it’s weird how many people still buy into the justifications that feudal ruling classes used to legitimize their power. Samurai and knights were no more chivalrous and honorable than emperors and kings were divinely ordained to sit on their thrones
They felt the same way about crossbows too cause any dude with a cross bow could kill a knight on a horse
The ruling elite always LOVE guns. They just hate the idea of the working class having guns.
Also much of our modern conception of the Samurai are the result of post-meiji reaction.
Brief history lesson, the Meiji restoration was a period in the late 19th century when the rules of Japan became very concerned with ‘modernizing’(re: Westernizing) Japan. This included things like encouraging industrialization, banning or discouraging Japanese styles of dress and cultural practices in favor of western ones. And most significant for our purposes, phasing out the Samurai and replacing them with European style military regiments.
Like any sweeping social change, the initiatives of the Meiji rules prompted a backlash. Specifically a loose collection of artists, writers and historians who lionized traditional Japanese and denounced the 'corrupting influence’ of the west. In particular they idolized the Samurai as the embodiment of everything good and noble about traditional Japanese culture, proud warriors who bravely defended their land from invaders and selfless servants of the people.
These post-meiji reactionaries particularly despised the introduction of firearms to Japan. Both because of the sheer destructive power of those weapons, but also because they saw it as the first step towards making the Samurai obsolete. And in the stories they told about the Samurai, firearms became a symbol of both western corruption and the passing of the age of the Samurai. And thats been a part of Japanese pop culture ever since(see, Yojimbo, Princess Mononoke). And of course the Samurai in their stories are too good and noble to ever use firearms.
Just like modern day, the rich and privileged want only those in power to have firearms
AH needs to understand the difference between freedom of speech and making up lies to ruin a man’s life. The verdict isn’t a setback for women. Her lies are what made it harder for women to be believed. This has proven that both women and men can be victims of abuse, and when you come forward, do it with the truth.
Anyone paying attention should be outraged. She isn’t an imperfect victim; the idea that anyone can go into a courtroom, show some edited photos, incomplete evidence, testimonies that don’t add up and swear up and down something happened and expect the other person to be convicted just because they say so is something that should scare the shit out of us all. What does that mean for anything in our justice system?
Shame on what she has done to women who will never have the opportunities or the money or the means to help themselves and receive justice. Shame on her for robbing them of the hope of ever being believed after the shitshow she performed for the last 7 weeks.
I am outraged because I believe women. And this one just set victims back a full century with her theatrics.
uh oh the conservative americans are once again crying and freaking out over their mass murder weapons
Make sure everybody remembers this shit when the progs here cry about its just “Assault weapons” they wanna get rid of. These retards will absolutely just keep moving the goal posts until only the racist wife beating pigs have any firearms.
Whats the problem with that, @durkin2000 ? All the racist wife beating pigs are in the republican party!
“All the bad cops are republikkans, liberal cops would never hurt ME!”
Man when you’re up against a wall and you remember this post it’s going to be v funny.
i mean you have to hand it to mcytblr. somehow people manage to be weird about systems in every single way possible, including ones that would normally be mutually exclusive
If someone believes the moon is made of cheese, and starts thinking about reasons why the moon is made of cheese, one is guaranteed to get wrong answers because the moon is in fact not made of cheese. It doesn’t matter how plausible one’s giant space whale lactation theory sounds: it’s wrong.
Regarding current Discourse about a headline-enhanced shooting, some people should put more effort into checking whether America is such a uniquely violent outlier as they claim, before they start making shit up and inventing reasons why America is such a uniquely violent outlier. (I generalize vaguely because I have seen different people making different claims.)
The paper has a table of countries by per capita so you can check those 64th and 65th values, and I found it interesting and amusing. The attacks per capita list goes like this, with my annotations:
Northern Mariana Islands (me: which has like no people, so one shooting is huge per capita)
Iraq (me: which is a shithole)
Afghanistan (me: basically Iraq 2)
Central African Republic (me: that’s a shithole for different reasons)
Solomon Islands (me: I’m going to start skimming past the microstates and the shitholes now)
…21. Israel… (me: outlier country is outlier)
…34. Finland… (me: now I’m curious)
Finland, apparently, had the Jokela school shooting (8 killed, not counting perp), the Kauhajoki school shooting (10 killed) and the Sello mall shooting (5 killed) in the timeframe surveyed. Finland has about as much population as an averaged US State, so this is comparable to 150 mass shootings in the US.
I wrote the following to mess with a lesbian fascist that I have had the misfortune to once again be brought into near-proximity to, and the various reactionaries she surrounds herself with.
What does it mean to be American?
Does not truly being American require lesbianism, lesbianization, sapphical consciousness? Are we not formed by the orgiastic frolics of the goddesses Liberty-Marianne, Justice, and Columbia? Are we not the horniest bitches the world has ever seen? Do we not, in the face of reactionary insistence that immigration is a kind of wanton sluttery, rejoice in the promiscuity of our liaisons with our many international lovers? Do we not notoriously refer to our international politics as “special relationships”? Do we not boast of our incredible endurance? Have we not been understood as an inherently feminine nation, even as we have been denounced as aggressive and demanding? Are we not an unholy fuck machine of tempestuous lust, a global sugar mommy with an ill temper?
Of course, this requires insight. There is a dichotomy between the true Americanism as dimly grasped by the early politicians of the First Revolution (and seen again and again since then by visionaries but often dismissed as an impossibility, manifesting itself only through bizarre idealizations) and the false Americanism of hot dogs, McDonald’s, Hollywood, all the more usual cultural factors.
Hot dogs, after all, are German. Motion pictures are French. McDonald’s is syncretic in its origins but fundamentally English in its grasp of cuisine. What is there that is truly culturally American in origin? Even our racism is borrowed from the English. As such, when people say, dismissively, “Americans have no culture,” they are more right than they know! The false Americanism is a mosaic of random pieces to conceal the shattering reality of true Americanism, apple pie as the only thing that preserves the sanity of everyday life.
For you see, the vision of America as founded on a set of ideals meant that Americanism was in one sense utterly shallow. One could become an American simply by verbal pronouncement after maybe 30 minutes of thought. But in another sense, this is quite simply the recognition that true Americanism is truly egalitarian. Anyone can become an American. Americanism is a thing of pure Gesellschaft. No Gemeinschaft, Völkisch or otherwise, for us! That is something for the other portions of our selves, the cultures of the constituents of America. This, then, is the true depth of Americanism– being American can encompass the whole universe without ever having to compromise or annihilate anything else. Coexistence, coevality.
And these ideals, what are they? That all people are created equal, that however they are created they are endowed with certain rights in the process, including but not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that they establish governments to secure these rights, and that they may destroy and remake anew any government which fails in this endeavor? That is certainly a good starting point to consider. Let us break it down, then.
What these ideals are is collectivist in nature. It is not the right of any particular ego to destroy and remake anew. It is not any particular person’s decision which establishes governments. It is the people who do so. Why? Because all people are equal in the unalienable rights they possess. No one has any greater claim to power than anyone else.
And it is a collectivist outlook which secures the individual as an entity. Under a world of pure individualism, everyone would be fundamentally identical entities, unable to specialize or develop their particular characters or interests or talents, monistic beings that could not approach within the zone of absolute terror close enough to make the contact necessary to differentiate us into individuals.
Therefore, America is necessarily and at its core set firmly against individualism, in order to save the individual.
It is thus no surprise that Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter, won the admiration of Marx, and that Marx himself was so fascinated by the United States. In the end, America is fundamentally socialistic. The encrusting of “personal responsibility” on the American love of voluntary organizations, the attempt to redefine these as “charity” in order to assert power over those who are in need, cannot escape the buried roots beneath, which say this: compulsion is immoral! Thus, to work to live is an abomination, to work is properly to express one’s dignity, to contribute to the world! This is what socialists of a particular stripe might term the distinction between “work” and “labor.“
What, you might ask, has all this to do with lesbianism?
It is no surprise to anyone except the most blushing infant that heterosexuality is idealized as unequal. It is said that men and women are “separate but equal,” “complementary,” all terms which we must understand in light of Brown v. Board of Education to indicate inherent inequality. Even if we ignore that shining light of reason, the obvious note is that masculinity is understood to convey power and femininity to convey weakness in the ideal heterosexual relationship.
In turn, relationships between men are nervously stuffed into the erastes-eromenos frame, insisting that one partner must necessarily be weaker than the other, inferior, unequal. This proceeds in alternate turns by feminizing or infantilizing this partner. But lesbianism has escaped this constraint– rather, lesbianism remains to a certain extent in a realm of coy mystery. Why is this so?
In the end, it comes down to a metaphor– the metaphor of penetrative sex. It is understood that heterosexual sex consists of a penetrator filling an empty vessel in the form of the penetrated. The postures of idealized heterosexuality feature the penetrator above the penetrated, reinforcing notions of hierarchical scale. And thus, male homosexuality is perceived in this mode, wherein sex is penetrative, the erastes filling the empty eromenos. Never mind the reality.
But lesbian eroticism is mysterious. For centuries those outside of its world have been perplexed by the question of how two women can have sex. Frequently the answer has been to assume that there was some sort of secretive penis involved, something which could allow lesbianism to be reframed into heterosexual visions of what sex is and could be. One could say that fingering or the use of a dildo might restore penetration to the mix, and thus redeem lesbian sex into the realm of the comprehensible act of filling an empty vessel.
But therein lies the difficulty- fingering may be mutual. The dildo may swap users. There is always the blood-curdling possibility of egalitarianism. And if we go to the French term, tribade, tribadism, we are confronted by something even more horrifying- sex without penetration. Tribadism proper and scissoring are in reality fairly difficult to perform and not especially satisfying. But let us instead consider cunnilingus. Traditionally, fellatio is considered to be a submissive action on the part of the oral performer, because they are being penetrated. But the oral performer in cunnilingus is penetrating, unless they are being penetrated by the clitoris, or merely bring tongue to labia. Even when heterosexuals perform cunnilingus, it is with an aura of fear and mystery, for they tread on the grounds of sexual egalitarianism.
And to go beyond, into the deeper realms of lesbian sex opened up by this insight, is even more terrifying to the unenlightened. But I wish to stop here, and simply note that, lesbian sex is egalitarian, it is mutual, it is democratic. It is American, and America is lesbian. To be American is to have sapphic consciousness perpetually weighing on you. For all too many cisgender heterosexual people, the terrible allure of this leads them to vicious rejection and thus the epidemic of violence in America, which is directly aimed at reasserting hierarchies, is explained. It is fear of a lesbianized planet.
Thus it is ultimately necessary to awaken this consciousness in everyone, to lesbianize the planet by willpower rather than await spontaneous insight which may never come. Even within Zen teachings to achieve moments of kensho, let alone full satori, requires extensive study and knowledge of the Noble Eightfold Path, membership within the Sangha.
It is worth being clear here that I do not mean a total conversion to lesbianism. I mean quite simply that heterosexuality and gayness be made more lesbian in their attitudes in order to awaken their egalitarian sense and suppress the insipidity of aristocracy that currently chains them. I mean quite simply that we must pursue the maximal sapphic consciousness within ourselves, act to purge un-American thoughts about racial inequality, the superiority of the abled body and mind over the disabled one, the utterly asinine notion that gender is a hard rigid thing, nationalism, sectionalism, regionalism, belief in cultural superiority. We must cultivate the highest possible degree of lesbianism so that it might be awakened to the fullest extent in everyone else.
I shall call this “Americo-lesbianism” to distinguish it from the false Americanism, for the simple sake of clarity. And thus my particular beliefs might well be termed “absolutist lesbocracy,” or alternately, “radical sapphic democracy.”
What, then is the radical sapphic democratic program? There both is and is not one. We are not in a position to directly contemplate offensive action to implement anything like a program as such, and so any program we might present is necessarily tentative, subordinate to events, a living, breathing document.
And, to put it bluntly, we must necessarily endorse the principle of Auftragstaktik, of “mission command,” when considering political action. We cannot be democrats of any stripe, let alone radical sapphic ones, and envision a politics that is directly controlled from the top down according to a strict plan. It is necessary to have a politics that consists of broad goals and strategies which are translated via operational planning into different tactical approaches.
The first of these goals is democracy. We must democratize society. It is important to understand that by democracy we mean democracy in spirit as well as in outer form. We mean the democracy of the Toyota Production System, not the democracy of Brexit. It is a democracy of chaos, of flux, of cycles and motion. It is a democracy that breathes deeply and lustily. It is a democracy that does not proceed in straight lines, but sways and curves.
Democracy not just in a vague “political sphere,” but democracy taken to its ultimate form within every sphere. We shall democratize the family. We shall democratize the workplace. We shall democratize the shopping mall. There are those who would sneeringly disdain these notions as causing an inevitable snarl, the machine stopping. They understand “democracy,” more often “the republican form of governance,” as the elevation of a figure who dictates and determines, rather than the selection of a figure who holds the responsibility of evaluation and bearing blame.
(For those who often profess Christianity, or to value Christianity and Christian values, it is thus curious that they understand government as Caesarist rather than Christian. But that is an aside.)
For we shall democratize romance. And we shall lesbianize this all too. We shall understand that roles are roles, they’re something to play as and not an essence to be. We shall thus develop yet further the glorious vision of the American system of manufactures, one where any given person may be trained and put in a position and achieve.
The second of these goals is sapphism. We shall adopt the insistent passion of the lesbian from the familiar joke (to us) who shows up to the second date with a U-Haul. We shall, in that immortal voice of wisdom, recognize that “world hard and cold, tiddy soft and warm.” Thus we shall develop a society around this concept of tiddy. Warmth, softness, nourishment, pleasure, diversity: all these shall become the centerpieces of a truly sapphic life.
As such, we will necessarily offer compassion of the tits to all! We shall nourish all, we shall foster pleasure for all, and we shall understand the width of experience and reject a one-size-fits-all intellectual brassiere.
And let us be clear– this shall be sapphic in that this compassion of the tits shall be mutual but not necessarily reciprocal. That is, we shall understand that a woman may indeed be blessed with large breasts or small, with a titlust great or little, and that it is not required, indeed far from it, to insist that only like should be paired to like. Thus, the shared compassion of the tits is like a busty woman who is not especially fond of breasts in a love affair with a slender woman who thirsts for tits deeply. Each contributes what they are able to, each draws out what they need.
To this extent, we do not need to go into details about the specific particulars of this or that. It is only important for the purposes of this manifesto to emphasize the broad principles here. We must distinguish between government and the state, administration and compulsion. Government should be understood as something like an enormous hookup app, enabling and uplifting the potential for sapphic encounters, developing itself further from cruder personals ads. Even if we were to foolishly limit sapphic life to encounters between two, one cannot be forever satisfied with dates that consist of walking in a featureless plain. For there to be movie theaters, cute cafés, charming restaurants, karaoke bars, adorable shops to walk through and coo over arm in arm, even for there to be maintained paths for hikes and walks and time on the beach, there is entanglement with and reliance on other people than simply one’s partner(s).
Thus, government. What of the state?
Some might say that power is illegitimate (some of these might well claim this while also claiming to believe in the justice and mercy and love of a potent, that is to say, a powerful god). Let us set that aside for a moment. What we desire is simply an intermediate shift before contemplating the long haul- not the nanny state which extends its largesse from a position of authority, but the sugar mommy state which provides from a position of voluptuosity.
This, then, is an overview of the sapphism of radical sapphic democracy– the mutual non-reciprocal compassion of the tits, the hookup app theory of governance, the sugar mommy state as a rejection of inherent authority in favor of a theory of voluptuosity.
Then there is the radicalism. For after all, what in the preceding vision of sapphism and democracy is truly radical in implication? All of it is as entirely conventional as arranging a monthly twelve-woman orgy. But by radicalism I mean playfulness. I mean a willingness to explore and create and see what plays out from our whims and passing fancies.
By radicalism, thus, I mean a willingness to understand that the world is malleable and delightful, something to live in and with and not to withdraw from, first of all, and then second of all, the will to act on this willingness. This is the essence of the true radical: they are playful.
In their playfulness rests a willingness to be tested and challenged, to put things to the question. They are unwilling to let conventional wisdom and common sense lie like old logs– they turn them over and find an explosion of life and activity.
Thus, for radicalism I do not make any claim but for flexibility, playfulness, and the exploration and expansion of what is possible.
From these principles, radicalism, sapphism, democratism, we might well resolve any political question through proper application.
Gun control? The opponents of gun control emphasize a hierarchy with them standing above the “irresponsible” gun owner, and so they are not truly democratic. Radicalism would lead us to question the dogma of the usefulness of a personal gun for self-defense. Sapphism would require us to consider whether it is truly compassionate, truly thinking in the way of the tits, to make it so easy for suicides and accidents to kill so many.
I could go on in this manner, but I believe that this serves as a sober political analysis for now.
@cromulentenough - that’s the thing, and I think I worded my original post badly; I think trying to argue that Intelligence Does Not Exist, or that it isn’t distributed among populations, is the wrong argument. it’s one meta-level too low.
if what you’re trying to argue is “everyone needs and deserves basic human respect, kindness, and the chance to prove themselves on their own terms; intelligence is not the sole arbiter of moral worth or competence”, then thatis what you should be arguing.
and I think that’s why most people who oppose HBD oppose HBD. like i said before: if people didn’t give intelligence an undue amount of moral weight, no one would careif intelligence was distributed differently across different populations. no one argues about whether asian people are more disposed to pancreatic cancer because pancreatic cancer don’t have moral weight.
I think Frederick DeBoer’s Cult of Smart as reviewed here more or less agrees with the take that intelligence shouldn’t matter morally, but makes a pretty good case for caring that intelligence/g-factor is real and differs between people, for the reason that if it does differ between people then every system we build which is meritocratic or even credential-driven in a way that depends on intelligence is discriminatory against people who happen to have been born less smart, and insofar as this controls how people get rewards this is horrible, and also very self-serving of the (mostly smart) people who build such systems.
Myself I’m somewhat sympathetic to this take on it- that we should be very iffy on claims about intelligence differences becoming common knowledge because regardless of how much we loudly proclaim that we aren’t assigning it moral weight it will go badly because your control over human society is limited, and therefore refrain from amplifying them. I assign this position a plurality and so think it appropriate that people are expected to not be “trying to get [the general public] to care”.
I’m not sure how you can square “smart people are systematically setting the world up to distribute benefits to themselves with unnecessary credentialism and they and we should recognise this bias” and “differences in intelligence are one way the concept of equality of opportunity is broken out the gate, this is a significant argument for prioritising equality of results” with “we should not try to get people to care/notice that g-factor differs between people”, but would like to.
I think it’s a bit unfair to act as though the people being accused of the worst things here (e.g. Scott) weren’t already applying a mix of both of these requests, though. I think they’ve been very consistent in arguing anywhere it did come up that it was morally irrelevant, and not trying to amplify it specifically. The current fuss came up because of digging between the lines followed by sharing of a private conversation about the topic, and I think it’s important to distinguish people getting problems from “trying to get people to care” from people getting problems because others decided to investigate/”whistleblow” whether they had private thoughts about it.
Nah you didn’t fail to convey your opinion. I just misread it the first time(Might be doing it again too), then got carried away with explaining my theories. Okay, so let’s answer the question of “Why is this considered Alright?”
To me, I don’t consider it that way. I secretly cringe everytime I see a mage RPer create a portal for something as mundane as “I forgot my bag back at my apartment. One moment. Okay, it’s here now.”
It’s use in combat: I find it impractical and silly. Not to mention a little bit Overpowered. If a mage could do that so casually, why invent other spells? Fireball, Arcane Blast, Polymorph and the like? Spells specifically meant to be used in combat? Seem’s redundant if you ask me. So I agree with you there.
However, perhaps the reason people think that’s okay, is because many of them don’t quite know the lore behind portals and teleports, and just want to be like Doctor Strange I mean… Flashy >.> … and want to believe their mage is Skilled enough to cast Teleportations and Portals instantly. “I’m a Master Conjurer! Also fuck authority! The Kirin’Tor is obviously corrupt!”(They aren’t. At least not anymore. Unless Blizzard decides otherwise again.) Which, yes, is pheasable. But if your mage really was a master conjurer, they’d know the damages portals cause to the fabric of reality XD
If I still missed the point of your post then I sincerely apologize. I am trying here. :P
In past RP’s, I’ve used both portals and blink in combat, but each with their own caveats:
1) Portals: cast time took 3 uninterrupted combat turns, and it took us to a city that is commonly ported to; it took reagents and drained my caster of most of her mana, after which she was left in a weakened state.
2) Blink: distance was short range; my caster could only use it twice in one combat experience; the only time she used it to save another person as well, she could only use it once, and it drained her of twice as much mana as normal.
At the end of the day, it’s about tempering abilities based on the skill of the characters. Overpowered abilities are cool, but they sap the fun and creativity out of small fights. Saving them for those Nat20 Critical kills is way cooler!
eh true, so does the uk with the obscene publications act, but I was thinking of the post as like vibes rather than actual law y'know?
Wait, Australia what now?
“Norman Lindsay’s Redheap was the first book to be banned from import into Australia, in May 1930, under the Commonwealth Customs Act 1901. This was before the establishment of the Commonwealth Book Censorship Board in 1933 by Prime Minister Joseph Lyon’s United Australia Party, which was renamed the Literature Censorship Board in 1937. The novel Upsurge, written by J. M. Harcourt and published in 1934, became the first Australian book to be officially banned under the guidelines of the Commonwealth Book Censorship Board. It was initially banned as seditious, later reviewed and the ban confirmed, ostensibly on grounds of indecency and explicit depictions of sex under the Indecent Publications Act. However the main cause of its ban was its socialist tone and subversive agenda which criticised capitalism, featuring Communist characters in its portrayal of life in the relief camps of the Depression.”
similarly to the uk having the obscene publications act and such, autralia has indecent publications acts and such, as far as I know, it’s not something I’ve researched extensively though.
I’m saying this as a tommy main, but a Lot of tommy apologists are out here making posts about wilbur that sound Exactly like the way the rest of the fandom talks about tommy word for word. swap out the names and Maybe some key phrases and I could 100% be convinced that they came from a techno subreddit.
I’m never gonna be against looking at a character’s actions with a critical eye, but can we Not say that someone trying to save their little brother from the man they just learned abused him into nearly committing suicide was an Ego Stroking Stunt? can we Not steal the “he just wanted to be a Hero” cold take from the techno apologists? can we not call it Cringy that wilbur was Angry at learning about a horrific injustice that happened to someone he cared about?
wilbur didn’t exactly go about the situation the Right way (I’ve already talked about That in more detail), but the way that people are talking about this is not just Reductive but genuinely uncomfortable. I don’t understand why people feel the need to go to so many Extremes to twist or vilify wilbur and tommy’s relationship together from Both angles. Neither is the villain trying to hurt or use the other, they’re just complicated messy people.
and more to the point, the hatred for the scene where wilbur fantasized about killing dream from a Characterization Perspective is Really strange to me (and actively uncomfortable with how some people are wording it). when people criticize it’s execution that’s a matter of taste, which Mainly comes down to their limits of suspension of disbelief with the medium, which is Fine.
but this Intense arguing about how it’s out of character, about how it’s Unbelievable, about how it’s cringy, or about how wilbur is Just Selfish And Using Tommy is. well let me break this down.
1: what was depicted on screen is a Genuinely Normal Reaction to that special cocktail of intense anger and helplessness that comes from stewing on the emotions of something horrific that you have no control over. I’ve had moments like that in the wake of tragedies or in learning about the personal injustices the people in my own life have faced that are long passed.
it’s an expression of genuine human emotion first and foremost, which is Exactly what this series and wilbur and tommy in particular are known for. desperately wanting to fix an injustice With Your Fists when you don’t have the power to go back and change what’s already been done is exactly as relatable to me as tommy’s reactions to trauma.
2: wilbur has just learned that his little brother was abused to the point of nearly committing suicide and there are people genuinely calling it an overreaction or selfish or Cringy that he wants to hurt the person that hurt his family? like Deadass?
this isn’t a question of what would be the most narratively satisfying outcome for dream’s end or for the way that tommy’s storyline with dream Should Be resolved, this is about wilbur’s motivations and feelings as a character that exists in this world and has relationships with these people.
one of the first things wilbur said after he was revived was that he would’ve gored dream for what he did to tommy if he was there. this was before he knew anything about exile, this was when wilbur was still Strong in his honeymoon phase with dream directly after his revival. at the time a lot of people read this as an exaggeration, but We Know It Wasn’t Now. we’ve Seen It with our own eyes and That Was The Point.
we saw it in this way so that there Would Be No Doubt what wilbur felt or what he meant. it was a Visceral display of his genuine emotion seen through his own eyes. again, you can dislike the Execution of that premise, but it’s so Bizarre to me that people are actually trying to vilify wilbur for this.
the way he pulled off trying to actually Protect tommy was. Very Typically Wilbur Of Him. but there’s a specific way that people talk about wilbur and tommy that vilifies their Intentions as dramatically as possible. and I feel like people who have to Deal with that kind of flanderization on the regular should know better.
he was actively willing To Die to protect his little brother and win his freedom back. and he was Misguided in his attempt, he Made The Wrong Decisions. but to claim that he Didn’t Care about helping tommy at All is no different from the ways that tommy has been flanderized for two straight years. “he just wants to be a hero!” does not include being willing to commit suicide to save the people you care deeply about from their abuser and it’s Uncomfortable to insist otherwise.
3:we literally had an arc where quackity tortured dream out of revenge for tommy for an entire year? why wasn’t that cringy? why wasn’t that unrealistic?
sure, people Did make it out like quackity was doing it for selfish reasons all the time, but by and large I’ve noticed that it’s mainly Not the people who thought that saying this about wilbur now. like I’ve said, I’ve mainly seen this coming from tommy apologist circles.
I’ve seen someone before pointing out that the actions we should judge are the ones Wilbur actually followed through with and not what he fantasized about, and I think that’s important.
It’s important to remember that immediate emotional reactions to learning important information is not something we have control over. You can’t control what you feel. And when it comes to what he actually did he didn’t go for a violent solution, at least not violent against Dream.
The objective of the actions Wilbur actually took wasn’t revenge, like he fantasized, it was to free Tommy from Dream’s control. His actions were misinformed because he doesn’t have the full picture and he doesn’t entirely understand Tommy’s and Dream’s relationship. And they were influenced by his self-hatred as well as his self-centredness (in the sense that he overestimates his own importance, though he wasn’t completely off the mark there as both cc!Wilbur and cc!Dream have confirmed) so the ultimate result wasn’t ideal. But he wasn’t being selfish. He wasn’t aiming for senseless violence. He was very clearly angry, we know that, but he still made a plan that didn’t involve anyone but himself potentially getting harmed and he stuck to it.
And it’s really really important to keep that in mind.
“it’s unrealistic/cringy/selfish to want to beat the shit out of someone for abusing a teenager to the point of nearly committing suicide, even if that teenager is your actual family that you care for deeply”
do some of you even hear yourselves talk, because that’s what’s actually being said right now
I’m saying this as a tommy main, but a Lot of tommy apologists are out here making posts about wilbur that sound Exactly like the way the rest of the fandom talks about tommy word for word. swap out the names and Maybe some key phrases and I could 100% be convinced that they came from a techno subreddit.
I’m never gonna be against looking at a character’s actions with a critical eye, but can we Not say that someone trying to save their little brother from the man they just learned abused him into nearly committing suicide was an Ego Stroking Stunt? can we Not steal the “he just wanted to be a Hero” cold take from the techno apologists? can we not call it Cringy that wilbur was Angry at learning about a horrific injustice that happened to someone he cared about?
wilbur didn’t exactly go about the situation the Right way (I’ve already talked about That in more detail), but the way that people are talking about this is not just Reductive but genuinely uncomfortable. I don’t understand why people feel the need to go to so many Extremes to twist or vilify wilbur and tommy’s relationship together from Both angles. Neither is the villain trying to hurt or use the other, they’re just complicated messy people.
and more to the point, the hatred for the scene where wilbur fantasized about killing dream from a Characterization Perspective is Really strange to me (and actively uncomfortable with how some people are wording it). when people criticize it’s execution that’s a matter of taste, which Mainly comes down to their limits of suspension of disbelief with the medium, which is Fine.
but this Intense arguing about how it’s out of character, about how it’s Unbelievable, about how it’s cringy, or about how wilbur is Just Selfish And Using Tommy is. well let me break this down.
1: what was depicted on screen is a Genuinely Normal Reaction to that special cocktail of intense anger and helplessness that comes from stewing on the emotions of something horrific that you have no control over. I’ve had moments like that in the wake of tragedies or in learning about the personal injustices the people in my own life have faced that are long passed.
it’s an expression of genuine human emotion first and foremost, which is Exactly what this series and wilbur and tommy in particular are known for. desperately wanting to fix an injustice With Your Fists when you don’t have the power to go back and change what’s already been done is exactly as relatable to me as tommy’s reactions to trauma.
2: wilbur has just learned that his little brother was abused to the point of nearly committing suicide and there are people genuinely calling it an overreaction or selfish or Cringy that he wants to hurt the person that hurt his family? like Deadass?
this isn’t a question of what would be the most narratively satisfying outcome for dream’s end or for the way that tommy’s storyline with dream Should Be resolved, this is about wilbur’s motivations and feelings as a character that exists in this world and has relationships with these people.
one of the first things wilbur said after he was revived was that he would’ve gored dream for what he did to tommy if he was there. this was before he knew anything about exile, this was when wilbur was still Strong in his honeymoon phase with dream directly after his revival. at the time a lot of people read this as an exaggeration, but We Know It Wasn’t Now. we’ve Seen It with our own eyes and That Was The Point.
we saw it in this way so that there Would Be No Doubt what wilbur felt or what he meant. it was a Visceral display of his genuine emotion seen through his own eyes. again, you can dislike the Execution of that premise, but it’s so Bizarre to me that people are actually trying to vilify wilbur for this.
the way he pulled off trying to actually Protect tommy was. Very Typically Wilbur Of Him. but there’s a specific way that people talk about wilbur and tommy that vilifies their Intentions as dramatically as possible. and I feel like people who have to Deal with that kind of flanderization on the regular should know better.
he was actively willing To Die to protect his little brother and win his freedom back. and he was Misguided in his attempt, he Made The Wrong Decisions. but to claim that he Didn’t Care about helping tommy at All is no different from the ways that tommy has been flanderized for two straight years. “he just wants to be a hero!” does not include being willing to commit suicide to save the people you care deeply about from their abuser and it’s Uncomfortable to insist otherwise.
3:we literally had an arc where quackity tortured dream out of revenge for tommy for an entire year? why wasn’t that cringy? why wasn’t that unrealistic?
sure, people Did make it out like quackity was doing it for selfish reasons all the time, but by and large I’ve noticed that it’s mainly Not the people who thought that saying this about wilbur now. like I’ve said, I’ve mainly seen this coming from tommy apologist circles.
I’m saying this as a tommy main, but a Lot of tommy apologists are out here making posts about wilbur that sound Exactly like the way the rest of the fandom talks about tommy word for word. swap out the names and Maybe some key phrases and I could 100% be convinced that they came from a techno subreddit.
I’m never gonna be against looking at a character’s actions with a critical eye, but can we Not say that someone trying to save their little brother from the man they just learned abused him into nearly committing suicide was an Ego Stroking Stunt? can we Not steal the “he just wanted to be a Hero” cold take from the techno apologists? can we not call it Cringy that wilbur was Angry at learning about a horrific injustice that happened to someone he cared about?
wilbur didn’t exactly go about the situation the Right way (I’ve already talked about That in more detail), but the way that people are talking about this is not just Reductive but genuinely uncomfortable. I don’t understand why people feel the need to go to so many Extremes to twist or vilify wilbur and tommy’s relationship together from Both angles. Neither is the villain trying to hurt or use the other, they’re just complicated messy people.
I’m going to share with you guys a revelation I’ve had about why politics in fiction is so unbearable now, and I’ll probably go on a while, so I’ll just tl;dr right now.
Up until recently, ‘political messages’ in fiction were meant to give you a new perspective on real world issues. Now, political messages use real world issues as shorthand for the message they’re already delivering.
I’m going to give you about the most obvious example I can think of for the former.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is hardly Star Trek’s most subtle hour, but it’s still a thought experiment. You’re invited to take the position of a third party and observe black-white race relations through the perspective of an alien being. And in a world of Gorn lizard people and energy beings and that one talking baby, it’s ridiculous that two people who are nearly identical can’t get along because of (ba dum tssh) the color of their skin.
You’re not meant to look at these Star Trek characters and go “oh, this is like black people and white people”–you’re meant to look at black people and white people and go “oh, this is like the characters who had a race war over petty differences on Star Trek. How’d that work out for them?”
In contrast, let’s look at the more recent The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
The villain and the general plot are meant as a metaphor for the refugee crisis, but it’s really poorly established and constructed and executed, in just about every way. You basically have to have a working knowledge of the refugee crisis to even understand what they’re getting at. But the idea is… and I don’t think they spelled this out until episode four or so, well into the plot, so you just could not understand the fundamentals of the conflict or what anyone’s motivations were and anything…
but anyway, the idea was that after the Thanos Snap, half the population of Earth disappeared, so the developed world welcomed immigrants from the third world to help rebuild society in the wake of all that. But, five years later, when the Snap was undone, everyone came back, so they just kicked out all the immigrants and I guess gave all their property and land and money over to the people who’d come back to life while putting the immigrants in camps. And the bad guy decided to fix that by blowing people up.
Now, I think that could’ve worked as a metaphor, but they didn’t put any effort into it beyond “get it, these people are like refugees”. It didn’t work as an analogy, it didn’t work as a thought experiment, it didn’t work as a parallel.
And they could’ve used the situation to make you identify with the Flag Smashers, to put you in their shoes and ask you to emphasize with them–but they never did. We never saw what they’d been through, what was motivating them, what they were hoping to accomplish.
They just had Sam Wilson deliver a cringe-as-hell speech about how the people we’d seen being terrorists for six hours shouldn’t be called terrorists and the best way to prevent them from being terrorists was to give into all their demands.
The writers went at the story from the position that their audience already agreed with them (or, worse, that their audience was dumb and just needed a strong talking-to to get them to agree) and so they would just present the political message of their story and get happy nods. No effort to educate, no effort to inform, no effort to convince. The whole thing is more of an exploitation movie centered around the refugee crisis than an attempt to address it through fiction.
And that’s the problem with a lot of writing these days. Instead of using a fictional character to explain why something Donald Trump does is bad, they invent a fictional character, say “look, it’s Trump!”, thus he’s bad and they fight him. And it used to be they would have main characters–noble, heroic, sympathetic characters–representing the political positions that they were criticizing!
If Star Trek: Discovery had a good-natured character who was making a good-faith argument about why immigration should be restricted, and other characters opposed him, I don’t think anyone would mind. But they don’t do that. They take a character, he’s Space Hitler, he’s a straw-man for all the politics that the writers don’t like, and they blow him up. Oh, and he’s a straight white man, natch.
OK, I know I shouldn’t post this, but I’m curious if we can have a civil debate over it, since it isn’t…*technically* culturewar until the end?
Or maybe I’m just in a bad mood and feeling chaotic today, IDK.
Oh, this is definitely an interesting discussion, and I won’t do it justice, but it’s 2AM and I don’t feel like doing a complete essay, and leaving it for later will probably result in me not doing anything at all.
So my first half-baked thought about this is that media’s relation to their audience has changed, and they just don’t trust us to get complicated messages as well as they did in the past. Partly, they’re in the right, I mean, just look at the people who are constantly shocked by “woke politics” in Star Trek. I honestly wouldn’t know how to put a political message into fiction without someone completely missing it, and ending up using the story against me and my cause.
The second is of course corporations. Star Trek in the 1960′s was just a silly little show. They could get away with a lot, because nobody was paying too closely attention to them. Star Trek today is a frikking huge brand with an awful lot of money behind it, and above all else, it needs to stay profitable. And that is without even bringing up Disney, to whom the “politically relevancy” of their stories is nothing but a glorified marketing strategy for what is in the end a very bland action story.
Third is selection bias. You know who else tried to give social commentary and education, but was really bad (condescending) about it? Batman in the 1966 TV show. We only remember the ones that worked particularly well, but how many other shows messed up their political side and just how badly? Compare to today, where beautiful and subtle messages definitely exist, but we get them along with the trash, completely unfiltered.
i don’t want a dsmp reboot because, from the sounds of it, the only reason a reboot is being made is to appeal to the fans - which, whilst a nice idea, will ultimately lead to lackluster storytelling. when creating art your main focus should be your own passion and what story you want to tell; when wilbur and tommy first made l'manberg people made fun of them, and it wasn’t something the viewers initially wanted, HOWEVER, it was their passion and clear love for the story and characters that caused them to keep going with it - and it worked! they created a meaningful story which people still love to bits and with characters that their fans still talk about and still look forward to seeing.
trying to recreate that just will not work if it’s solely in the interest of making fans happy, because the minute you’re not receiving the feedback you want you will just have no motivation to actually carry on with your story. you need something to motivate you to continue streaming, to tell your character’s story completely and if you’re only relying on viewers / the potential of your ideas “blowing up” then you’re going to get burnt out really quickly and you’ll likely want to drop the project -> thereby disappointing the few fans you have cultivated for that story.
ok I think most of what I would say has been said so just go check my mutual’s blogs you know the drill but one more thing:
when tommy started his dsmp story arc/general rise in popularity, he was streaming daily on there, uploading frequently, and being annoying as hell about collabed, even when he was ignored. he put in requests for who should be added, played the “loud annoying” persona for people to bounce off of, and did as much as he could to promote himself.
when wilbur was doing his dsmp story, he was putting in so much work that he couldn’t get YNB out until after he stopped being head writer, and every cc has generally corroborated that he got really invested and spent a ton of time planning everything. he spearheaded a plot involving so many moving pieces and in such little time comparatively to how the server moves now. he bought a costume, made a song, posted on reddit constantly about it, uploaded regularly about it, etc etc.
yes, they got lucky to be added onto a server during a time when mcyt was rising rapidly in popularity. yes, they had a prior audience (though especially in tommy’s case, nothing compared to now). but to act like wilbur and tommy haven’t put in the work to build up an audience, that they were just coasting off prior success, is insane. let’s not forgot how much wilbur and tommy were made fun of for doing rp until it started exploding in popularity, and then everyone started copying. they put an absurd amount of work in out of sheer passion, love, and quarantined-fueled insanity, and absolutely fucking earned the trust their audience has in them now. they fought the uphill battle that michael and other ccs are facing now, arguably from a worse position.
no offense, but lore should take off camera prep, should take time. it’s work! it’s your job! but also… you have to be good at it lol. you have to create something fans will like, will come back for, and then you have to do it consistently and then again and again until you have the audience trust wilbur and tommy have. because you have the platform, you have the eyes and the ears, and word travels fast in fandom. but if you want those 10k viewers, you need to give them something worth talking about
okay okay, I get it now, when I do a Ponzi scheme, I’m “breaking the law” and “fooling innocent people,” but when the government does a Ponzi scheme, it’s “social security”
ALT
