Always sunny. @licionia - Tumblr Blog

being alive is like a whole fucking thing dude ive only been here 23 years and can only really remember like 10 of those years at most and yet im literally immobilized by fear and anxiety i have no clue what i want and yet i am mad at myself for not moving fast enough? like towards what? for who? who is even going to hand me a medal for living correctly? like what would happen if i was just content but like no one knew and i told no one. would that still count? i think it would

evil-britney

*takes off my leather jacket to reveal a second, secret leather jacket underneath*

nintenclo-deactivated20140319

when you accidentally upset your friend

lejacquelope

chocolatehighhh

Please reblog this every time you see it

klassizismus

─ Old Castle by Shishkin Andrey

lesbiancousin

declare your undying love for your girlfriend by buying her 44 bags of hot cheetos. most romantic thing ive ever done

lesbiancousin

this is what love looks like

estheticsly

politicalmamaduck

Writing about a child rapist did not make Vladimir Nabokov a child rapist.

Writing about an authoritarian theocracy did not make Margaret Atwood an authoritarian theocrat.

Writing about adultery did not make Leo Tolstoy an adulterer.

Writing about a ghost did not make Toni Morrison a ghost.

Writing about a murderer did not make Fyodor Dostoevsky a murderer.

Writing about a teenage addict did not make Isabel Allende a teenage addict.

Writing about dragons and ice zombies did not make George R.R. Martin either of those things.

Writing about rich heiresses, socially awkward bachelors, and cougar widows did not make Jane Austen any of those things.

Writing about people who can control earthquakes did not make N.K. Jemisin able to control earthquakes.

Writing about your favorite characters and/or ships in situations that you choose does not make you a bad person.

It’s a shame that in this day and age these things need to be said.

nyarnamaitar

Or, in short: the narrator =/ the author.

oblakom-deactivated20200302

You know what else is a shame? This nowadays tendency of putting on the author the responsibility of teaching their readers morality.

Authors are allowed to write morally ambiguous characters.

Authors are allowed to write downright despicable characters - and guess what they are even allowed to make despicable characters charismatic and likeble and the protagonists of their stories if they wish - because absolute monsters exist only under the bed.

It is not up to the author to spoonfeed the readers about morality and Yes I know this character did a bad thing and I am going going to show it in the story and make other characters call them out of it and– Bullshit.

The authors should be able to write what they want without having thousands of people jumping and their throats claiming to know them, their ideas and their morality based on what they write.

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

theanishimori

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

idlnmclean

“This nowadays tendency of putting on the author the responsibility of teaching their readers morality.” Bullshit. Ever hear about the Hays Code or the Comic Code? Before the advent of the commonly published graphic comics and the movie there were all manners of normative structures mandating that the primary function of publication was teaching people about what is right and what is wrong.

This goes back a long time in all classical cultures. It isn’t “nowadays” as if there were a mythical golden era of before.

Authors are allowed to write whatever the fuck. But whatever you write has consequences. Maybe you write something interesting with a lot of care that has great social value and happens to be about child abusing serial murders. Chances are that if your primary product is indistinguishable from political propaganda for Nazis and child abusers that you are indistinguishable from a Nazi and child abuser apologist.

Being the author for a thing does not make you immune to criticism for your authorial choices and does not bar people from opposing the publication of your work particularly in an environment where such work constitutes a kind of political propaganda to normalize violence and oppression.

Whatever you create is never truly independent of you. Narrator is not strictly identical to the author, but they may be similar enough that for general arguments the difference can be neglected without loss of precision.

You get free speech. That does not mean freedom from social consequence. In situations of injustice such as colonial, imperial, patriarchal, or capitalist politics choosing a neutral point of view as a creator is siding with the abuser. If you as an author choose to not teach ethics or morality or consider such things real world implications then you have made a choice which is reflected in your artifacts.

Language matters. Representation matters. Political apathy is not commendable.

vaspider

I literally stopped after you cited the Hays Code and Comics Code as “mandating that the primary function of publication is teaching people what is right and what is wrong.” Because if that’s the case, you must think that gay people, interracial marriages, adults drinking alcohol, and married couples sleeping in the same bed are wrong. Let’s be real clear here: the Hays Code was both ridiculous and unconstitutional and the Comics Code was a parody of itself, and both of them made queers invisible unless they were suffering for their queerness. It was literally a rule, because homosexuality was “perverse”.

Under the Hays Code:

Crime (again, including BEING OPENLY GAY) must have consequences shown on-screen. You couldn’t be gay without punishment for your gay.

The “correct standards of life” must be upheld. Guess what? NO OVERT GAY, because that wasn’t correct. No interracial marriages. Both of those items were directly and explicitly banned as “perverse.” Anything that didn’t fit the sanitized version of life could not be shown. Also, directors shied away from depiction of poverty, or anything that the ruling class didn’t think was ‘correct standards of life,’ because showing people living in poverty could be construed as not showing people ‘living to proper standards.’

No nudity or sexual activity even between consenting adults. The Hays Code is why married adults on sitcoms had separate twin beds. This also included pregnancy and childbirth, as those were the ‘results’ of sex. To prevent love scenes from being considered sexual, a woman had to be shown with one foot on the floor.

Adults could not drink alcohol unless it directly was related to plot.

Religion could never be ‘depicted in a mocking manner,’ which led to some editorial changes. For example, 1940′s Pride and Prejudice? Mr. Collins was a librarian. 1948′s Three Musketeers had Prime Minister Richeleu. To avoid being accused of ‘mocking’ religion, studios removed religion altogether.

And, of course, the sanctity of marriage had to be upheld. You know. Marriage between one cisgender heterosexual man and one cisgender heterosexual woman. That marriage.

The CCA was so ridiculous that it wouldn’t approve a comic written by Stan Lee called ‘Green Goblin Reborn’ which was explicitly recommended by the US Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, because it depicted a character’s drug use in an extremely negative light and had an extremely anti-drug message.

The CCA wouldn’t approve the comic because it showed drug use at all. Comics couldn’t even have positive messages or show characters overcoming or recovering from negative paths they were on because those negative paths couldn’t be shown in the first place. And of course they had all the same issues as above.

It’s also worth noting that the United States Supreme Court began neutering the Hays code 14 years after its inception, and in 1965 it ruled that the Hays Code could only approve a film, it could not ban one, because that was an infringement on the First Amendment.

This is how we got – wait for it, wait for it! – a ratings system instead of content bans! Jack Valenti was elected to the head of the MPAA in 1966 with the specific promise to move from bans and codes to ratings.

So, if your point was ‘this already existed and it was good!’ actually, uh, those things already existed, and they failed, and it bears repeating that attempts to bar films from being shown without Hays Code approval were explicitly declared unconstitutional, and were replaced by ratings systems and content warnings.

I don’t give one good goddamn about shipping wars on Tumblr, but for fuck’s sake, at least take three hot seconds to Google the history you’re citing and see if what you’re holding up as some standard that supposedly “established blah blah movies should only teach us morality” did something other than

fail miserably

lead to a bunch of ridiculous workarounds and euphemisms and Melanie in Gone With The Wind giving birth like she’s some shadow creature about to stab Renly Baratheon

disproportionately affect LGBTQ/queer people, POC, and other marginalizations

get declared unconstitutional (because, as it turns out, making a big board of people who decide what can get published does in fact violate the First Amendment)

make such a parody of itself that comics companies stopped giving a fuck and released comics without the Comics Code approval.

Like, seriously, this isn’t difficult history. You could Google it. Literally the only film critic these days who actually supports the Hays Code is Michael fucking Medved. You know, the guy who says that all non-Orthodox Jews vote primarily based on their hatred of Christianity? The one who’s super great buds with Daniel Lapin? The one who wrote “Six Inconvenient Truths About The US and Slavery”? That’s the only film critic still around who thinks that the Hays Code was ever a good idea. That’s who you’re aligning yourself with by pointing to the Hays Code and going “see? The Hays Code! ‘mandating that the primary function of publication is teaching people what is right and what is wrong.’” That is literally the only film critic I could find who agrees with you. Someone who thinks that the United States didn’t prosper because of slavery and that the concept that slavery is what built the US a lie, who champions himself as a former delusional leftist turned ‘conservative champion.’

That’s your buddy. That’s your pal in morality, methods, and rightness.

Jesus fuck, read a little history. I’m so exhausted.