#someone put it into words
what you need to understand about recommending a show to me is that no matter how much we both know I’ll like it, I can’t watch it until the Neurodivergence Department in my brain approves it. I don’t know when that will be, and I don’t have any more control over it than you do.
Ever Given was a nice treat, and while I am glad the issue is solved, I am a bit sad to see her go. I think what we enjoyed most about the situation was knowing there was absolutely nothing we had to (or even could) do about it. It wasn’t our job! At all! We didn’t have to donate, protest, educate ourselves, raise awareness, or even move the darn thing. We didn’t have to feel guilty about our inaction. This time it was wholly, completely not our problem.
Here’s something I’ve been chewing on recently: there’s a discourse template where someone talks about how something is really important, or is “human nature”, or people need it, and then someone else objects that they don’t care about the thing and their friends don’t care about the thing and therefore the original poster is just making excuses.
Like:
“People need romantic companionship!” “But I’m aromantic. Are you saying I”m not really a person?”
“War is part of human nature.” “I don’t start or support wars and neither do most of the people I know, so clearly it’s not. You’re just making excuses for warmongers!”You know. Anyhow, it seems like mostof the time, the original statement isn’t actually intended to be normative or exhaustively general, and it makes more sense if you interpret it more like, “this thing is important to a very substantial fraction of people, and you aren’t going to have much luck excluding those people from your society or segregating them into marginal classes, so the way society provides for that thing is really important even to people who don’t care about the thing directly.“ Which may still be untrue, but is usually at least a more defensible statement.
It bothers me that there isn’t a way to say that clearly in a more concise manner, but I think that often that’s what people actually mean when they talk about “human nature” or make overbroad generalizations about what people want and need.
“fandom & stan culture have ruined critical thinking, obviously you’re not supposed to connect with [morally abhorrent literary protagonist]” i love connecting with heinous characters i love having empathy for characters that have committed legitimately terrible unforgivable acts i love understanding why they did the evil things they did and i love that it’s always some basic human feeling or instinct that i feel like every other thursday. i love when circumstances and choices push characters to inconceivable extremes i love when fictional people never had the choice to be good and i love when they do and then actively choose the moral lowground and indulge the darkest most corrupt corners of the human psyche i love the visceral uncomfortable unsolvable knowledge that they could be me and i could be them and i love sitting with that knowledge and not deciding if this makes me bad or good and then moving through the world with that stone in my shoe. rip to this website but im built different
