By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.
We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.
Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.
Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!
q!tina — who do you pray to? whose blood stains your hands in the fervor of your devotion? which god abandon you? we sit at your shrine and pray with you.
happy late international women’s day everyone
christina marie brown / @lupusartz / donna tartt / sue zhao / cecil castellucci / heather havrilesky / @qbebou / unknown / hélène cixous / @boykeats / @chaerimoon / traci brimhall / hekabe
Here is a little Linh drawing, inspired of a video by les-pages-d’Avry on Instagram !!!! You should check out her kotlc-related videos, they’re so fun!!!
One of the most common reasons given for boundaries (and subsequent boundary policing) is the idea that cc's see themselves as their characters and it makes them uncomfortable in some way. Sometimes this is made explicit (such as luanne + kyleff) and other times it's the clear background implication (pyro). There's a term in broader rp space for this concept called "character bleed" (<- blog post describing it w/ some academic articles) and its usage in the context of boundaries is complete bs
I think graecie (in her discussion on stream and on tumblr) unpacks the idea that managing bleed is on the audience really well! I also think it's a shame that, despite this, she's never used as a "good example" when talking about boundaries. So, I'm talking about her and why other people should too
Here are some quotes from when graecie clarified about her post further on stream:
"When I bring up character bleed or how our brains differentiate- or-or. Our brains are unable to differentiate fake emotions from roleplay to real emotions in real life and how, like, your brain treats those emotions that you feel the same way. I don't ever want that to be misconstrued as I'm putting that responsibility on the community to prevent us from getting character bleed, or prevent us from struggling with those things. That's not it." (22:40)
(Small note that the use of "us" is super notable here! This is something that (should) apply to all creators, not just graecie)
"When I brought [character bleed] up in the past I think it might've been misconstrued as me blaming the community or, not blaming the community but expecting the community to be responsible for preventing that and that's never what I mean. Whenever I bring it up it it just, I think it's something creators in the mcr space— in the mcrp space are unaware of, um, because it is so new. Safety tools, uh, self-care in roleplay, all of that is relatively new to the mcrp space, uh, and I don't think a lot of creators understand the impact that playing a character live non-stop can have on their mental. And like, how they— how they view that character as more of themselves." (23:45)
"It-it can be stressful to navigate but that's also, it's on me to navigate, which is what I've been doing. Um, it's not on anyone who engages with my media to navigate for me." (25:10)
This is already (somehow) leagues above every other creator who thinks it's on their (mostly underage) fanbase to regulate their own emotions! What's most interesting to me in this stream + graecie's subsequent posts is that she's clearly interested in spreading this idea outside herself. In a recent(ish) tumblr post she detailed some of the consent/safety tools she introduced on the flight and on stream she mentioned:
"I've been slowly trying to introduce more dnd safety tools into the mcrp space. I did a character, uh, like safety and consent checklist form for the flight for everyone to fill out... it's absolutely, it's on the other people you play with and the gamemasters but it's not, I-I would say it's not on the community who is consuming the content you create to be aware of and prevent [character bleed]." (25:30)
"And, I'm there for my friends if they're going through it, I've got resources for that." (27:09)
You'll notice that it didn't take some huge controversy for graecie to change her opinion, just some self-reflecting and actually listening to the community. Here's her establishing a dni tag and talking about it on stream
That other people (the ones ppl usually point to as good examples) had such a public turn-around and have done nothing to actually change the culture which encourages boundaries brings their motives into question. It's an issue that "changed" creators get to respond to their co-workers insane boundaries by saying "I do respect other creators boundaries cause its their preference" and get uncritical praise. The only reason we see boundary discourse come up so often is bc ppl who are "okay about boundaries" aren't willing to challenge the overall culture in mcyt that endorses that behavior. An unwillingness to challenge even basic ideas such as "the rules that inspire harassment are good" and "my emotional regulation is the job of the audience" makes me wonder if opinions have actually changed or if creators are just searching for fandom brownie points. If creators who "figured it out" were interested in more than just themselves I don't think this discourse would be happening every other month
I mainly just think there are better examples of "boundaries done right" than the names ppl usually throw around. Especially when graecie's a marginalized creator who (lbr) probably deals w/ a lot more fandom weirdness than the (mostly cis and het) men that ppl talk about :). That she didn't require some explosive discourse also proves this is a topic of discussion because these mindsets are so normalized
i think maybe one day the black swan might shift from an oligarchy to an emergency state presidency type leadership w one leader w checks and balances -- but in the end between the council and the black swan, what will sophie choose? i feel like the answer would be a lot more complicated than expected
"oh boy a new character i like, who's pretty obviously vision-impaired even though canon didn't really acknowledge it! i can't wait to go on tumblr and reblog some awesome fanart of them!"
anyways if you're going to draw or otherwise post about a blind or low vision character then you need to either learn how to write image descriptions, or learn how to reach out and ask volunteers to help write them for you. you need to consider the real life disabled people you interact with on the internet, because they are in fact here.
if you struggle with writing image descriptions for whatever reason (your own disability, second-language speaker of the language you'd be describing in, anxiety about doing it wrong, etc), then that's nothing to be ashamed of, but just to repeat the above for emphasis: there are many ways to ask people to write IDs for you, and you should take advantage of them. in an ideal world, all posts should be described, but if you have limited time or energy, you should prioritize posts that are about blindness or blind characters (or even better, posts about disability and/or disabled characters in general). there are resources and crowdsourcing efforts that want to make this easier for you, so please use them!
if it wasn't clear already, i'm sure that the frequent inaccessibility of posts about blind/low vision characters (and more generally, disabled characters) comes almost entirely from ignorance, rather than from active malice — but it's, like, still not a great look to be posting about a character losing an eye, but never writing any image descriptions or alt text for those posts, you know? not in a "let's rile up an angry mob to cancel you about it" way, because that's shitty, but in a "hey, friendly reminder that if you're that obsessed with that character, you can probably also learn how to write IDs so real people with similar disabilities can experience your posts" way. if you didn't know before, that's okay, but the important part is that now you do. and you can do things about that
this time i'm reblogging this post because of a different vision-impaired character (this time with actual canon acknowledgement!) than the one i originally made this post about, which truly goes to show that the fandom inaccessibility problem is dire. write image descriptions in general, but if you're still learning or have limited energy, prioritize writing image descriptions for vision-impaired characters!
