So, a couple of years ago, I stood in front of a concert hall in Japan by myself as a white person. There was another white girl who engaged me in a conversation in English (since we were both white I guess). She asked where I’m from, so I said Germany (a European country). She was like, cool, I’m from Georgia. Let me stress again that I’m from Europe. So being from Europe, I thought she meant the country of Georgia and was super impressed at her English because she had no accent that would have identified her as Georgian. I also tried hard to think of anything I know about Georgia but since that adds up to “isn’t that where Stalin is from?” and “I liked this one Georgian singer in the ESC”, I didn’t say anything. It literally took me hours until I realized that she probably was from the United States and I’m really glad I didn’t ask her about Stalin.
Like, I’m sorry, but Georgia, Europe is a country and Georgia, United States isn’t.
Idk who needs to hear this but as much as “nurses and people that work in the medical field in general deserve to be treated better” is a thing that is true and also should be talked about more, the time to do that is not and has literally never been When Disabled People Are Talking About The Medical Abuse They Face From Them
Anyway this is Still not a fucking “these two things can Coexist” post
sometimes I get so jealous of other people’s social skills. like damn. they can talk to people?? and peoplelike them?? look at all those people who like them. wtf. illegal
ugh people annoy me the fuck out man. first of all - stop fucking caring if someone likes you and second stop focusing on what other people are doing and immediately thinking you’d like to be that way and start behaving that way. and believing that that would just magically sort out your life. just fucking let yourself find yourself- stop bringing yourself down man I’m so shocked by how many people have no problem with talking themselves down it scares me. just stop focusing on your surroundings and look into yourself. your mind. your soul. stop fucking seeing people and wanting rather to be like them and start appreciating who you are- and how are you ever gonna do that if you don’t give yourself the chance? how you ever gonna find out who the fuck you are if all you ever do is put layers n layers of other people onto yourself? just fucking be independet and rely on yourself for once instead of hiding behind something you think just makes it easier for you. you don’t even know about the harm you’re doing to yourself and all the work with digging that up later. the problem you’re feeling shitty about yourself is that you’re feeling shitty about yourself.
I’m rereading Les mis again, and one thing I didn’t notice on my first reads is just how Militarized every single town is? Even in scenes where characters are just going about their ordinary day there are always soldiers in the street, and everyone’s always mentioning prison, and the police are always there, and there are always traces of the recent wars all around—
No matter what the characters are doing, the threat of state violence is always There. The threat of the military and police and government is always hanging over them.
Like in Fantine’s chapters with Tholomyes! As the four couples are going on their dates, there are constant references to how “Everything is Fine Now Because the Monarchy has Finally Put Down those Nasty Rebels and is Back in Power Again.”As the couples flirt and play, there are gendarmes in the street and people singing rowdy songs about the return of the king. There’s an entire intro chapter about the year’s historical context, and the rest of the chapters contains sprinkles of anecdotes about the new regime.
Hugo draws what I feel is a pretty explicit parallel between Tholomyes and the new King. We’re told that is fine in Paris because King Louis is on the throne: and we’re told that everything is idyllic in Fantine’s friend group because Tholomyes is its (quote) “dictator” who leads in a way that obligates everyone to obey.
Of course in the end Everything is Not Fine and these dictators can’t actually be trusted to rule over their people, and are going to especially hurt marginalized people like Fantine.
But it’s not just this one subplot obviously, it’s Every Single One. The threat of military violence is the background noise of the entire book.
Montreuil-sur-Mer where Valjean becomes mayor is literally a garrrison town for the military; Paris is always swarming with police and gendarmes; Marius’s story centers on his changing feelings about his Bonapartist soldier father; the Thenardiers live at the Waterloo Inn and constantly go on about Monsieur Thenardier’s military history; like the threat of the military/police is always there in the background of every scene, long before it comes to a head at the barricade.
One of the subplots that illustrates this best is Everything that Happens In Digne after Valjean is released from prison.
Valjean shows his yellow passport to the mayor and is immediately followed by a gendarme before he heads to an inn. His passport causes every inn to refuse service to him. After he asks a kind-looking peasant man at home with his family if he can stay at his house for the night, the man pulls out a gun and threatens to murder him. He attempts to get temporary housing at a prison, which refuses him.
We’re later given an explanation for what the townspeople think and say about their police force, and why they’re so determined to beat Valjean away. We’re told that the townspeople say:
“The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure each other by making things happen.It behooved wise people to play the part of their own police, and to guard themselves well, and care must be taken to duly close, bar and barricade their houses, and to fasten the doors well.”
Which is a terrifying philosophy that we see throughout the book? The reason everyone is so cruel to Valjean is because in a world where everything is militarized, ordinary people have decided to become unofficial cops. It’s like they believe the problem with their society is that there aren’t enough police/soldiers on the street—even though we see police and soldiers on Every Page.
There’s something terrifyingly familiar about the mentality that looks at cities swarming with police and says “the way to fix this is to Add More Police. Or for regular citizens to Do Police Work themselves!”
And I feel like that tension, that constant pervasive threat of government violence that never goes away because ordinary people are actively supporting these institutions too, is such a tragically relevant part of the book.
Maybe not the biggest culprit behind the Radioactive Bad Takes on this website, but the one that’s bugging me the most lately: Please, I am begging you, learn what genre conventions are and read the text accordingly.
Fiction is not reality and pretty much every genre of fiction has certain standard ways in which it deviates from reality. And I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t nitpick the physics of how Superman is able to fly. There will be ways in which the characters’ behavior and relationships will be informed by the genre as well and it makes just as little sense to judge them by realistic standards as it does to complain about something in Star Wars being scientifically implausible.
For example, “Adults are Useless” is a well-recognized trope in children’s literature. But that’s not because children’s authors are all going around writing adult characters who are terrible parents or teachers. It’s because the protagonist of a story written for children is almost always going to be a child, and the protagonist of the story has to get into trouble and solve problems themselves for the story to be any good. Yes, in real life, teenagers shouldn’t be fighting in a war. But if the grown-ups stepped in and stopped the teenage protagonist of your action-adventure series from fighting, there would be no story.
Does that mean the grown-up characters in that series are evil people who use child soldiers? No, because we accept a child being in these kinds of situations as a conceit of the genre of children’s fiction, and we interpret the characters and their choices accordingly. We don’t apply a realistic standard because the very premise is unrealistic to start with.
Another example: An adult hitting a child in real life is horrible. But if the child is a superhero, and the adult is a super villain, and they are in a cartoon, then we can’t read it the same way. All cartoons with any kind of action or fighting in them use violence unrealistically, and if the child and adult characters are presented as equally matched adversaries then that’s how any violence between them has to be understood. The villain might be a real bad dude, since he’s, you know, a villain, but hitting a child superhero in the context of a super-fight does not make him a child abuser, specifically.
I’m focusing on children’s books and cartoons here because I think that’s where tumblr fandoms have the biggest trouble with this but it applies to everything. Characters in a romantic comedy won’t behave realistically, characters in fairy tales won’t behave realistically, characters in police procedurals won’t behave realistically, all of them will behave as characters within their specific genre have to in order to make that genre work. The second you start trying to scrutinize every single action a character takes by realistic standards, you miss the point.
Repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
reminds me of how every couple years some dipshit comes along and says, ‘i’m going to FIX the romance genre! i’m gonna DEFY convention! my characters don’t get together and they don’t live happily ever after because that’s how real life is!’ and then everyone who bought their book, which was billed as a romance, judges it to be a terrible romance book, because it doesn’t do what a romance book is supposed to do. and then the author flips their shit because how dare people judge them for being bad at the thing they failed at on purpose.
Shoutout to the geniuses STILL whining about love at first sight in fairytales and Shakespeare plays. Get the fuck over yourself and learn what suspension of disbelief is.
In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”
I am not joking when I say that Lucius’ line, “Actually, I think I’m just so-so, but I’ve decided to carry myself like I’m cute,” has radically shifted my self perception and presentation. Like damn, he’s right
not to post even more Villains Discourse on main but it really bugs me how people read giving villains tragic backstories as inherently excusing their actions and/or demonizing trauma survivors.
theactual message of Tragic Villains is (almost) always “people who are never taught or given any healthy, constructive outlets for their emotions will often find unhealthy,destructive outlets.” it’s that people who are traumatized and never learn how to cope with that trauma can become a danger to themselves and others. the message isn’t “trauma makes you evil!!!!” or “genocide is okay if you’ve been sad before!!!!” it’s “people need compassion and help to recover from trauma instead of becoming increasingly angry and harming themselves and others in the process.”
this site takes an alarmingly behaviorist and punitive approach to everything and it’s literally the most annoying thing. y’all have this concept that “if we just punish people hard enough, if we just scare them enough, if we just make them feel guilty enough.” that people just Do Bad Things Because They Do Bad Things, I Guess, and Because We Didn’t Threaten Them And Shame Them Enough. but humans are an innately social species. at our very core, we need compassion and kindness. we need healthy relationships with other humans.
you can keep looking at traumatized villains and being like “haha this dumb pathetic sadboi thinks murder is okay because his parents died” but as a survivor myself, unaddressed/untreated trauma absolutely can make you ragey and destructive. i was lucky enough to have support and eventually get the treatment i needed. but it’s not hard at all for me to imagine how, if that hadn’t been the case, that could’ve been me. obviously not on a movie-villain scale like murder or war crimes, but it’s so irritating as someone whose trauma has always manifested as anger to watch people on this site be like “this is just bad writing!!! real survivors/good survivors don’t end up like that the writers just hate survivors and want the audience to condone murder!”
Seriously people, especially if you are in A03, TAG your Moon Knight fic with #separatebodies.
And if you’re not going to do that? At least don’t tag them Dissociative Identity Disorder because if they’re in separate bodies? They NO LONGER have DiD. Congratulations, you took a perfectly adorable System and turned them into same-cookie-cutter Ken dolls.
YEs, even if you still have them (or at least some of them) with Layla.
Whoever you are writing about? They’re no longer the Moon System.
Misstagging is a little bit worse than not tagging btw. Because then people who ARE expecting to read about the guys as a system? Who want to read about the system, and specially Plurals who are happy that they FINALLY have some good media representation that is not “we must integrate the alters” or “of course we have an evil alter in our midst”, get hit by the horrible implication that Plurality is not valid, and Single existence is to be strived for no matter what.
And, vague blogging a bit the fic that enraged me about this: No, giving lip service to “a telepathic connection” remaining between the three? Is NOT the same. You still separated the boys, just because you found writing a Plural in a relationship within themselves and with another HARD.
SO yeah, do it. It’s your fic, your circus, your monkeys. But for the love of Khonshu and Tawaret? TAG.
i love you practical effects i love you corn syrup blood i love you set designers i love you creature artists i love you makeup and prosthetics i love you costumers i love you actors who sit in the makeup chair for 5 hours i love you makeup artists i love you practical sets i love you puppetry i love you miniatures and bigatures
Please, for the love of God, please, make your papers more understandable.
Fuck you
Sincerely,
A college student on the verge of tears
I’m writing a manuscript rn and every single piece of feedback i’ve gotten has boiled down to “use more technical language” and “be more formal”, and I have been actively going “i will not be doing that, thanks” but my GOD do they not like it.
update: i cant believe this is actual literal feedback i actually recieved
OK so this is a genuine issue in scientific communication where a paper requires very Preciselanguage, and because people aren’t really used to writing that, they crutch on rules of Formality, because they’ve never been taught how to write with Clarity.
In the above example, ‘huge’ is not a very precise term. Could mean anything from “lots” to “About the size of a battleship” to “bigger than expected”. Not a very precise term. I’m not sure what OP’s field is, but they should probably be using a word that’s more specific like “Statistically Significant Differneces” instead of “Huge differences”, or maybe “Widespread Impact” instead of “Huge Impact”. Whoever is providing critique here should say “the use of 'huge’ here is imprecise and can confuse what you’re talking about, please use a more specific descriptor”.
What people generally are asking for when they want something 'understandable’ is Clarity. Complex topics are perfectly fine, but they need to be explained clearly. Purdue has a good guide here, which I’ll share the outline of, because it’s genuinely good advice for many genres or writing:
Go from old to new information and keep the timeline straight. No Dr. Who Plots.
Use Transitional words when bridging concepts. Words like however,therefore,in addition,also,but,moreover, etc.
Keep your sentence structure simple, and mind where you put subordinate clauses. This is really hard for ADHD people who srt of tend to zig-zag across concepts, but in general, it’s better to have several simple sentences than one huge rambling one.
Use Active Voice. Good: “The Comittee decided to postpone the meeting”. Bad: “A descision was reached to postpone the meeting by the comittee”
Use Parallel Contructions. If you’re comparing several things, use the same gramatical structure to describe each thing.
Avoid using the noun version of verbs. Good: “The Plan was implemented sucessfully.” Bad: “The implementation of the plan was sucessful.”
Avoid Multiple Negatives. Double negatives are confusing as hell, triple negatives are worse.
Chose Action verbs over forms of “to be”. Good: “TV can report on events much faster than newspapers.” Bad: “One difference between TV and newspapers is the relative speed at which they can report on things.”
Avid Unclear Pronoun References: If you use terms like It, They, He, She etc. make sure it’s very clear who or what that pronoun is referring to.
Name a better feeling than getting the first comment on a fic you were uncertain about and knowing that at least one person liked the tiny piece of your brain that you put on the internet
As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”
Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.
The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”
OI. PEOPLE IN THE THREAD. CAN WE REBLOG THIS VERSION PLEASE. DON’T STOP MAKING CALLS.
But also as another person further up says, don’t let your activism start and stop with phone calls either.
When you’re angry at the characters, the story is well-written. When you’re angry at the writers, it is not.
the presumption here is that audiences can tell the difference.
presuming they’re not children, the audience can usually tell. ex: when a character does something you don’t like - but it feels like something the character would do - you get mad at the character. when a character does something you don’t like - and the history of that character makes it unbelievable that the character would do that thing - you get mad at the writers.
^^^^^^^^^^^THIS
The fact that you’re aware of the writer’s existence at all should be a clue. The writer should be invisible to you if they’ve done their job properly.
I… actually disagree with that last take. I think there are two ways in which you can notice a writer’s narrative choices: when they’ve done something wrong, or when they’ve done something extremelyright.
The difference of course is that you’re not getting mad at them. You’re marveling at their story-telling ability.
And in this case, specifically, you could be like, “Oh, fuck (derogatory) that character for doing that, and fuck (lovingly) the writer for making that choice work so well and fit both narratively and thematically.”
Analyzing one line said by a gag side-character in a kids’ cartoon - An Owl House Essay
Belos is supposed to know everything, but why should he know what the Titan wants? Maybe the Titan doesn’t even know what he wants. Maybe he’s just some normal guy, you know?
I’m just sat here, still endlessly contemplating this line delivered by Steve and its implications on the nature of religious belief in the real world. I feel like there’s a pretty nuanced take that is implied there, that I don’t see brought up often, not within the online spaces where theist topics are usually discussed and especially not withing the context of kids’ TV animation. So I’m going to try and extrapolate the implied meaning here while adding some of my own thoughts in a way that would hopefully be comprehensible but I can’t necessarily guarantee that :)
Okay, so you guys know how often discussion of religion is exclusively framed around the question of Theism vs. Atheism? It always seems to boil down to the question of god’s existence, he either is or he isn’t. Every participant in a discussion is supposed to place themselves in one of the two camps and go die on the religion hill in the name of either god or science. This is, to my knowledge, the most common way people conceptualize all of religious discourse for themselves: there’s the main question of god vs no god and then many axillary questions that are less important and largely stem from your personal position on the main one.
Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be like this. You personally, don’t have to reject and abandon your religious beliefs in order to be critical of religious institutions and recognize the historical and ongoing harm said institutions have done to society.
Bringing this back to Steve’s words, his question is not necessarily about whether the titan exists, he’s literally standing on its corpse, in his case it would be silly to question that. But what is not silly to question how Belos, the titan’s prophet, is even able to be certain about the titan’s will, if the titan himself actually has a definable will and if it’s even worth following it. Because ultimately, these things are unknowable and if anyone is to claim to know them, the burden of proof is on them, especially when they stand to personally benefit from everyone taking them on their word. Belos has just as much actual proof for his bullshit about the titan as Steve does for the titan being ‘a normal guy’ so why does Belos get be emperor?
It’s not as if Steve here independently came to some ultimate truth that is unambiguously more true than what he was told by the system he was indoctrinated into. Instead, he has just accepted and embraced that some things in life are just unknowable.
This is, of course, easier said than done because we, as people, are known to be terrified of uncertainty. In fact, many theorize that all religious/supernatural belief is a consequence of people trying to fill in holes in their understanding of the world. Why does it rain sometimes? Gods pissing from the sky. Where did we come from? God created you. Why do our loved ones have to die? It’s God’s will. Why the world is so cruel? God is testing you. What happens when I die? God decides your faith for the rest of eternity. And so on and so forth.
Religion is a natural consequence of human curiosity, our brains are inclined to get anxious over existential questions and religion provides simple and comforting answers to them. There’s nothing wrong with that in on itself, everyone likes to feel comforted but, of course, as we al know from the real world, providing comfort is not the only thing religious institutions are capable of. In fact, they are responsible for all kinds of war, genocide, minority group persecution and other kinds of oppression. Religious leaders are known to often push their personal beliefs through the authority or their institution, justifying all kinds of horrors with the notion of 'god’s will’, which is not to be questioned.
But like maybe you should question it. After all, the titan didn’t personally tell you his will, you only ever heard about it second hand from that Belos guy and he certainly doesn’t have your best interests in mind, just look at the inhumane conditions you and your fellow scouts have to work under!
Anyway, so the point here is that it’s absolutely necessary to question the authority of religious institutions regardless of if you are religious not. Faith is an important part of many people’s understanding of the world, but this shouldn’t, however, be a justification for supporting harmful things practiced by religious institutions. You have the moral right to disagree with things done in the name of your faith.
For a lot of people, my younger self included, it can be quite difficult to decouple the concept of religious belief from the the religious institutions that are supposed to embody them. But separating them is actually quite important because belief is a personal matter, while social institutions are a public one. In other words, each individual is free to determine their own beliefs for themselves but the questions that have to do with determining what kinds of institutions serve society best have to be decided upon collectively. Thus, critiques that focus specifically on religious belief remain in the realm of philosophy, a field that is notorious for never having certain provable answers to any of the questions it seeks to answer, all is shrouded in uncertainty and frustrating to engage with for laymen. On the other hand, critiques of religious institutions rely primarily on historical and material analysis, they are way more grounded in reality, accessible and understandable to an average person and don’t have as much ambiguity as philosophy does. It is way more productive to criticize the bad things done in the name of faith than the faith itself.
Basically, I think that this is what the creators of The Owl House are trying to get at with Steve’s story and with the broader point it’s building towards in general: the show is not against faith, instead it’s against authoritarianism justified by faith.
Op I admire your strong will to make this post. You are right.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.
This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what’s good and bad.
Sawthis article linked on twitter yesterday and…. yeah. YEAH.
I guess the reason I like early Who so much is because it’s I dunno, more realistic and cozy? Actors would fluff their lines sometimes and the dialogue wasn’t always so trim so it felt like you were watching real people instead of a polished movie script. It was slow sometimes but I kinda like how it lets you get to know the characters better when there isn’t action every scene.
The thing that people trying to tell me I’m “cringe” don’t get is like…
I know that.
My entire self-identity is based on having basically everyone my own age for my entire childhood treat me as an incredibly embarrassing misfit, and having internalized that there was nothingI could ever do to make myself less cringetastic.
So all my later friendships and social acceptance and self-worth were based upon the premise that I am weird and embarassing as hell, but, there are certain people, subcultures, and social situations where this isn’t necessarily a barrier to acceptance and fellow-feeling, and also, people who ostracize others for harmless eccentricity are giant assholes. I purged most of my trauma by going to fast food restaurants in medieval clothing during SCA events and internalizing that no matter how weird I am, I still have basic human rights and deserve to exist in social spaces.
So if you want me to change you have to actually tell me what I’m doing that you don’t like, because when I ask myself hypotheticals like, “What would a person find cringey about me?” or even, on my bad mental health days, “Why would someone strongly dislike me?” the answer is, “Idk, everything I do, say, and am? Which is not something I can change. You’ll have to give me more specifics if you want me to do anything about it.”
It’s one of those things where like… downside, I’m horrifically scarred inside. Upside, it makes me resistant to some forms of peer pressure!
