is exactly as he wants. This is a man who texted one of his friends that he would give her “total global humiliation”. The man stated in black and white exactly what he wanted so I’m not sure why anyone would think he would be appalled by any of this.

On a final note, I wonder how many people have actually read the op-ed that she is currently being sued over? I think people should and bear in mind that this is the speech Depp and his team is trying to silence. It barely even alludes to him and the bulk of it is about the need to expand protection for victims of abuse in general. Remember that.

Chapter:2/7

Word Count: 302

Pairings:Tommy Milner/Chuck Steinberg

Characters:Tommy Milner, Chuck Steinberg

Warnings:Gay, Slash, Yaoi, Abuse, Bullying, Blood, Non-Con Kissing, Sexual Harassment, Harassment, Homophobia, Slurs

Chapter Summary: Tommy caught him by the neck, Chuck had no choice in this.

AN: Hey guys, it’s me again! Just thought I ought to say, if you want vague updates and to talk to me more, I have a writing Tumblr, it’s Writteninsunshine! I also have a writing Discord that is currently pretty dead. xD If anyone wants it, let me know!

Here’s yet another chapter for this fic, I’m really on a roll today!

Haphephobia Chapter Masterlist

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark Fic Masterlist

Chapter Two: Repulsion 

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Feeling the bully’s hand clamp over the back of his neck, a possessive gesture on his part, made Chuck’s skin crawl right off, and Tommy leaning in had him stiff and uncomfortable. Tommy’s lips met Chuck’s neck, just above his own thumb, and his tongue swiped over the skin. Chuck just about leaped out of his shoes, his eyes slamming shut and hands balling into fists.

“Oh, what’s the matter, Upchuck?” Tommy cooed into his ear, “Gonna do something about it, or are you just going to cry and hug onto Ruth’s skirt?”

“Sh-shut up, Tommy. Get off me.” Pushing at the jock, Chuck almost growled, scooting away as much as he could. However, he didn’t get far with Tommy’s grip on his neck that tightened considerably to keep him from tipping over. The other snarled at him, grabbing the front of his shirt and yanking him closer.

“Don’t be such a fucking pussy, gaywad.” Tommy told him, voice quiet but firm, a deadly level of venom in his tone. Before Chuck could respond, he was being kissed with bruising force, teeth clacking together. Copper hit his tongue and he didn’t know who it belonged to before Tommy was pulling back and reading his arm for a hit.

Before he knew it, Chuck took a fist to the face, ending up on his ass on the ground. Blood flooded from his nose and upper lip, and he just stared up at Tommy with a frown, hurt and tears in his eyes.

“If you’re going to be with a gay-ass clown, you gotta look the part, don’tcha, fag?” Spitting at Chuck, Tommy turned on his heels, flashing him the bird as he walked away, leaving him to lick his wounds in silence. His quiet sobs were the only music left in the air.

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AN: Welp, these are going to be short vignettes, but I love them nonetheless.

Prompt:Touch

twofacedcalf:

you can have pictures but it’s not enough you can have corroborating witnesses but it isn’t enough you can have texts where he fantasizes about murdering and raping you but it isn’t enough you can have him admitting he was controlling and angry and violent but it isn’t enough. this is going to get people killed

“Be careful with that one, he’s like a criffing rabid cur!”

I imagine this scene happened sometimes pre TFA after Armitage had an encounter with Snoke or even Brendol?

I’m sorry but I’m just a sucker for hurt!Hux.