the damage done by the trans bathroom predator myth is impossible to overstate. to know that the myth permeates the space between you and everyone you meet, living in both of your minds whether either of you choose to believe it or not. it turns our love, our kindness, into a threat
performing indifference can become a kind of defense mechanism. a way of saying "hey, I have no interest in you, so you're safe from me"
even the smallest, most platonic acts of love or even kindness feel laced with the guilt of imagined violence
if a tgirl shows you love in any form, know that she very likely does so out of trust in you
i can't vibe with anyone who thinks icarus was an ignorant idiot for flying too close to the sun. "oh i'd never do that i would have remembered my father's warning and been fine". do you seriously think that after years of imprisonment, feeling the sun on your face and the open air beneath your wings, you would be able to focus on anything but the joy of being alive and free? do you actually think that if you were given the opportunity to go where nobody has never been before, you wouldn't want to push it to the limit? to dare to be the first to try what no one else has ever even thought possible? do you honestly think you're too good for your own human nature? look me in the eyes and tell me if i strapped a pair of wings to your back that could take you wherever you wanted to go whenever you pleased that you'd be careful and sensible about it. you are not better than icarus just because you have the benefit of his example.
I for the life of me can't find my original post but since I'm getting new followers again I wanna state that as a csa victim from more ppl than I could ever remember that I wholeheartedly believe that "the pedophile" is a boogeyman, a fascist tool for making you okay with violence being enacted on people, and not the cause of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse. In the same way that rape is not borne out of attraction but rather is an expression of power that simply uses sex as a means to its end, childhood and adolescent sexual abuse is not by and large borne from attraction to children and adolescents, but rather from the incredible amounts of power that adults have over young people
Who is a pedophile? Whoever fascists label a pedophile. It's insane to me that so many people can watch fascists call homosexuals and transsexuals as an entire demographic pedophiles and groomers, and their response is to fucking accept the premise that there is in fact a monstrous type of sub human person whose entire goal is to abuse children (which then makes it okay to do literally anything to them), just that its not homosexual or transsexuals, it's its own thing. Newsflash but they are calling people groomers BECAUSE they're gay or trans, it has never had anything to do with this boogeyman they invented. They think you're a pedophile too.
And I get it. I understand why it's galvanizing. None of us got justice (not that I believe our current legal frameworks could even dispense it) and we have to live every day with the shit that happened to us. And that fucking sucks. The animal in me wants retribution. It wants them to hurt like they hurt me, it wants violence done to them like the violence they did to me. When I was 19 I would watch To Catch a Predator on YouTube on repeat. It satisfied that angry animal. Seeing n these men--the exact same sorts of men who hurt me, having the exact same sorts of conversations they had with me--getting their "just desserts" was so profoundly satisfying to me.
But no one deserves violence--physical or social--certainly not for the sake of supposed catharsis. The animal that craves an eye for and eye is reactionary. It is moved by feeling, outrage, and (often justified) anger. But what it really wants, it will never get. I cannot change the fact that I've been raped and abused. It will never be satisfied, it will always be angry.
And how quickly that quest for satisfaction turns to violence, social murder, and torture--all in the name of "protecting children." But this world does not have monsters. Evil doesn't exist. Everything is explicable, every social ill has material conditions which produces it. I wasn't raped and abused because of evil. I was raped and abused because adults had incredible amounts of power over me and they wanted to use that power and just didn't care about how it would hurt me.
But the fascists don't care about that. They never have. To them, the problem they face is not one of the material conditions of children, but instead a fight against evil, against whatever social forces stand in the way of the family as an economic unit of capitalist production. They'll label you as a pedophile too.
They care about using that anger we have for their own ends. That's all. Don't let them. You're next.
i thionk we should dump hundreds of gallons of acid on lady liberty to turn her copper again. i think itd be cool. and i think the hudson bay could handle all the acid because its got that new yawk spirit.
Day 2 in the Middle School Time Loop: you remember that last time, everyone ignored you at recess because they were talking about a TV show that you hadn’t watched. This time, you lie and say you’ve seen it. They ask you who your favorite character is, and you don’t know any of the characters, and so you’re tongue-tied. They think you’re weirder than ever, or maybe a liar, which is worse (and true).
Day 3 in the Middle School Time Loop: you tell your parents that you feel ill. They let you stay home while they’re at work. You spend the whole day watching past episodes of the TV Show.
Day 4 in the Middle School Time Loop: Recess again. The same person asks you who your favorite character is. This time, you're ready. You eagerly tell them, and supplement your reasons for liking them with solid evidence from all 4 seasons of the show. But! Tough luck: you’re now too invested. The atmosphere turns uncomfortable. They go back to ignoring you like they did on the Day 1 that you didn’t know was Day 1.
Day 5 in the Middle School Time Loop:
You decide to try a different approach and update your style. You've noticed that Ashleigh, who’s blonde and constantly surrounded by friends, always wears pink stripey sneakers. You try wearing a pink dress. Someone says it’s cute, but you know from how they say it that it isn’t the good cute.
“I thought that pink was cool,” you protest, more to the uncaring universe than to anyone in particular.
Your interlocutor shrugs. “Maybe on someone else.”
Day 6 in the Middle School Time Loop: You keep your head down, but still surprise the teachers by somehow knowing the correct answers to every spontaneous question they throw out to the class. You study the outfits of your classmates more closely. You realize that it wasn’t the color, so much as the brand that made the difference. It proves the shoes were expensive. You note down Ashleigh's sneaker brand in smudgy ink on the back of your hand, and then after school you take half a year's saved-up allowance and buy a matching pair at the mall. Your mom raises her eyebrows but doesn’t stop you.
Day 7 in the Middle School Time Loop: Today you make it to lunch before anything major goes wrong. You think that the sneakers have protected you, and stare down at them lovingly, watching the Barbie-pink plastic stripes reflect the tube lights on the ceiling as you turn your feet this way and that. But then at lunch, Ashleigh comes up, arm and arm with a friend. Her eyes are a little pink, but only a little.
“Ashleigh wanted me to tell you that she’s really hurt that you copied her sneakers,” the friend informs you, nobly, as if it would be too unpleasant for Ashleigh to have to say this herself. Her mouth is solemn but her eyes are gleeful.
“I didn’t…” You start to deny it automatically, even though it’s true. And yet, something won’t let you apologize. Doesn’t she see your imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment you know how to bestow? This is your Hail Mary.
As you meet her eyes, you realize she does know, but this only makes her despise you more.
“I think a lot of people have these sneakers,” you stammer, in the end, and they just sniff and turn away. You go back to eating your lunch alone.
Day 8 of the Middle School Time Loop: even though you do well in every class, you must be so much more stupid than your classmates, to be missing whatever detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before recess, before the end of homeroom, even, they all just know. You’ve had endless chances to do this day over and yet you never seem to be able to catch up with them. Running to stand still, you’ve heard your mother say, when she’s busy at work. That’s you. Running to stand still.
Day 9 of the Middle School Time Loop: you pretend to be sick again, and you realize that if you want to, you can pretend to be sick every day. It's easy to convince your parents: you look tired and unhappy, your eyes small within their dark circles, like some underground creature. You stop watching that TV Show that you never really wanted to watch in the first place, and instead dream your way through all your favourite childhood movies. Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. You retreat into jewel-colored landscapes, where everyone is magical or beautiful or at least funny, and the heroes always win in the end.
Day 10 of the Middle School Time Loop: You notice that most of the Pixar heroes, the Disney princesses look more like Ashleigh than you. Long hair. Pale eyes. Button noses. And all of them, so thin.
Day 11 of the Middle School Time Loop: you go to school, but you don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even answer your name at roll call. Your teacher asks you if anything is wrong at school, or at home perhaps. You shake your head, but that evening you hear your father taking a call. You shrug off his worry: it’ll be forgotten tomorrow anyway.
Day 12 of the Middle School Time Loop: an unexpected development: your apathy almost seems to make your classmates like you more. When you say, truthfully, that you don’t care much for the TV Show that eternally dominates the recess chatter, some people look impressed. They ask you what you think is better. But you’re wise and don’t admit to liking anything. "Mysterious," someone says appreciatively.
At the end of recess, the girl who told you off for copying Ashleigh nudges you. “Hey. Look, Robert has an Up shirt. Kind of cute, that he’s still into that stuff, right?”
You know that it’s not the good cute.
You stare at her coldly. “The shirt just has a dog on it. It doesn't say he's from Up. So you must have liked the movie enough to remember him.”
She flushes scarlet, and hurries to catch up with Ashleigh, throwing you a dirty look. Robert glances at you gratefully but you don’t return his smile. He won’t remember that you did this for him. Anyway, you didn't, really. Do it for him, that is.
Day 13 of the Middle School Time Loop: You tell your parents you’re sick again. Today, you watch the second tier of Studio Ghibli movies, the ones that your parents always say, self-consciously, that you’ll find dull. Only Yesterday, Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There. You’re only a few minutes into Marnie when there’s a line that pulls you up short:
“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle. There’s inside and outside. These people are inside. And I’m outside.”
The relief that washes over you is so profound that you almost cry, and then, when the movie's over, you do cry. Ugly sobs that make you sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the mall, that make your head pound with a dehydration headache. But behind the tears, there's relief. There it is, the truth that you were searching for, through all these do-overs. There’s an invisible magic circle. Of course there is.
But here’s the thing about circles: the inside is small. The outside is scary, and lonely, but it’s huge: huger than you could ever have imagined before you turned around and looked.
When your dad gets home, he asks if you’re feeling better. “Much,” you say, and it’s true.
Day ?? of the Middle School Time Loop: Sometimes you go to school, but ditch class and go to the library or the playground and do your own thing even if teachers yell at you. Sometimes you wander around the neighborhood. Sometimes you ask your parents crazy things, like to take you to work with them, or to the beach, or to DisneyWorld. Sometimes they say no. A surprising amount of times, they say yes. You wonder if maybe they’re trapped in a time loop too.
Sometimes you sit quietly in other classrooms than the one you’re meant to be in, until they shoo you out or even send you to the principal. (He finds you baffling. You feel a deep, slightly mournful affection for him, like you would for an very old and tired dog). It’s surprising, the amount of different things that are getting taught in one school in one day. It takes you a long time to work your way through them all.
You watch a frog getting dissected a few times before you start to feel bad and don’t go back to that classroom again. Your favorite class to crash is art, because the teacher always clocks that you’re not meant to be there but smiles and lets you stay anyway. When you meet her eyes, it feels like you’re sharing a secret.
Day One-Hundred And Something of the Middle School ...Wait.
At some point, time started moving again, and you didn’t even realize it.
For so long, the reprimands you received about your future seemed so empty, so laughable. There was no future. Only a more- or less-bearable present. But now, your classmates remember the unhinged things that you do; now, your teachers’ and parents’ worries about the future have the full juggernaut weight of reality behind them.
You thought that you’d be more terrified. For so long, you’ve dreaded this forward momentum. No loading screen, no mini-games, just one single, awful, pulsating life. But things are different now. Time’s moving again, and here you are, so far outside the invisible magic circle that you’re not even sure that you'd be able to see it any more. You can still feel its power, but faintly, like the pull between two magnets when they're an arm's length apart. Easy to ignore.
“Are you ready?” Robert says, catching your eye over the kitchen table. He comes here first thing so you can get the bus together. At some point, during the time loop, you started to seek him out. He was outside the circle, too, you realized. But even more importantly, not once, on any of those grimly looping days, did you see him try and push someone else out to make a space for himself. In this crab bucket, that’s something that counts for a lot.
“Our final day of middle school,” he sighs, half to himself. “Never thought I’d see it.”
"Me either," you reply, getting up to put on your talismanic pink sneakers. They’re scuffed and dirty after years of wear, and certainly Ashley would never be caught dead in them these days. Maybe that’s what you should have told her, all those loops ago: that no imitation, let alone one as unskilled as yours, can ever be perfect, and that indeed the very imperfection renders it an original work in its own right. Time and thought and human care transforms even the most diligent copy into something else entirely.
But you’ve been through enough time loops to know that that sort of explanation wouldn’t go over very well.
people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.
It's not just abstract things either, like where nobody experiences a DIRECT connection between work and reward.
I can work on a month-long crochet project, slowly seeing it take shape under my (cramping) hands, and when it's done, I feel roughly as accomplished as when I make a single mousie (which takes me half an hour and I can practically do in my sleep by now). I like having the RESULTS of my work, I wouldn't spend all that time crafting something I didn't want, but it doesn't feel like a "victory".
Addressing the issue of water pollution, the artists collected samples from 100 locations across Taiwan, first freezing the liquids and then preserving their creations in resin.
Had Padmé been 20-30 years older than anakin instead of 2-3 it wouldve fixed a significant portion of the franchise, including padmé's own chracterization
he whole "'woah we're doing something we shouldn't this is going to ruin both of our lives" doesn't ring true in the original movies cause they're just two beautiful young people doing what they're supposed to do in a story. the cliché kills the dramatic tension. give me a 45 year old woman ruining her career life and reputation because a dumbass 19year old monk is pathetically throwing himself at her feet THAT'll give the audience something to be anxious about. It's not something people expect to happen.
Would also explain why all the authority figures are like "Sure, lets put this notoriously disobedient and hotheaded beautiful youth as the sole escort of an equally beautiful young woman who's had the entire world on her shoulders from childhood. no prophecy twins will result from this". i could see obiwan allowing it because he can't deny anakin anything, but what about the rest of the jedi council??? What about padmé's own people? The choice of anakin as bodyguard looks like bad optics even if nothing actually happens. What about her reputation??? It would've been satisfying if they'd actually leaned into it instead of vague hints. Like padmé says its improper but nothing in the surrounding world actually makes it seem that way. The prequels at least didn't do a good job establishing the jedi as sexless and chaste. They just seem like cool hot guys with swords of COURSE they fuck.
but if she's 45, even if she's beautiful, a lifetime of dutiful service to the republic would make most people go "ah she would never sleep with a teenage monk, doesn't matter if he asks". Plus the general social standards of star wars being actually identical to those of our own society they'll probably be like "well what would a 19year old even want with a middle aged woman?" the thought wouldn't even occur. She'd be desexualized by virtue of her age so of course give her a hot young bodyguard no one (including the audience) is gonna see potential for impropriety
AND NOW WE COME TO ROTS. Its not impossible for a 45 year old woman ti get pregnant (average menopause is 50 i assume also in space until proven otherwise) but it is rarer, and it would make sense of anidala not to have been expecting it. It would also underline, again, that this pregnancy is a genuine threat to their lives and careers, because two young people in love secretly married having a baby is literally fine. its normal. the audience will forgive and even applaud even if the wider society in the movie doesn't. but a 45 year old senator with a secret baby?? that she's KEEPING?? like already in the original she shouldn't have kept the baby but the movie is christian and the audience too the vibe is "noo pregnancy is beautiful its luke and leia awww". We should be SCARED about the pregnancy.
And then, anakin having nightmares about padmé dying in childbirth are no longer obvious prophecies. like young padmé is healthy and rich, she'll have the best medical care theres no reason to think her pregnancy will have complications. It's actually kind of stupid and dismissive for people to say anakin's nightmares are nothing to worry about, especially considering he's had them before! but if padmé is pregnant at 45 the risk of complications is very high even with good medical care, and it would make sense for anakin to just have regular nightmares about it. The pregnancy is not a good thing! its a big risk they're taking in a lot of ways!
It also complicates the "unavoidable fate" thing they did in rots. Like in the original had anakin not tried to do everything to prevent padmé dying in childbirth she actually wouldve been fine. She died of grief while fully healthy which i think everyone can agree was fucking stupid. But if anakin's descent into the dark side, 100% ensured padmé dying (strangling a 45 year old woman who's already endured a huge amount of stress and throwing her to the ground? narratively speaking, either she's not making it or the baby isn't), i think it would be good if we weren't told with absolute certainty "had anakin stayed a jedi she wouldn't have died". It would be more compelling if we didn't know for sure!!
Plus it would make anakin's freakout so much easier to empathize with. Like sure its scary to think of your loved ones dying but the whole movie she's presented as obviously not at risk. Anakin worries but we don't. We should worry! Are we so much better than him? Wouldn't we also be desperate in his position? Or alternatively we refuse to sympathize with his decision to fall in love with a middle aged woman which is uncomfortable and leads us into much more complicated moral questioning than "become evil or stay good?". It would add drama either way!
And it would make both padmé and anakin so much more 3 dimensional as characters. Now they're making strange, emotionally driven and unexpected decisions instead of following the script for romantic lead 1 and 2. Padmé has actual depth and complications! She makes decisions we can't necessarily appove of, keeping the baby becomes a genuine decision with genuine cost instead of "duh, what else is she gonna do?" Her falling in love with anakin actually adds depth to her character and tells us something about who she is instead of turning her into a cliché. Replaying the trilogy in my head with older padmé instead of young padmé she immediately feels like a character with agency instead of a cardboard cutout of the ideal dead wife.
