GreatWyrmGab

Trying to be less terminally online. Failing. Trying to figure out my gender. That's going better. Trial pronouns: She/her

[cryptotheism]

Theres also 2 hour video essay analyzing Snape wives as a new religious movement that draws on the history of Christian mysticism, midrashs, and idea of what unifies religion as a concept. Why do you think Harry Potter fanfic has lead to so many movements like them and the Zizians?

Harry potter fanfiction itself didn't lead to anything. If Harry potter wasn't around, these groups would use some other popular media property. They wrapped these things in Harry Potter aesthetics because for nearly a decade it was one of the most popular pieces of media on earth. I also generally don't like to focus on whatever pop-culture thing is wrapped around these groups. It distracts from more meaningful discussion. It also leads to people comparing Snapewives and Zizians in ways that are not necessarily useful or material.

[cryptotheism]

A lot of people cover groups like these from the angle of internet anthropology, or public interest journalism. This isn't inherently bad, people have done it well, but inarticulate discussion can lend itself to sneering internet freak-show behavior. Or more commonly, relegating the topic to an incurious fun fact.

[pirateprincessjess]

Friendly reminder as we get closer to the launch of the ModRetro M64. ModRetro is owned by Palmer Lucky, a self described “Radical Zionist” who fundraises for Donald Trump.

Palmer Lucky also has another company, called Anduril Industries, that manufactures and sells AI powered weapons and surveillance systems. ModRetro even sells Anduril branded gameboys that were made from the same metal that they use to manufacture attack drones.

Don’t buy this thing. A 200 dollar Nintendo 64 clone is not worth your soul.

[pirateprincessjess]

The reason I’m bringing this up now is because there seems to be a new marketing push happening for this device. It’s all over my feed on TT and IG right now.

They seem to be pushing the fact that there are new Nintendo64 games being made for the M64. This is very misleading because any game that runs on the M64 will run on a real Nintendo 64.

There’s also been new games coming out for the Nintendo 64 for years. ModRetro didn’t make this happen. They’re just publishing a few games. The Nintendo 64 Homebrew scene has been thriving on its own.

[dilemmaart]

Day 23 . Leafy Sea Dragon 💚💛🧡

more on Patreon 🫶

RedBubble | Patreon | LinkTree

[catboybiologist]

After some years of HRT I've been left with this deep, low simmering rage. Because what do you mean it was always this easy to be happy

[catboybiologist]

I take a shot once a week, and even if that was too much, I could do it as pills, and so many of my problems just evaporated overnight.

And not one person thought to bring it up.

When I was talking about how horrifying puberty felt. When I was cutting myself. When I was in inpatient care. When I attempted suicide. When I talked for YEARS in therapy about how dissociated and trapped I felt in my body. When I felt like I never truly fixed something that was deeply wrong about me that started at puberty.

Not one person said it was a possibility. No one thought "hey, maybe this kid should go to someone trained to identify dysphoria". No one mentioned that trans people weren't some weird other group of people. It didn't have to be pressure. It didn't have to be "forcing" me. Just mentioning that trans people exist and it could be me. That it was possible and it was easy. No pushing, just laying the option out there.

HRT is treated like this last ditch option. This horrific, mutilating thing that I GUESS we can give to you if you have NO OTHER options. Because did you know it's permanent? Did you know you'll be on it for the rest of your life? Did you know the health risks? Did you know it'll make you infertile? Did you know that it's deviant? Did you know that it's an alternative lifestyle for other people?

No one said it was okay to WANT it to be permanent. Or noted that most people are reliant on the medical system in one way or the other anyways (and it's not even necessary for HRT). Or that the health risks are the normal parts of having that hormone, even in cis people of your gender. Or said it was okay to not want kids, or mention that you can just freeze gametes. Or acknowledged that the "deviant" people are just people, living their lives, that have been violently pushed out of "normal" society.

I grew up in an area that Republicans mock for being a kind of "woke central". And even then it's just. Not treated as an easy option. It was never on the table if you don't specifically already know you're going through gender stuff, and no one will help you get to that point. At which point, it's still treated like the last ditch option. Did you know you can be a feminine man? Did you know you can slap a "she/her" in your twitter bio and be done with it? Did you know that you're oh-so-valid without it? Did you know that you shouldn't take HRT? Maybe don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't ta-

When you've been in it a while, HRT is the easiest, most casual thing in the world. Just pop a shot on a Saturday as part of your "everything shower" routine and you're done.

Anyways. Support trans kids always and forever.

[catboybiologist]

And if anyone comes swinging in here with "but Sierra you don't have to take HRT to be trans this is toxic" I'm going to fucking scream, because that is the status quo. "Just do this without doing this" has become a "give them an inch" refrain when making ourselves "acceptable" to the cis. Of COURSE you don't need to take HRT. I'm only reminded of it a dozen times a day.

[tamabula-rasa]

​

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to multiple porn bots catfishing using the same stolen pictures of the same trans woman on the same page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags. note that despite neither the image nor video in the posts in this screenshot being marked as mature content, this screenshot of them is going to mark this post as mature content as soon as I post it

here's some of the lovely messages of positivity you can expect to get if you're a transfem on this platform! I cropped the real-life gore images out of the first one, the person in the second one has made multiple posts like this + pedojacketed me and still has that same account and does that same shit, and the the person in the third took weeks for tumblr to do anything about, because:

here's tumblr staff stating that making explicit death threats towards transfems is not a violation of the ToS or user guidelines!

and here they are stating it again! and while we're on the subject of who the user guidelines apply to:

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a year-old post with 15,000 notes being flagged as sexually explicit (over 100 times in case you thought it was maybe a fluke) despite the image in the post not actually showing anything, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a heated rivalry gifset showing two fully nude dudes fucking center frame getting flagged as sexually explicit, which it is according to tumblr's definition, but despite that it has tens of thousands of notes and in fact is so popular and shared that if you look over to the third image you can see that same gif as one of the trending tag thumbnails! and on that note:

here's an episode of an anime available on youtube with a TV-14 age rating that I posted a screenshot of that got flagged as sexually explicit, had the appeal denied twice, got fully nuked off the site, and then got my entire blog marked as mature for posting!

and here's that same already-marked-as-mature blog curiously being marked as mature a second time out of the blue 15 minutes before they dropped the age verification update that would hide mature content!

and here's my first blog of 13 years getting a SPECIAL type of mature flag that marks all of my posts as mature content individually and separately from the actual mature content label!

you don't get to appeal these terminations btw! they automatically and instantly deny your appeal and send you the rejection before you even get the email telling you they got the appeal and will carefully review it

not that appealing will do anything anyways! here's tumblr staff terminating me for explicit content when I appealed the explicit flag on a post that they accepted the appeal on after terminating me for it,

and here's tumblr staff denying my appeal on that termination, lying about why i was terminated, terminating my already-and-still-terminated blog a second time to change the termination reason to one i can't appeal, which they then upgraded from an account deactivation into a postmortem full account nuke! isn't that wild?

here's them doing it to me a second time

and here's tumblr staff terminating me FIVE TIMES in multiple weeks it took them to do anything about a burner blog and a post pedojacketing me and encouraging people to harass me forever over completely fabricated claims that everyone spreading it around admitted were false on the post itself by the way! note also how only the burner blog got deleted - but the main account? just a post removal. after weeks of it being reported and spread around. the fastest of my terminations during this period was three hours after making the account by the way!

which isn't an isolated occurrence, either! they'll pass over multiple open, avowed nazis posting swastikas and slur-filled nazi race science shit about how they think black people are biologically inferior subhumans for months on end to nuke some random transfem off the site in as little as 10 minutes after account creation, then take MULTIPLE MONTHS to respond to your report of someone sending you harassment messages to tell you that the content you reported has already been removed (because it's an ask in the inbox of an account they already terminated along with four others in the time it took them to respond)!

And to really send a clear message about where they stand, they've REALLY ramped up the termination of transfems since the start of pride! And everybody will act like you deserve it and are a subhuman unworthy of life if you don't openly support the multiple ongoing harassment campaigns against transfems, all enabled and quietly endorsed by tumblr staff and moderation!

*except transfems

[missstrogen]

@staff stop terming my friends. Why are you letting nazis thrive and terminating trans girls fifty times in a row

[crotchapplin]

They reinstated Pjackk, a blog that's been abandoned for over a year before getting terminated, but none of the trans women who were termed for posting selfies and talking about their days

[missstrogen]

damn happy pride huh

[missstrogen]

reminder that staff never answered my messages regarding my original termination with nothing but automated boilerplate stuff until they blocked me from appealing.

Staff doesn't want trans women

[misellapuella]

Mermaid who doesn't know mermay is over hehe (my oc Elmoira as a pastel mermaid)

[dixiebu]

don't touch

[demilypyro]

I ain't performing squat, buddy

[too-lazy-to-make-a-username]

gender is a performance only for the novices.. once you fully mastered gender, it is no longer a performance, whatever you do becomes what your gender does

[slunch]

ban pjackk again

[captain-price-returns]

my like 60 percent confident take from the start of all this is that the strait is not ever opening back up so long as Trump is in the chair. even if he could be trusted to stick to a deal (he can't) he'd straight up forget about it 3 hours later

Trump has betrayed Iran over and over and over again for going a decade now, and capped it off with a Pearl Harbor style sneak attack that massacred most of the current leader's family and then a triple tap strike on a girls' elementary school all while being unable to even articulate a consistent set of demands

Doing a deal requires him to be conciliatory toward Iran, which he can't do because he can't tolerate looking weak so he's stuck. Took 80 years but he finally met a consequence of his actions he can't bullshit his way out of.

[zoriezoriezorie]

I love Pomni from The Amazing Digital Circus. I also love Asa Mitaka from Chainsaw Man.

I couldn't decide which one I wanted to draw first. So I fused them.

[cinemamind]

Killer Klowns From Outer Space✨💫

[richardom]

poulpe à l'encre..

[3liza]

why is pjackk back unbanned?

Post by @3liza · 1 image

💬 1  🔁 0  ❤️ 60 · reference post about the "phantom report bug" · this post is not rebloggable because i need to be able to update it and ed

^^^ i spent all night and yesterday compiling information about a "phantom report bug", where people are getting emails from tumblr support about TOS reports they did not file. pjackk was banned off one of these phantom reports, i told tumblr support about it, and now he's unbanned. i think @garaks-padded-bra was also banned erroneously off a phantom report, so hopefully that will get reversed soon as well

PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL FOR PHANTOM REPORT EMAILS. if you spot any, even if theyre old, tell me about them so i can add them to the list (linked above), and report them to tumblr support. POLITELY. tumblr support wants to fix this.

[doyoulikethischaracterdesign]

Raqio from Gnosia

"Their design was one of the biggest things that drew me to Gnosia… Their outfit is kind of a mess but somehow they make it work so well"

Do you like this character design?

Yes

No

It's Complicated

Remaining time: 6 days 18 hours

[koyomism]

Aqua and Akane’s relationship is another example of the series trying to convey how lies are love and can become truths, in a very literal sense I might add. Their relationship starts purely for work purposes, but once Aqua believes he is free of his revenge, he stops seeing Akane as a tool and begins to see her for who she truly is, someone he wishes to love. He starts doing everything he can to be a good, genuine boyfriend to her, even though he’s still battling against his own feelings on his identity, if it’s really okay to let go of his revenge, and what he wants to do with his future. What he does know for sure is that he wants Akane to be in that future regardless of what path he ultimately takes. Their fake relationship became the thing grounding Aqua to his identity and reassured him it was okay to live a normal life, Akane’s devotion to him giving him to the opportunity to experience actual love. Though things don’t work out that way, this is what their dynamic was leading towards before everything hit the fan.

(This whole interpretation is another reason I’m very against shipping him with Kana)

People often bring up Akane’s monologue about Aqua being attracted to Kana, but I feel this is very clearly just Akane’s insecurity and inferiority complex (especially in regards to Kana) shining through. I still have yet to see any example of Aqua’s own character hinting at seeing Kana that way, at most he saw her as a potential second option when he wanted to distance himself from Akane, but I cannot see a universe where he would pick Kana over Akane, the only one who actually understood him and spent the entire story doing everything in her power to save him, the force that came the closest the completely freeing him from his guilt and revenge.

If you interpret Kana and Aqua’s “romance” as anything other than one sided admiration from Kana, then I honestly think you misread their dynamic

Kana fell in love with Aqua because he was the first person to “beat” her in acting, and thus she developed a strong sense of admiration for him in the same sense that she would a rival.

Kana’s feelings are notoriously unreliable too. She falls in love with anybody who sees her for who she is and “saves” her, like how she started developing feelings for who she thought was Peiyon just because he gave her advice and helped her out. Kana is an extremely insecure person who’s secret wish is to have someone to rely on, so anyone who fills that role for her becomes a romantic option. She didn’t love Aqua for who he is, she couldn’t possibly because she never came to truly understand him. She was in love with how he treated her and the fact he was someone who would always come through for her.

Her attraction to him was very clearly just another way she was clinging to her past and refusing to move on. Being with Aqua would have meant continuously holding on to that part of her history, and it was also just validate her feelings that she needed a savior and someone to protect her. If anything, losing Aqua was the best thing that could have happened for her growth overall ||, because it meant she HAD to stand on her own two feet and she could no longer count on him to save her at every opportunity, she couldn’t cling to the idea of him or meeting him again like she did previously, || she had to accept he was gone and couldn’t save her anymore, and has to learn to save herself.

[aihoshiino]

(guy whose reply became so long it had to be a reblog again voice) you're never gonna guess what happened again

I see a lot of takes of this vein in which Kana's feelings for Aqua are downplayed or dismissed as her not "really" being in love with Aqua in comparison to [insert the other half of the writer's pet ship here] but I've never really seen a critique of this nature ever really able to articulate in what ways Kana's feelings are invalid or illegitimate or somehow unworthy of being taken seriously as "real" love - or even really to articulate what "real" love is, in comparison to Kana's. Maybe this is just me talking out of my aromantic ass, but when you start to get into "well it's not really love because of [reasons that are literally just a person having an insecure attachment style]" territory you start to get into a weird sort of relationship essentialism that I find offputting on a personal level and also just... less interesting as a perspective to take when analyzing a fictional character?

And to be clear, I do think some of what's been said here is correct: Kana is an insecure person who deeply desires having someone to rely on because her formative relationships were abusive and unstable and she has literally never had anybody she can absolutely rely on except herself. She falls for Aqua because he's one of the few people who has consistently and repeatedly extended a hand to her and gone out of his way to be in her corner. That's absolutely true! But where I can't agree with OP's analysis is that this is somehow an invalid reason to love someone. Why wouldn't "I fell in love with you because you are always there for me when no one else is" be a valid reason to love someone? Is that not more or less why Aqua falls for Akane - because she is consistently in his corner and providing him a kind of support that other people aren't in a position to give him?

This obviously isn't to say that there aren't reasons to criticize how Akasaka as the author wrote Aqua and Kana's relationship, but in the context of the story as presented we are being asked to treat Kana's feelings as genuine and earnest. They are presented as being distinctly different to say, Ruby's feelings, the character we are explicitly told is infatuated more with something she is projecting onto Aqua than she is meaningfully in love with the person who actually exists in front of her. By contrast, Kana's feelings are shown as coming from a real place, even if that place is an insecurity or need to be validated and protected - I think it's fine to just personally not find that engaging or have preferences for other kinds of dynamics but I think it's a different thing entirely to argue that the text itself frames her feelings as less legitimate than other characters' because I really, really don't think it does.

More broadly, what is the standard we are setting for "real" love in discussions of this nature? That you can only be in love with someone you completely understand? Is love is achieving 100% total mental sync with your partner so that you may comprehend the totality of their being and be comprehended in turn? Does love always need to be something huge and dramatic and self-annihilating to be validated as genuine?

Idk. In general, I feel like this insistence on delineating "real" love from "unreal" love in the wider fandom (and using that as a measuring stick to judge the validity of characters' feelings and the merits of their relationships) ends up tripping and falling into the Amatonormativity Hole, insomuch as it presents 'true' romantic love as being some self-evidently Morally Good And Pure thing, rather than a complex human emotion that can exist alongside a host of other not-so-pure impulses like neediness or selfishness or insecurity or co-dependence. For instance, I've seen some people try and insist that Kamiki didn't "really" love Ai because he was willing to hurt or even kill her, but this of course completely ignores that people can and do commit acts of horrific violence against people they sincerely, desperately love. This is a huge part of what makes abuse cycles so hard to break; the abused party often knows their abuser does love them even as they hurt them, which is precisely why they stay. "Love" is a morally neutral state of being.

But in fandom these complexities get ironed out or just pushed off the table altogether, and as an aromantic person who already has to navigate this kind of cultural baggage about what love is 'supposed' to be all the time, I can't help but find the whole exercise kind of wearying.

[greatwyrmgold]

More broadly, what is the standard we are setting for "real" love in discussions of this nature? That you can only be in love with someone you completely understand? Is love is achieving 100% total mental sync with your partner so that you may comprehend the totality of their being and be comprehended in turn? Does love always need to be something huge and dramatic and self-annihilating to be validated as genuine?

In Oshi no Ko of all narratives?? I don't think there's a single relationship which meets those standards. No one understands each other. No one even understands themselves.

The most unambiguously loving relationship in the series (Ai and the twins) is characterized on one side by kids actively concealing their nature from basically everyone (except arguably Miyako), and on the other side by Ai not even being sure she loves her children until her last moments.

If I wanted to, I could characterize Ai's love as similarly insincere and "unreliable". She didn’t love Aqua and Ruby for who they are; she couldn’t possibly because she never came to truly understand them. Ai is an extremely insecure person who’s secret wish is to have someone rely on her. Any other character interpreting Ai's feelings is wrong; they don't even need an inferiority complex, everyone misunderstands Ai all the time, it's one of her defining character traits.

But none of this would actually demonstrate that Ai's love for Aqua and Ruby is anything less than genuine. It just demonstrates that their relationship was less than perfect, because neither Ai nor Aqua nor Ruby are perfect people. All three of them lie, to each other and to themselves. They often believe those lies. But that doesn't make their mutual love less real!

Heck, if I wanted I could could apply Koyomism's logic to Aquakane. Her feelings for Aqua also germinated in gratitude for him "supporting "saving" her—and in a much more straightforward way than Kana's!

Akane was facing harassment so bad she was about to jump off a bridge into traffic. But Aqua saved her life, first by literally stopping her from killing herself, and then by preparing and posting a video to dissipate the harassment. Thus, she developed a strong sense of admiration for him. Maybe not in exactly the same sense as Kana did, but it's pretty similar!

Yeah, the dating reality show was part of why Akane and Aqua hooked up. But Aqua saving Akane is why Akane and Aqua hooked up, not MEM-cho and Aqua, or Akane and...uh...the other guy. If Kana's love for Aqua is just clinging to a rock in a storm, Akane is clinging to a somewhat more significant rock in a far deadlier storm.

Which I don't think is a mark against Aquakane, but if you're going to say Kana's love is insincere, you kinda have to say the same thing about Akane.

It also strikes me that OP seems to treat Aqua filling an emotional need for Kana as proof that Kana's love for him isn't real. But Akane filling an emotional need for Aqua is proof that he'd pick Akane over Kana.