Eleonore Birk

30, female, panromantic/asexual My works on ao3 My works on ffn

[theerraticace]

Please reblog if you think that “they/them/theirs” is a valid set of pronouns.

[possums-against-cops]

this post must be reblogged by everyone

[gayshitanddadjokes]

What the fuck is this??????????

Folks: you CANNOT censor trigger tags. When you block a tag, it doesn't block other "spellings" of it. Writing it as "r@pe" or "r4p3" means that someone who has "tw rape" as a blocked tag will still see that post because you didn't wanna say the word rape. You are hurting people. Do not censor words, because people do not have those filtered out.

And honestly if you can't even write the word rape to protect other people then you probably aren't old/mature enough to be on this website.

[themarchrabbit]

I've hated that "un-alive" filtering since it started. Because my pretentious ass read 1984 and Brave New World when I was 16. Words like "suicide", "rape", "death", etc, these shouldn't be censored. These are words that describe actions and states of being. They're fucking unpleasant words, but you know, life is sometimes fucking unpleasant. Hiding the word doesn't magically make the bad thing go away. It makes you afraid to talk about it. It makes it a forbidden subject. It locks people who need to talk about it in a closet, like a fucking wife who has an opinion in 1925.

Stop it. Use the correct word.

[fullbottles]

i think we as a culture leaned too hard on the sentiment of “if it’s not hurting anyone then it’s fine” so now people feel like if they want to complain about something they dislike they have to find or fabricate some reason why it’s actually hurting someone. the truth is you’re allowed to just dislike things and you’re allowed to say so as long as you’re not being a jerk about it

[pillow-princeps]

the problem with “you don’t owe anyone else anything” is that what I think people first meant when they said it was “don’t apologize for existing, you do not owe others for tolerating you being alive especially if they are cruel to you” but what everyone online took it as “if someone in your life ever asks you for anything ever you should kill them”

[strawberrydykke]

yes all my favorite characters are desperate to be loved. no i don’t think that says anything about me

[achillieus]

what a shame doctors don’t prescribe vacation to secluded seaside towns like they used to

[treetopview]

does anyone else kind of.. enjoy spoilers ?? like they’re sort of a relief because then I know whether or not something is worth investing in watching or reading or not

I’m not gonna be disappointed if it doesn’t turn out how I want plus I’m not going to fast forward and skip through large parts of it to find out what happens, which I’m embarrassed that I do I just don’t have the patience

Is that just a me thing or do other people do that too? Is that an adhd thing?

I just do way better watching things if I already know the entire synopsis and can predict kinda when things will happen like landmarks in a movie that help me through

Please tell me this is an actual thing and not just me

[bomberqueen17]

ok so recently i wanted to read a book to my niece, who just turned 7, that I thought she’d like. but it had some scary parts in it, that might be too much for her. she’s tough, but she’s sensitive too, like any kid her age.

so what did i do? I spoilered it. I said “hey this kid runs into some monsters that are gonna try to eat him, and then they chase him and it’s very suspenseful. You think that would be too scary?”

She considered it. “Do they eat him in the end?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Then no,” she said. And then, when we were about to hit the Big Reveal that this person who had helped him was secretly actually a man-eating monster, she lit up and was like “IS THIS WHEN IT HAPPENS” and I was like “SHH yes!” and she was like “AHH YEAH” and loved it.

I don’t think spoilers are just for kids, though. I’m now so Tired of conventional media’s endless race for The More Shocking Ending that I refuse to watch shit when I don’t know how it’s going to end. It’s not that I don’t have the emotional resilience to handle unexpected things (well, sometimes I don’t, honestly, and have no shame about that), it’s that if the unexpected thing is the “fuck you if you liked these characters ha ha ha!” plot twist, I just don’t have the time to invest in your fictional world. If you can’t respect me as an audience then I have other shit to do with my time.

Even my own writing– I dithered a bit in my latest series, which was going to hinge on a dead character being revealed to really be alive. I did my best to avoid spoilers as I was writing the thing, but now I’ve posted it and I figured, the thing to do is just to– tag it for the reveal. It’s not worth trying to be coy or people won’t know whether they want to read your shit.

[terrie01]

I stand by my view that if knowing the twist ruins your story, your story is poorly written. Like, I appreciate that some people love the thrill of discovery, and as such, I support making sure people don’t stumble over spoilers without warning. But I’m sick and tired of stories that go “Ha, ha, tricked you!” or confuse shock value with suspense. 

[event-x-horizon]

I’m also reminded of classic tragedies where the entire point is that the audience knows what happens, but the characters don’t, and there’s definitely a good amount of fun in frustratingly watching them careen towards doom, seeing all the signs, and not being able to do anything about it.

That’s also partly why picking up a piece of media you’ve already enjoyed again is so fun; seeing all the little hints the author peppers throughout the story you might not have picked up the first time gives you an entirely different, but still very much enjoyable, experience.

[thebibliosphere]

God, grant me the confidence of a white, straight cis man writing unhinged sex scenes so I can stop agonizing over this one paragraph and get it done.

[hasufin]

To all restaurants: you need an online presence OTHER THAN Facebook. Like, something people can access without any account or login at all.

Also, that online presence should just show your menu. Not a PDF download, simply your menu, directly, no need to start an online ordering process.

I remain amazed how many ways, in 2022, places can fuck this up.

[nerdsandthelike]

and the menu should include prices!!!

[bixbythemartian]

and the menu should include the fucking prices!

[bloodanddiscoballs]

also if I could add it is helpful to have an allergen menu very easily accessible as well. this one isn't as common but it sucks when some don't have them At All

[seymour-butz-stuff]

[sharkangelic]

The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters.  The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4

The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.

Sauron.

Isildur

Deagol

Sméagol

Bilbo

Frodo

Samwise

[kaispeakshermind]

I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds

[uberguber89]

He held it for the rest of of his life!

[animanightmate]

[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.

[elidyce]

From the ring’s perspective:

1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.

2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.

3. What the fuck is you?

4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.

5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.

6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop. 

7. FUCK

8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally. 

9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt* 

[kiwivee]

[liminal-zone]

I can viscerally feel that ‘FUCK!!!!!’ when Sam has it. This is ring cruelty.

[afrafemme-blog]

A friend and I were out with our kids when another family’s two-year-old came up. She began hugging my friend’s 18-month-old, following her around and smiling at her. My friend’s little girl looked like she wasn’t so sure she liked this, and at that moment the other little girl’s mom came up and got down on her little girl’s level to talk to her.

“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”

Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.

My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.

“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”

Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.

“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.

What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.

And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?

[luvlyhuman-deactivated20150629]

I try to do this every day I go to nursery and gosh it makes me so happy to see it done elsewhere.

[bebinn]

Yes, consent is nonsexual, too!

Not only that, but one of the reasons many child victims of sexual abuse don’t reach out is that they don’t have the understanding or words for what is happening to them, and why it isn’t okay. Teaching kids about consent helps them build better relationships and gives them the tools to seek help if they or a friend need our protection.

[geshertzarmeod]

Teaching Consent to Small Children

[lotesseflower]

I wish this post featured the OP’s name more prominently; it’s by Libby Anne of love joy feminism, and she writes fantastic stuff. A survivor of Christian patriarchal fundamentalism, she writes about parenting from the perspective of someone working through her own traumatic experiences. I love reading her blog.

[sylviasybil]

I met my nephew (codename Totoro) in person for the first time when he was eight months old. Before this, I’d known him only through video calling. A few hours after getting home from the airport, my sister (codename Mystery) was holding him on her hip. I asked her, “Can I hold him?”

She smiled and said, “Ask him.”

“What?”

“Hold out your hands to him and see if he leans toward you or away from you.” So I did, and he leaned away, and I dropped the subject. Five or ten minutes later, he was leaning towards me, overbalancing and almost falling out of Mystery’s arms, and she said, “He’s asking you to hold him now.” So I did, and it was magical, getting to introduce myself to my nephew and the firstborn of the Sybil family.

I am all about respecting children’s agencies and teaching good boundaries. I didn’t ask at the airport, when Totoro was surrounded by new stimuli and needed the reassurance of his mother. I didn’t ask when we first got back either; I gave him time to settle down, get used to his surroundings, and get used to me in person instead of a moving picture on a cell phone screen. I thought I was respecting his boundaries. But it had never occurred to me that an eight month old, who couldn’t speak or even understand most speech, might be able to establish his own boundaries.

A year later they came to visit again, when he was 19 or 20 months old. The weather was what we Northwesterners call “a bit nippy” and what thin-blooded Midwesterners like my sister call “fucking freezing, are you kidding me?” As we were getting ready to leave the house, Totoro objected vehemently to the need for pants and a coat. Finally Mystery had me stand by and hand her things as she near-literally wrestled him into his clothes. He was screaming and kicking and saying, “No pants, no no, don’t wanna, no Mama.”

And as she worked, Mystery kept talking to him soothingly. “I can hear you saying no, and I understand that you don’t want to wear your clothes, but it’s my job to keep you safe and warm. I know you’re saying no, I can hear that, but it’s very cold outside and I have to keep you safe and warm.” Over and over, reassuring him that she understood what she wanted and that she had a good reason for ignoring his wishes.

And it hit me all over again, an aspect of respecting children’s agencies and boundaries that had never once occurred to me. Because sometimes it is necessary to override their wishes. Part of being a good guardian is keeping them safe even when they want to play in traffic or eat nothing but candy. But I’d never thought about it from Totoro’s point of view, how frightening and how helpless it would feel to scream “no” into an unhearing void. Mystery made sure he knew he was being heard, he wasn’t being ignored, he was important enough to have people react to his words.

It’s just, geez. Every time I watch Mystery interact with Totoro I learn something new about agency and boundaries and just plain humanness. It blows me away.

[rivendellrose]

My mom was over, and saw me tickling my son as he laughed his head off. “Oh, I hated being tickled,” she said. 

“All done!” my son shrieked. 

“All done,” I confirmed, and stopped tickling. Then I looked at my mom. “Did people stop when you told them to?” 

“More tickling!” my son shouted. And so I tickled him again, while my mom had a little think about consent. Because sometimes it really is that goddamned easy.

[yesterdayiwrote]

I’m thinking today about Savita Halappanavar, an Indian dentist living in Ireland, who in 2012 suffered a partial miscarriage of her first pregnancy. Doctors refused to perform an abortion to expel the foetus as it still had a detectable heartbeat. She developed sepsis and died. She was 31.

About Agnieszka T, a Polish woman who was pregnant with twins. She miscarried one foetus but was refused an abortive procedure. 6 days later her second foetus died. She had to wait 2 further days to be given a termination. She died 3 weeks later of septic shock. She had a husband and 3 other children. She was 37.

About Izabela, a Polish woman whose foetus was found to have several abnormalities, but who was determined to carry to term. When her waters broke in the 22nd week of pregnancy she was told she had to wait until her foetus had no heartbeat before they could induce her or perform a c-section. She died leaving behind a husband and nine year old daughter. She was 30.

About Andrea Prudente, an American woman on a ‘babymoon’ in Malta where she suffered an incomplete miscarriage. Due to Malta’s complete ban on abortion, she was denied an abortion that would save her life. She asked her husband to punch her in the stomach as hard as he could to either induce labour or stop the foetal heartbeat. She was medically evacuated to Spain where they safely performed the procedure needed to end her pregnancy and save her life. This happened on Thursday.

Restrictive abortion bans harm anybody who can get pregnant. They harm planned pregnancies, as much as unplanned ones. They harm residents and non residents. If you’re reading what’s happening in America and thinking ‘Well at least it’s not my country’, sorry to say there’s every chance you could still end up affected one day. Abortion is basic healthcare, and basic healthcare is a basic human right. All these women were denied theirs, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. The last 3 all happened within the last year. Rather than these women being a sign of the past, instead they’re now very much a sign of what’s to come in America and that’s terrifying.

[yesterdayiwrote]

Y’know what, I’ve let it slide for a while, but if I get one more notification of someone tagging this with “Correction, it’s women actually” or something similar, I might actually scream.

Do you want to know what the 10 year old in Ohio case proved? That it’s not “just women”. It’s girls, it’s children, and yes, sorry terfs, it’s trans and non-binary folk too. It’s anyone who has the ability to get pregnant.

You might think you’re being clever, and you’re somehow owning the trans and non-binary community by excluding them, but what you’re actually doing is reducing how far reaching this harm is. 10 year old girls are not women, and people trying to treat them as such is part of the problem.

[fozmeadows]

there are many, many things that drive me insane about the pro-life crowd - all of the above included. but something I think bears mentioning in addition is their absolute refusal to play by their own rules. 

specifically: if you believe,100% truly and really believe, that a fetus at any stage of development is a person, and if, at the same time, you can acknowledge that a specific pregnancy, due to whatever heartbreaking set of circumstances, is 100% going to kill the person who’s pregnant unless an abortion happens - and that’s far from being a hypothetical scenario; it is, in fact, a very real one, especially in the case of ectopic pregnancies - logically, by your own argument, it should be morally impossible for you to decide which one of them gets to live. it’s a literal trolley problem: pull the lever to save one person, or do nothing and watch the other die? if both those lives are of equal weight, then morally, there’s no correct answer. saving the baby is not more “right” than saving the pregnant person, because your founding logical principle is their equal humanity. if both count the same, then whatever moral judgement might apply to abortion applies equally to letting the pregnant person die. it’s just a horrible, impossible choice a person or a family has to make, and in which outsiders should have no logical say.    

but pro lifers don’t want to acknowledge the trolley problem, even when it’s one entirely of their own creation. they want things to be clear-cut. simple. absolutely without exception. and so they put their thumb on the scales, inflating the value of the fetus by ascribing it Moral Innocence. “the adult should die for the baby, because the baby is Innocent and the adult is Sinful and Imperfect” is not a thing they’ll usually come out and say in so many words, but they’ll yell and scream and shout about the Innocence of the Unborn as though it’s a trump card; as though the fact that the pregnant person whose life they’re willing to sacrifice is fundamentally unworthy in comparison goes without saying, even when that person is a terrified child whose pregnancy is the product of rape. because they absolutely cannot admit to the existence of any situation or context where the pregnant person’s life matters more than fetal innocence, because doing so would reveal the fact that their entire ideology is based, not on protecting innocent lives, but on control. 

because when it comes to scenarios like the one I’ve described? very often, the pregnancies in question are not viable. ectopic pregnancies are not viable. a partial miscarriage isn’t viable. a near-term baby that’s died in utero and is slowly poisoning its parent with fetal mirror syndrome is not viable. a fetus with anencephaly is not viable. no scenario exists in which these pregnancies come to term and produce a living child, and yet pro-lifers will cling to the idea of Innocence to explain why, even though the “baby” they’re protecting can not and will never be born - might even already be dead, in fact - their Innocence still takes precedence over the real human life of the person carrying them. that’s not a trolley problem; that’s having to choose between accepting that one person is already dead and killing a second person, and choosing, in defiance of all logic, to kill the second person.

at nine weeks pregnant, the embryo is so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. the tissue removed during abortions or miscarriages at this level of gestation is so small, you can fit a five week, six week, seven week, eight week and nine week gestational sac in the same petri dish and still have room left over. THAT’S how small we’re talking. recently, a republican politician claimed - incorrectly - that fetuses begin to feel pain at 15 weeks; according to the american college of obstetricians and gynecologists, however, a fetus cannot feel pain until around 27 weeks. now, personally, I’m inclined to trust the ACOG on this one - but EVEN IF they were wrong, that 15 week mark is still five weeks after the point at which, even according to pro-lifers, 80% of abortions take place: namely, at 10 weeks or earlier. and even if an ability to feel pain was the deciding factor here - why? the pregnant person feels pain, too, and let me tell you, speaking from personal experience: giving birth HURTS, and that’s before you factor in the potentially lifelong health complications that can come from it. so, what - it’s morally wrong to inflict momentary pain on a fetus too underdeveloped to even be aware of its own existence, but morally correct to inflict, at absolute minimum, HOURS of excruciating pain on a fully sentient pregnant person? how does that make sense?

but what about that other 20% of abortions, I hear you cry! the ones that happen after the 10 week mark? if any of this data has swayed you to think that early abortion is maybe okay, but the whole thing has to be restricted because of those later examples, I need you to to consider two important things. 

thing the first: free and easy access to abortion is pivotal to enabling early abortion. if you restrict abortion to only a handful of clinics - if you make it hard to access - then the limited number of appointments available and the distance many people will have to travel to reach them means that, even if someone decides to terminate at the early-as-possible 5-week mark, they’ll be forced to wait. if you think early abortion is fine, late abortion bad? then you need to make abortion easy to access, or you’ll always end up getting more of the latter than the former.

thing the second: remember that thing we discussed above, about pregnancies going wrong? yeah. even more than lack of access, that’s the reason for the vast majority of abortions happening later: because the pregnancy is a wanted one, but something bad happens. maybe the person has a partial miscarriage and needs a D&C at twenty weeks - aka, an abortion - to prevent sepsis from setting in. (this is what would’ve saved savita halappanavar.) maybe the excited parents find out their baby is died in utero at six months along, and they need to perform a D&C - aka, an abortion - to remove the body. (in a pre roe v wade america, actress debbie reynolds - yes, THAT debbie reynolds, mother of carrie fisher - was horrifically made to carry a dead baby to term. the poisoning from it almost killed her, and did so much damage to her body that she miscarried her subsequent pregnancy, too.) maybe the doctors do a scan and discover the baby is missing part of its brain or skull - aka, anencephaly - and can’t survive outside the womb. maybe one of a dozen, a hundred other tragedies. 

but you, pro-lifer: you will stand before this person already facing an unimaginable loss, and you will call them a murderer. because magical, beautiful, unborn Innocence is somehow more important than a real, autonomous, living, breathing human. because deep down, the appeal to innocence is a smokescreen. what you REALLY want is to control women’s bodies (and the bodies of people you think are women, even when they’re children or nonbinary or trans men) by locking them into parenthood and taking away their autonomy.    

[idril-fay]

Gargoyles 20th Aniversary

Today has been the 20th Anniversary of the Disney TV show, Gargoyles.

Anyone who knows me, knows that Gargoyles is my all time favorite show, now and forever.  

And there are many reasons for this. It has amazing storytelling, with rich characters with wonderful dimensions! Hell, the main villain gets married and has a kid! How often do you see that!

The show also has amazing literature (tons of Shakespeare), mythology, legends, and folklore references from all over the world. There is the Gargoyles themselves, and there are robots, secret societies, Faeries (some of whom are shown to be the ‘gods’ from different pantheons), Genetic Mutants, ‘Monsters’, Cyborgs, Aliens, Gangster Mob Bosses, Tricksters, ghosts, and everything in between.

It also promotes reading, and got me into Shakespeare.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflecting all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected in the dark sea of time.

-Jeffrey Robbins, Gargoyles

And has a kickass Female heroine, who is half African American, half Native American, a Lady Cop (Detective), and all badass. Elisa Maza!

However, the main reason I love this show, was because it gave me hope when I was all alone. When I was a little 11year old girl in 6th grade, the youngest in my year, I was bullied and tormented relentlessly. I had only two friends in the whole world, and at that point in time, they were just as likely to either bully me, or allow others to do so, or just to leave me all alone to go and play with the ones to bullied me. I was a little girl with ADHD, and mild as of then still undiagnosed Asperger’s. I danced and skipped down the hallways, and believed in fairies. I walked through the crowded halls full of kids trying to trip me, or slam into me, and learned to dodge. I was different from the other kids, in many, many ways, and they knew it. I’m still afraid of being near people playing Basket Ball, because of all the times they were aimed at my head.

Ironically, the faculty of my elementary school all loved me. I had wonderful teachers, and they did try their best to protect me. But it wasn’t’ enough. The principal of my elementary school even took a whole week, to sit down and talk with every child in my grade individually (106 kids), to get to the bottom of the horrible bullying. I appreciated their efforts, but nothing really changed. I was so, utterly alone then. Alone in ways I’ve never quite experienced since, thought I have come close. I had depression, and my stomach hurt, and my hands shook, and my head ached. I was able to get the nurse to send me home many times, (like I said the faculty all loved me). I was a pariah and outcast. And I was a little girl, who was 11 years old, who wanted to die. I never tried anything, but I wondered if any of the kids would care, or be sorry.

But Gargoyles, a show where the protagonists are good people who are shunned, ostracized, and feared for looking and being different, gave me hope. I knew how the Gargoyles felt, I knew what it was to be alone, like Demona,

and to search for kindred spirits like Lexington.

“We can’t hide from the whole world up here. There are kindred spirits out there for us, but we’ve got to look for them and got to give them chance. Or else we will always be alone!” - Lexington

And I saw Goliath, who lost so much, and was treated so poorly by the humans he had protected, and he forgave, and kept going, and he, HE had Hope. And, he gave me hope in turn.

“We can’t hide from the world, we must live in it. We must search for allies, kindred spirits. And sometimes we must take chances like we did tonight. To do otherwise, is to remain forever alone.” - Goliath

Gargoyles Protect. that Is what they do.

A Gargoyle can no more stop protecting the castle than breathing the air.

And they saved me.

My Dad saw this, and he took me to The Gathering of the Gargoyles, the fan convention. 10 years ago, on the 10th Anniversary of the Show. I met Greg Weisman, the creator of the show, and he was so kind. I was more comfortable in my skin at the Gathering than I’d been in a long time. Everyone there was so nice, and welcoming to this silly little girl. I met some of  the amazing actors, like Keith David who voiced Goliath, and Thom Adcox who voiced Lexington. And I met these other amazing fans. And Greg and CrazyDemona cast me as Elisa in the Radio Play. I felt like I was worth something again.

Gargoyles is why I’m majoring in film. Because someday, I want to be like Greg Weisman, and create a story that can help and inspired others, the way that Gargoyles helped me.

So Thank you Gargoyles. Thankyou Greg Weisman.

Thankyou to everyone who made this show possible.

And I also want to thank all of those wonderful fellow Gargoyle fans that I met at the Gatherings, who made a depressed little girl feel so welcome.

[self-absorbed-pretty-boy]

it's so bitter to watch how many people are only now realising that the censorship of "morally bad" things will never stop at just the things they personally find repulsive. the problem with morals is that they're not a fixed norm that everyone agrees on and that they're a very easy argument to be used by bigots against marginalised groups. that's why it's dangerous to call for censorship on moral grounds - whose morals exactly?

all you people campaigning for a boycott of ao3, wanting them to censor "bad" content, i am begging you to wake the fuck up and understand that for many people "bad" things include queer people's existence, any form of sexual content, minority-representation and criticism of the government.

don't open the door for them.

[wellhalesbells]

Fanfiction isn’t written for you, it’s shared with you.

[captainarwenpond221b-deactivate]

BLESS THIS POST

[theartofforensics-deactivated20]

[words to read and write by]

[octopuscato]

Everyone needs to remember this - writers as well. It’s okay to just write whatever you actually like and not write what people want you to.

[home-and-having-tea]

You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.

[quecksilvereyes]

there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore

[theropoda]

children eleven thousand years ago enjoyed jumping around in puddles made from the footprints of a giant sloth. children loved muddy puddles so long ago there were still megafauna alive

[captainlordauditor]

There’s a record of an emperor of Japan in the 9th century talking about his cat - how pretty it is, and how it stalks birds and curls up in a circle and meows mournfully for company and escaped its collar. All completely normal ordinary cat things. And then it ends with him saying “it is superior to all other cats”. I am delighted to be united across 1200 years with this fellow cat owner with exactly the same feelings about his cat that I have about mine.

[three--rings]

Because I just read a few AO3 censorship related posts in a row…

I’m not sure antis and people who want to remove certain things from AO3, like any content with anyone under 18, understand WHY those of us who are Of A Certain Age, aka the people who created AO3, fight so hard on this stuff.

Like I don’t think they understand that we have LITERALLY SEEN THIS BEFORE.  People spoke up before about “child porn” aka anything involving any character under 18, or even stuff with aged up characters like an adult Harry Potter, but people assume Harry Potter is always 12 or whatever. 

And when those complaints were made ALL adult content was wiped.  FFN suddenly wouldn’t host ANY explicit fics.  No matter how healthy, how fluffy, how consensual and adult and whatever.  Just Nope.  Things were wiped from existence.  LJ randomly wiped entire blogs for being reported, banned users based on the say of Conservative Christians who shouted pedophile at the gays.

What happens when people try to remove objectionable material is that it ends with having no home for ANY explicit material.  It’s happened again on social media under SESTA and FOSTA in the name of preventing sex trafficking.  In the name of keeping smut out of the Apple store. 

Archive of Our Own was founded to be a home for content that wouldn’t be hosted elsewhere.  Where you could put something and not fear its deletion the first time someone happened upon it and reported you for whatever reason.  Where no one is going to judge whether your fic meets some subjective standard of purity, so long as it’s tagged appropriately and is legal content in the US (which all written fiction is.)

We watched so many communities destroyed, websites erased, content lost and then a new generation comes along and is like “hey let’s do this again” and we’re like NO WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU INSANE?

They’re never going to accept your gay porn about other people’s fictional characters just because you got rid of that “icky” stuff you don’t like.  You’ll still be a freak for it.  You cannot respectability politics your way out of your shame and embarrassment at being associated with something others see as dirty.  You’re going to have to grow up and just accept it.