Para on AO3 I usually go by Para. Ace, aro, trying to write about eight different things at once. Genuinely confused about what followers are looking for, I have neither consistency nor tags. Feel free to message me; if I am not feeling up to chatting I won't answer, if I am I will be happy to talk about almost anything that shows up here.
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
imagine if people actually took romantic consent seriously. wouldn't it be fucking awesome. i know they never will, but just. take a moment and imagine it with me
no more "just give them a chance, maybe you'll end up liking them!", no more "if you're going to reject someone, at least apologize to them!", no more shaming people for breaking up/divorcing, no more demonizing people for rejecting other peoples' romantic advances, no more shoving romance in romance repulsed peoples' face on purpose to provoke us, no more "i know we agreed to just be friends with benefits, but i thought you were going to fall in love with me eventually!", no more "i can fix them" when the only thing "wrong" with them is that they want to fuck without dating.
A friend I used to hang out with every week once confessed his feelings for me, which I didn't reciprocate. I wanted to stay friends, didn't see why we couldn't, we had been friends the whole time without any romance, why did that have to change? but he decided to stop hanging out with me.
I was heartbroken and felt tossed aside. I didn't understand why our friendship wasn't worth anything to him if he couldn't have me romantically or sexually. I felt betrayed and dehumanised, like I didn't matter to him as a person but only as a romantic prospect.
When I told other friends about it, to my surprise they all sided with him. "He is heartbroken, it's hard to get rejected" even my THERAPIST said this. It's not like I didn't empathize with him, but wasn't I rejected too? No one else could see that but me, they placed me as some sort of villain that had power over him in that situation, when all I did was set a boundary between friendship and romance. All I did was not consent to the terms he wanted for our relationship, I rejected them, my terms were different and he rejected those.
I've had my heart broken by friends over and over and it hurt the same, if not more, than any romantic heartbreak. Why is friendship undervalued next to romantic feelings?
To be honest, to this day I'm still pissed that no one sided with me on this. There's so much unraveling that needs to get done around how we view different relationships in our lives, and I feel like most people can't even scratch the surface when it comes to this questioning.
i desperately need people to stop avoiding what this post is actually about. stop derailing and trying to make it be about something else instead.
THIS POST IS ABOUT ROMANTIC CONSENT.
even if the person in question didn't want to fuck them, even if he just wanted a wholesome, purely romantic, nothing sexual at all relationship, it would STILL be fucked up to BLAME someone for rejecting that.
similarly, if someone really wanted to just fuck, but they were honest and clear about that, and handled rejection gracefully, there would be literally no issue with that.
when will you people understand what i thought i made incredibly fucking clear in the original post. the problem is not, and never was, the presence of potential sexual attraction. the problem is, and always has been, ignoring ROMANTIC CONSENT.
#people think that relationships are made of two parts#one part being ~Love~ (when it is Real it is perfect and pure and incapable of harm)#and Lust (dangerous and only ever potentially safe when tamed by a high amount of Real Love)#and thus they can only imagine that harm done in or relating to a relationship#is because of a lack of Real (romantic) Love + the presence of Lust#also i say relationship instead of just romantic relationship#because i dont think allo society is actually that good at distinguishing between types of relationships#they don't really see friendships between people who could potentially date as its own form of relationship#as much as a liminal space waiting room between being strangers and being romantic#anyways it's so fucking annoying how insistently people think that romance is only harmful because either#the person doesn't Really Love You or they ONLY want to fuck you (inherently a shallow thing to want as well!)#amatonormativity has such a grip people genuinely struggle to imagine that genuine feelings of romantic love#can be anything other than inherently good and beneficial#op you are NOT overreacting people just don't fucking understand what it's like being aroallo#and they don't give us nearly as much grace as we deserve when we get frustrated with this shit
keeping @genderkoolaid's tags because they are Important
you'll never believe. whose main blog that post was from. hi, it's me, tumblr user radioactive-yuri, formerly known as thermodynamic-comedian. this is my side blog. and a good few years ago, i made that very post on my main blog.
i have been fighting in these trenches. for YEARS.
As the fog returns this evening, it presents unique and compelling photographic opportunities. This image captures the 1877 Tall Ship Elissa re-entering Galveston Harbor. This is just another stunning view from the Galveston Ferry. 12/23/25 TXDot
I forgot to clarify that this excludes deanaming you if you've changed your name. I specifically meant the "brain offers the wrong word" kind of accidental name mix-up.
This was prompted by me and my boyfriend discussing handedness and being able to tell apart left and right. And me, being ambidextrous, was baffled by how do people with an obligate dominant hand mix up which side is the one with their Writing Hand and which one isn't?? And my boyfriend pointed out that I go "turn left - no I mean right" so much when giving directions that I have lost my navigator privileges.
I argued that mixing up the words isn't the same thing as mixing up the directions. Like if your mom accidentally called you the dog's name doesn't mean that she literally can't tell you apart from the dog. And he looked at me like this
Because evidently not only has this never happened to him, he has never heard of this being a thing. And he was so confident in this that I had to double-check that I'm not the only person this has ever happened to.
Hi! I’m not really sure how to phrase this, so let me know if you need me to clarify anything. A friend and I were talking about how with a good character, you can often understand their line of thinking even if you don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion they come to. My friend started talking about a sort of “input/output” way of thinking about it.
“which is what makes a good character, when you want to think about what information input leads to what output and the logic that informs how they react to things”
Then we were wondering… do you have any tips for practicing this sort of thing? I’m thinking it would be great to do an exercise where you’re given a list of inputs of some sort- events, things said by other characters, etc - and you write down a possible thought process, and the conclusion the character comes to.
Hopefully this makes sense! Please let me know if you know of any resources like this, and thank you in advance!
Okay, so I must admit to being completely perplexed at how your friend has phrased this, but the closest thing I can think of is Jack Bickham's concept of scene and sequel (written about in his book Scene and Structure).
Now, this concept has to do with plotting, but it really is about character, so bear with me for a moment. Bickham defines stories as being a series of scenes and sequels. A scene is a unit of conflict lived through by the character, and the sequel is the unit of transition between one scene and the next. To break it down further, scene is plot (action that is moving the story forward) and sequel is mostly story (emotional and logical reaction).
First, let's define a scene (according, again, to Bickham, who I think is onto something). A scene is build around three things: a goal, conflict, and disaster.
The goal is what your character wants. If your character wants to solve a murder, the goal of the scene is to find a clue to the identify of the murderer.
Conflict is the struggle to obtain that goal. Your character is mysteriously attacked from behind just as they were on the verge of recovering that clue.
Disaster is the complication that moves the plot forward. Your character is safe, but the clue has been stolen. Your character must now work harder to solve the mystery.
So far, so good. We could call this scene, we could call this plot, or we could call this input, but it is the exterior action that moves the novel along.
Sequel is the bridge between scenes where we learn about the character. It is all about your character and what they will do. It contains emotional response, thought, and a decision.
Emotion comes first because if we don't know how your character feels about the previous event, we can't relate to them. The bad guy has gotten away and the character despairs at solving the murder.
Next we'll have your characters think through their response. Your character promised his murdered best friend she'd never give up. If that friend was alive, they'd stop at nothing to solve the murder.
Last, your character makes a decision that leads into the next scene. Your character's worst enemy in high school volunteered to help, and no matter how much bad blood is between them, your character resolves to take them up on that offer.
The above sounds very clinical, but it isn't going to sound that way when you write it out. Note that a sequel also doesn't have to be actionless - if your character's emotional reaction is rage, having them throw their phone against a wall conveys that just fine. Having them rant their thoughts to a friend as they pace back and forth will also lead them to the decision, which will result in the next scene.
That's why I'm going to say sequel is the same as output - your character is reacting to, thinking about, and then acting on the scene/event, leading us the reader to understand their emotion and logic. Without that, the story falls flat. We do not have a reason to care about the plot if we do not know why we should care about the story.
As to how to practice this, that's easy - put your character in a Situation (scene/input), and then have them react (sequel/output). Try not to think about the checkpoints until after you are done writing, and then look at it with an editing eye. Is the goal/conflict/disaster clear? Can we understand the emotion the character is feeling? Does the logic of their thought process leading to a decision seem sound?
And just to be thorough, think of a part of a book or movie that didn't work for you. Maybe a character had a disastrous first date, frets about dying alone, and then cheerfully agrees to a second date - we have the emotion and the decision, but we're missing the thought process. Maybe a character stumbles into a fight with ninjas, but shrugs it off at the end. We've got the conflict, but the goal isn't clear (why is he fighting those ninjas?) and we have no disaster (this scene does not drive the plot forward or complicate it in any way). This is a common blockbuster movie problem because while it looks awesome, it doesn't mean anything.
I hope this breakdown helps! You are likely already writing this way, but this checklist can help you figure out why some scenes feel flat and how to fix them.
Spoilers for The Rowan, so if you're interested in reading The Tower and the Hive series without knowing things scroll on...
Despite being a universe that has a pretty good grasp on how to 'nurture' (ie control) telepathic potential, it's a major plot point that the main trainer of the FT&T's (Federated Telepaths and Teleporters) Primes (strongest level telepaths) manages to instil an agoraphobia so strong into her charges that they can't teleport/go into deep space. It's a fear so ingrained in this woman she psychically bullies it into those she trains without realising.
Which got me thinking: Pern dragons and between.
What if all the 'dragon memory stops them from having the ability to between to a specific place without a rider to provide coordinates' was partially the result of human bonding? Generations and generations of humans who believe that dragons can't do this, until there's no dragon left that thinks it's possible.
It could be entirely possible that bonding to a human who thinks they can't do it means they actually cannot do it, too. If anything said in universe about Nemorth and Jora can be believed, Jora's fear of heights was enough to stop Nemorth from flying as much (yeah, I know, canon doesn't really support this, but the canon around Jora is weird at best and incredibly stupid at worst).
I haven't really got firmer thoughts that this, and I doubt McCaffrey would have ever baked anything like it into Pern canon (there are plenty of other dark parts to the Federated Sentient Planets Universe, Pern is the most lighthearted corner of it), but sometimes a girl can think of ways to make already morally iffy situations even worse. Just as a treat.
i was legit filling someone in on the semi-canonical connections between the Rowan and Pern just yesterday!! (i.e. that lessa exhibits at least one Talent in early Dragonflight) (i didn't mention the Federated Planets shared universe thing bc i just forgot that's not common knowledge)
i think that's a really good and consistent take. i love the continuation of the logic there -- there are other parts of the Talents series that also use that logic of "if you only believe..." such as (if i'm remembering right) a subplot about machine gestalt in Pegasus in Space and the ending of that book.
watsonianly, would a change in human understanding change the abilities of dragons? ex. a followon from rediscovering flits, or AIVAS knowledge, humans then realize dragons can do this on their own, dragons start doing it on their own?
Yeah like I need you guys to understand that this is just how it works. Tho even the pool is shifting towards C. C is slowly winning temperature; and kg is slooooowly winning weight for even light things that are not your personal weight.
There is an additional confusion which is that if someone is older than 50 then they MAY measure even temperature outside as F. This will be deeply annoying.
I was rereading @domoz May the Gods Bless this Meal, and the description of Tobirama struck me, so I had to colour him.
And, Wow! I did not realize how different Tobirama and Hashirama's skin tones are until I started this colour-over.
He looks the furthest from blessed as someone could possibly be. His hair is sandy brown, his eyes a shade darker, and his skin is the same tan as Hashirama's. But there's plenty of him Madara can't see. Plenty of places a seal could be.
The eyes are a shade lighter, rather than darker, but I couldn't make myself lighten the hair enough.
My high school had I guess grown over the years, leading to the district building a second building and the school being split in half at the top and bottom respectively of a big enough hill that you were expected to take about fifteen minutes getting from one building to the other. Which the administration obviously preferred to avoid, since we only had 5 minutes between classes.
So functionally we had a school for 9th-10th grade, and a nearby school for 11th-12th grade. Which allowed the 10th graders to be the oldest grade in the building, and maybe contributed to the creation of an entirely unorganized phenomenon in which, during the first week of the school year, the 10th graders would, like, pick a 9th grader to claim as their personal 9th grader. Literally they would just say "that's my freshman" and "I haven't picked my freshman yet." And then they'd show their 9th grader around and give advice about how to deal with different teachers and whatever else, but like, while being weirdly possessive about it. Some of them Did Not Like It if any other 10th grader talked to their 9th grader.
There were also Rules, not all of which I picked up on due to them all being unspoken, but mostly you were supposed to pick a 9th grader you already knew, like a neighbor or a cousin or they went to your church or whatever. You didn't just pick a random 9th grader unless you actually didn't have any connection to any 9th graders at all.
I had made a bunch of friends during middle school cross country, none of which were in the same grade as me, so I had one friend who was a year ahead of me. Obvious choice! She picks me, we already hung out anyway, everything's good.
Except she did have a bunch of friends in her own grade, none of which knew anyone in mine. So for the first few weeks of 9th grade I had like five older girls arguing about who got to claim me and which of them I belonged to.
And then they never agreed so I just never got claimed picked by anyone and like, looked at a map to figure out where things were in the weird circleish building. Which was probably for the best, none of them could navigate to save their life.
Then the next year all the rest of my cross country friends arrived, and I had a pack of like six 9th graders following me around and absorbing all my advice, including my friend's younger sister.
Anyway that was almost 20 years ago but I just remembered it and.
1: hey wait my high school was fucking bizarre actually, what the fuck was that, how did hundreds of students collectively start staking claims on each other with absolutely no awareness on the teachers' part?
2: talk about a fanfic premise. Why didn't I post about this when high school AUs were at their height. But I should definitely put this on a sticky note somewhere in case I ever build some sort of fantasy magic dragonrider academy setting.
I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.
He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense
Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.
My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.
Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.
He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM
