i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂
watch movies that make you uncomfortable read books that make you uncomfortable go to plays that make you uncomfortable watch tv that makes you uncomfortable look at paintings and sculpture and artwork that makes you uncomfortable. it is spiritually and morally and ethically and artistically really really good for you. think about why you are uncomfortable. what biases do you bring to art? what biases does the art bring to you? how do you reconcile this? how does your worldview grow and expand and change? all this and more will be answered and available to you if you just engage with art that does not coddle you and treats you like an intelligent human being that can sit through discomfort
Sakura Haruno (Naruto) vs. Joan Watson (Elementary)
Sakura Haruno
Joan Watson
Remaining time: 1 day 14 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Sakura Haruno:
NUMBER ONE MOST HATED FEMALE CHARACTER FRRRR AND FOR WHAT. FOR WHAT! FOR BEING A 12 YEAR OLD (WITH THE EMOTIONAL REGULATION & INTERPERSONAL SKILLS THAT ENTAILS) CHILD SOLDIER WHO WAS KINDA MEAN TO THE PROTAG AND BOY CRAZY???? BC KISHIMOTO CANT WRITE WOMEN?????!?!?!?! Everyone hates Sakura soooo much saying she's useless, doesnt add to the plot, is annoying, etc to the point where even ppl who have never watched naruto know about how hated she is. What was her crime except being a girl in a shounen series and being "underpowered" compared to the powerhouses that are her teammates? She literally still wipes the floor with 90% of the cast let's be real here, she literally got a hit in on a fucking alien goddess but GOD FORBID a woman be emotional bc now she's a horrible person who only knows how to whine and cry and stands by while the heroes fight (even though shes a healer and it makes no sense for her to be a frontline fighter when she's much better used as a support 😭). sakura hate is so goddamned prevalent and feels like the blueprint for a lot of hate OTHER female characters get in shounen series 😭😭😭
Literally theeeee strongest kunoichi to ever exist with no kekkei genkai, clan name, or Anything helping her get a foot in the door. She's civillian-born and still stands shoulder-to-shoulder with her peers who are reincarnated gods (or close to it), one of whom has a sacred bloodline and another who has a tailed beast and also clan blood… In the history of the series only one other person would be comparable in achievement and strength (Minato), and her prowess as a healer 100% eclipses him. She's kind and empathetic and strong and deserves so much more than the slander she got from the fans!!!!!
she suffers from being written by a man who hates women but instead of realising this fandom instead decides that she's evil for being 12 years old. many people forgive dogshit writing choices for their male favs as dogshit writing choices but for sakura no shes an evil bitch i guess
shes literally one of the main characters & thee main characters best friend & yet she's constantly less popular than other male characters or treated in a way thats so incredibly misogynistic. she broke open naruto's chest to manually beat his heart with her hand. she was a fully fledged doctor at like 14 years old. she has super strength. she has a homoerotic rivalry. its not her fault she got miserably heterosexually married to sasuke 'homosexual' uchiha we all need to unite against our common enemy (the author) here
One of the main trio of characters we start and then go through the story with, achieves incredible fits in her own field, yet all the fandom has to say about her is how "useless" she is. Because boys. (Also the fact that the anime apparently added plenty anti-Sakura scenes and people don't care for her actual manga characterization does not help.)
Despite not being as super-duper-special as Naruto and Sasuke, Sakura kept up with them with her own power-ups. She succeeds Tsunade. She becomes an incredible healer. She supports her friends through and through. She believes in best in people and she's loyal to a fault. She lands a punch on a god-like big bad in the final battle, despite many not being able to touch said being. She is, actually, a multi-faceted character, and sometimes being a supporting friend of a super-duper-special hero is not any less impressive and strength-demanding than being said hero. The story wouldn't be the same without her, and that's the point. She deserves SO much better from both the fandom and the anime adaptation.
She's always getting brutalized in fanfics for sasunaru, called stupid and useless etc
In a series that likes to present itself as being about the value of hard work and eschewing destiny she is the only one that’s actually self-made and accomplished. Sakura should’ve been Hokage
she's sidetracked or turned into a homophobe for the popular yaoi, treated as annoying and unredeemable for being literally 12, and straight up ignored by half the fandom while the other just goes "girlboss who has the braincell!!!!" and then does nothing else with her character
She was the strongest shinobi in all of the verse im not taking any objections she did ALL OF IT without ANY HELP FROM ANYONE also one of the most interesting arcs in the anime
I don't even watch the show and I still know that the writer never giving her anything to do and making her lose every fight was interpreted by the fandom as her being useless and widely hated, including seeing her as "getting in the way of" yaoi stuff. Again I don't even go here but she looks cool and sounds nice so I hope she's respected by people somewhere.
sakura has been the butt of "useless" jokes her entire entire life and everyone is so quick to push her aside and give her less prominence when she's genuinely a really interesting character with complex emotions and drivers and of course everyone calls her annoying (derogatory) too as if the other twelve year olds she was introduced with weren't also annoying but sasuke and naruto are considered annoying in a positive way if theyre considered annoying at all. she gets left out of merch all the time thats not the fandom thats like official. and she's a main character!
sakura is genuinely so interesting and has a character arc and has to struggle with not having innate birthright power and being compared to the boys on her team and when sasuke leaves (sorry for the spoiler?) her reaction to it is so interesting especially contrasted to everyone else's like the way she views sasuke's absence is so different and so human and so characteristic! a character doesn't have to be physically strong to be interesting but of course thats the metric shonen fans are going to use and even on that front sakura SHOULD be stronger than she is it is plain misogyny that she doesn't get as many interesting power developments or specific fights. and is shafted aside to be a healer as is the fate of all women in naruto. anyway. but the fights she gets are genuinely really good and dynamic and they all push sakura to be a more self actuated and confident person! i think only so much can be accredited to the authors misogyny because he does take care to give sakura complexity and depth and it's the fandom that loves to scrub it away and blame it on the someone else. also i just find it personally compelling that she sees the actions her loved ones take and even if she understands them objectively she still takes them personally. i think it is very difficult to undergo what team 7 has and not take things personally and it is easy for a fictional character to be purely selfless and noble but sakura is very much selfish and she knows it and it makes her feel ugly inside but haven't we all felt that way!? being ashamed of our own feelings and reactions???
Sakura Haruno is my "In the trenches" character here, and hiding behind the author's misogyny has become a MASSIVE issue over time in the naruto fandom. Initially fandom was perfectly comfortable calling her useless, saying she was the worst person ever, saying she was so stupid for continuing to chase after Sasuke (but also praising the male main character for doing the exact same thing ofc) etc but then it became a lot less socially acceptable on tumblr to say all that openly. So NOW you get people just hiding behind "kishimoto is a raging misogynist and can't write women" to say the exact same things they always were. And look, Kishimoto isn't a great writer and he absolutely has problems with how he writes female characters. But I've come to feel like that's something people are using to completely write the character off without examining her any deeper than that. (and you esp can't escape the shipping discourse with her, it is some of the most accepted "female character is bad because she's in the way of my mlm ship" misogyny I've ever seen in any fandom.)
The Sakura anon who was talking about people hiding behind the author of Naruto's misogyny made a really great point, I think. Yes, in some cases the source material itself is misogynistic towards a character, but that does not cancel out the misogyny from the fans. I've seen a few times people saying a character "doesn't count" because it's the *show* that was sexist, but I think show and fandom misogyny often go hand in hand. Yeah, Kishimoto didn't really care that much about Sakura, but he's not the one who wrote torture fics about her for the crime of "getting in the way" of two boys
Piggybacking off that last Sakura ask/propaganda by saying the fandom not only hides behind the authors misogyny but they also like to hide behind other liking other female characters, that the same sexist author wrote, when they were shown much less than Sakura. Of course Kishi didn't fuck them up or fuck them over. They had the luxury of not being the female MC.
Worse yet, ppl also cherrypick when to blame kishi's writing and when not to while pretending to be objective when they do so. They exaggerate the shit out of her flaws & acting like she's this oppressive psycho with the whole cast as her perpetual victims. Any positive thing that is said or constructive criticism about Sakura that doesn’t involve holding her to a different standard than other characters is seen as "erasing" majority of her character. Her flaws define her 100%, but other characters, are allowed to have their redeeming moments/qualities exist alongside their flaws. Or just have them ignored entirely & it's accepted fandom wide. But not Sakura, never Sakura. In fact, when someone says “hey Sakura isn’t that bad” or “okay, maybe she is that bad, but she didn’t write herself. Other characters are terribly written as well” There is a visceral, “burn them at the stake” reaction from people. This fandom gets such a haughty attitude with ALL Sakura fans because they personally don't like the character, so no one should. For any reason. I always thought that Sakura antis got away with being unhinged, and hypocritical it pissed me off. I just had to leave the fandom for good. Sorry about this. I just wanted to rant/vent 😅
I finished naruto recently and tbh I didn't like sakura a lot, but it was because I felt the plot did her dirty, erased potential that she certainly had and displayed (ex sakura vs sasori) and took away a lot of her character traits and development just to make her obbssed with sasuke. I don't hate sakura, I'm js not a big fan of her, and if other people don't like her due to constructive and unbiased reasons, there's nothing wrong with that. HOWEVER. ever since I went into the naruto fandom, ive realized the hate for sakura is insane. Rather than actually critiquing sakura for real writing issues, some fans literally insult sakura for no good reason. I've seen fans hate on sakura a lot for saying the things to sasuke about orphans (I never really considered that a big deal and also I thought that scene was rlly funny lmao) and of course for getting in the way of sasunaru.. (ochaco🤝sakura). The worst thing I've seen tho has to be the people who insult sakura because shes "ugly" and fans who harrass sakura fans by calling them the r slur. This is actually disgusting and has nothing to do with writing any more. Smh
Joan Watson:
In Joan's case the fans that attacked her were mostly from another fandom, BBC Sherlock, who were mad that a woman was playing Watson. Sometimes they were racist also since she is Asian.
Joan is the best adaptation of Watson out there and a great take on the character. Never forget when Sherlock smashed a plate in anger and then Joan smashed a plate and was like Well look at that that didn't solve anything. Or when she outsmarted Moriarty.
the level of hatred and disdain people had for the character Joan Watson and the show elementary (which also spilled over to the real life actress Lucy Liu) even though they never watched the show was absolutely wild. And literally the only reason was because they turned John Watson from "white dude with just enough characterization to be gay shipped with Sherlock" into a self-confident, genuinely complex Asian woman. People back then ate up EVERY Sherlock adaptation or AU… but somehow the only adaptation that was considered to be universally hated trash was the one where your fav is adapted as a woman 🤨
I’m so glad I stayed off the internet enough back in the day that I haven’t personally seen any of the smear campaign against Joan Watson my beloved. It’s sad though that I immediately knew it was because of Johnlock and the fact that Lucy Liu is Asian. The bright side is that every single person who I know in real life and online who has watched this show knows that making John Watson into Joan Watson was genius. She’s hated by people that have never watched a single episode.
What’s sad is when I think of a race or gender swap in modern media I think that nobody has done it better than Elementary.
this woman is BRILLIANT. just becoming a surgeon is an incredibly challenging career path!! One that takes resilience and study and not only was she great at it, she was the top of her class.
Elementary never lets her fall into the "woman in a masculine field so she must reject all femininity and softness", Joan is playful and and wholly herself and KIND. And her kindness isn't a weakness. It helps to solve a case literally the first episode, she's not even a detective, just a decent person with a lot of compassion.
And she also had boundaries! They're not always perfect but they're also hers. She defines what works for her and her life. She doesn't ignore what other people want for her (she had a family who loves her, they don't always understand her but their bond is real and important to her and when they're concerned she hears them out), but she also makes it clear that what she wants for herself is what matters. And boy oh boy, her relationship with Sherlock! He's a bulldozer of a human being and she resolutely does not let him pull that shit with her. She changes because she knows him, but it's a change she chooses. And knowing her changes him, too! She's not his nanny or his keeper, what they have is a real friendship with a lot of push and pull.
She goes through a lot of hardship and her grief is given space and compassion. She left her first career because she was devastated by the death of a patient. Her bio father was homeless and mentally ill and his absence was tangible for her. A guy she was seeing died (in a poisoning where she was the target) and that loss changed her.
The source material casts Watson as either bumbling or as the filter through which an 'ordinary' person can understand the 'extraordinary' Holmes. But Elementary lets her be extraordinary, too. Her life is unconventional. She's exceptionally gifted and extremely determined. And she's able to pull one over on the one person that beat Holmes.
Katara (Avatar: The Last Airbender) vs. Sally Donovan (BBC Sherlock)
Katara
Sally Donovan
Remaining time: 1 day 14 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Katara:
Mischaracterizing her, complaining of her having traits they love in male characters, straight up ignoring her, villainizing her for getting in the way of M/M ships, blatant racism… Katara has seen it all.
She’s literally the last bender in her tribe… put some fucking respect on her name.
Within the fandom, she is frequently relegated to her relationships with male characters. Also, many people simply "do not like" her. I've seen people call her a bitch! I don't think she was ever bitchy. There is an added layer of racism; many people read her as first nations. Native women and girls are always seen as more aggressive by racists.
She is a badass
she's probably in here already but i gotta make sure she makes it. she better win this entire goddamn thing. people act like her being mean sometimes makes her an irredeemable bitch. Jesus christ like she's fourteen and her mom is dead and a war is going on. god forbid she processes trauma differently from sokka and zuko. Like Hello.
Reduced her to the Zutara (fake news) vs Kataang ship war, reducing her to the "mom friend," ignoring her complexity, refusing to let her character exist outside of her relationships with men and eroding it within her relationships with men, ragging on her for being traumatized by her mom's murder, flattening her character as much as possible.
This poor girl gets brutally flattened into either "mom friend takes care of everyone :)))" or "miserable spoilsport who is mean to the boys and always yelling :((("
Literally one of the most nuanced characters in all of tv, she WILL be recognized for her fantastic portrayal of complicated trauma and parentification!
shes a teen girl who has never had space to process her trauma and the one time she let herself be angry everyone decided shes a bitch
Is reduced to one of three things. Either "the mom", "the nag" or "flawless perfect angel" when being bounced back and forth in other people's shipping drama.
Katara is a character with so much complexity. Her kindness underpinned by a trauma, her caring instinct born from being placed into the role of adulthood WAY too early. Having to struggle to be seen as a fighter despite being one of the, if not THE< strongest bender in the group for huge chunks of the show. She has anger, she has bravery, she has purpose and she cares because she CHOOSES to and then has to struggle with the parts of that caring that hurt. Or simply don't come naturally to her. She doesn't grin while cleaning up the boys' messes, she dumps the half empty cooking pot directly on their head and tells them if they're gonna leave it yucky, THEY should wash it (metaphorical but something along those lines) She is more than just Aang's "prize", Zuko's "anchor" or Sokka's "babysitter".
Sally Donovan:
I was in the WEEDS of the Sherlock fandom back in the day in high school and the way Sally was treated by the fandom for being mean to the uwu baby grown man main character Sherlock when he was openly rude as fuck to her (making comments about her sex life while she was working etc) was weird as fuck - especially rewatching it as an adult. She’s also black, and I defs think that impacted the treatment of her unfortunately
Vote Sally Donavan if I got slut shamed in front of all my coworkers in a male dominated field by BENEDICT FUCKING CUMBERBATCH I’d be on the news. She’s one in a long string of caricatures Moffat assembled to make his Sherlock, the world’s biggest asshole, seem sympathetic, and because Sally is a woman this is approached solely through the lens of her being an evil slut having an affair with her married coworker. “I’m guessing you scrubbed his floors judging by the state of your knees” send me into a blind rage 13 years down the line. Free my girl.
It's not merely that people falsely accuse the Jewish state of "genocide", but that the accusers enjoy doing it. It is a phenomenon known as "schadenfreude", a feeling of sadistic gratification that overrides rational thought.
Only with Israel do people enjoy schadenfreude when talking about alleged war crimes
"Six days after October 7th, a genocide studies professor declared Israel's response "textbook genocide" — before a single independent casualty count existed and week before an IDF soldier entered Gaza.
A year later Amnesty admitted, on page 101 of its own report, that it was rejecting the ICJ's actual legal standard because that standard "would effectively preclude a finding of genocide." Internal staff at Amnesty revealed the report was called "the genocide report" before the research even began.
None of this happened to Myanmar, Syria, or Sudan — all more brutal, all with clearer evidence of intent, all treated with years of caution before anyone reached for the word. Only Israel gets convicted first and investigated after.
The article "The Delicious Accusation of Genocide," argues the missing variable is Schadenfreude — Richard Landes decade-old term for a Western appetite, rooted in real guilt over real complicity in the Holocaust, for pretending to discover that the survivors turned out to be no better than the people who nearly finished them off.
It's not just that the accusation is false. It's that it's enjoyable — which is why it fills city squares and op-ed pages, and why no amount of counter-evidence ever gets it retracted."
Not just Schadenfreude (an ordinary German word we all know), but "moral Schadenfreude" -- that's the term Richard Landes uses for the glee with which the accusation of genocide is turned by the close descendants of its perpetrators on the close descendants of its victims.
Accepting identities I don't understand is actually extremely easy because I just go "this isn't about me" and move on with my life unbothered by someone else's identity, it's truly that simple.
i heard someone say once, “you don’t need to speak French to acknowledge that it’s a language that exists”. and i feel like more ppl need to keep that in mind when they come across something they don’t understand.
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!
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