"isekai'd into my favourite book series" story from the perspective of a very confused author who's rereading their draft and finding there's an entire new character they don't remember writing.
Hi!! I had to crawl through the cobwebby recesses of my brain to remember my Tumblr password from a decade ago in order to send you this question lol. I was at your Minneapolis show and struck dead, deceased, disintegrated on the spot, by your performance of Bella Ciao. Obssessed. 10,000 aura points, or whatever the kids say these days? Anyways, do you think you'd ever toss a cover of that online somewhere? I'd give you my secondborn child for it. (I already have a first and I'm rather attached atp).
You're in luck - this is a recording I did a few years ago for an episode of It Could Happen Here
"why can't there be a good enclave faction?? my oc is part of a good enclave faction" ok the premise of the faction is that the most powerful men in the western world sealed themselves in trillionaire bunkers, and their descendents emerged in war machines with bioweapons to exterminate everyone outside of their genetic group or die trying, because they are a eugenicist death cult
they claim to be the pre-War government. the pre-War government had death camps for chinese-americans, and filled work camps with union organizers in bomb collars.
the enclave literally play dixie on their propaganda radio without comment. they dogwhistle to Old World Racists on the surface. read the room
vault experiments are an iconic cornerstone of this setting. for all intents and purposes the enclave is vault tec. they spent millions on a concrete bunker just to lock a guy in it with a tiger when the world ended. yeah i wonder if the tiger ate the innocent man or if elsewise occurred. this is just one of their many literal monuments to sadism, abuse, and dishonesty.
sometimes their bunkers were literally led by immortal Large Language Models
oh theyre doing it to ascend mankind to the stars? oh wow thats so noble and isnt what a cult would say to justify slaughtering villages and torturing people.
"but... theyre the most patriotic faction, and i'm... i'm a patriotic fallout fan! plus... they have the legal authority!" damn boss your sympathy and loyalty are that easy to command? like a glassy-eyed kid, touching your sternum and reciting a mantra of cosmic devotion to a cloth rectangle?
at goodsprings last year i saw a guy with deus vult written on his legion chestplate and i shamed him into taking his cosplay off for the rest of the festival. took me eight words. i guess his fellow legion cosplayers were just gonna let that shit happen
fallout is about the rot, the collapse, and the mutilated remains of the imperial core. your shallow enclave/legion obsession is not clean or cute or separate from straight-up nazi nerds. if you deeply involve yourself with pretend nazi nerd shit, actual nazi nerds will start sitting with you
"i wanna be in a faction that helps americans!" make a Responders, Followers of the Apocalypse, or Minutemen character. that is the entire premise of all of those factions.
"but i also want to worship the eagle and the flag and the war god george washington while exterminating the mentally-criminal greenskins with my slave brain robots, and i don't want the video game to imply that's inherently bad!" ok stupid there are 9999 fallout fans who expressed this before you and the ip has never entertained them
because the various artists who have shaped this concept always intentionally designed the faction as basically just nazis who do not wear swastikas
if you are obsessed with rehabilitating the concept of the enclave, it is because you are so indoctrinated that you cannot accept the basic premise of a dystopian scifi setting where the american government is not a benevolent god destined to uplift humankind through torture, dominance, and genocide
For Auld Lang Syne is as far as we ever need to explore the premise of 'a good enclave' and it is ultimately one of the goofiest, ugliest, most unsuccessful premises in that game
this science fiction is about how americans are This fucking deranged. the point is proven in shallow fans who insist that the Secret Patriotic Eugenics Death Cult can still be a positive symbol.
likewise, Legion Fans who intellectually justify their death cult or wreath themselves in thin irony to rehabilitate the concept are saying as much about their ideology and national character as the satire they are failing to engage with
sophia hess mainly exists in canon as a racist caricature (bc wildbow is a racist) and in fanon as a racist caricature of a racist caricature (bc worm fans are even more racist than wildbow (and dumber than rocks)) but she has soooo much potential to be such a good and interesting character in the hands of a good, nonracist author.
anyways, shout out to the two (2) good sophia fics on ao3
I've marveled to my partner before about how easy it is to tell which authors in the worm fandom are racist, just by their willingness to uncritically accept wildbow's canon as their baseline. The number of times I've started a fic and been able to instantly clock their unwillingness (or maybe inability) to process the reality of the crazy racist way wildbow wrote his story is insane.
Common offenses include (but are not limited to): the author's characterization of Sophia, their characterization of Aisha, implications that the cops are on the heroes' side in a city with the E88, implications that the PRT/Protectorate are on the city's side (in a city with the E88), their characterization of the ABB, their characterization of the Merchants, the way they talk about the canon situation in Africa, implications that the E88 or its members aren't that bad, and more!
Honestly, part of the reason I haven't reread Worm in so long is the level of racism baked into it right from the beginning. I think the story is a fascinating worldbuilding piece for its powers and sci-fi elements, and is a well-constructed exploration of how constantly choosing between lesser evils in the pursuit of a greater good can lead you down a terrible path. It is also so intensely racist on every level that I'm willing to take the pieces I find interesting and run.
I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up
This was the mainstream feminist belief like. A decade ago. Thats how hard we’ve regressed within mainstream feminism and it’s mainly because of right wingers/radfems/TERFs deciding trans women need to die.
One of my hottest transfeminist takes that I have is regarding drag and ballroom actually. Read the whole thing in depth instead of skimming it then getting mad at me.
I think that the US transfemme desire to disown drag/ballroom is a symptom of both white culture’s destruction of ancestral ties and the importance of cultural continuity, and of the predominantly white ignorance of it as a gentrified Black art form similar to how whites treat other Black art. They want a destruction of it because they see the effects and results of the gentrified version and assume that’s all there is/was.
In particular it’s frustrating because while some drag queens are cis, a lot are trans women, non-binary, or otherwise transmisogynized and drag/ballroom and the tipping culture associated with it existed in part because the transmisogynized are so fucking unemployable and it provided/s a method beyond mutual aid for the redistribution of money, through the labor of performance.
In relation to trans women, I view drag queens as a pathway to transness similar to crossdressers, femboys, (unfortunately) sissies, and similar - where although the perception of them currently may cause harm to the perception of trans women at large due to the ways they compromise with predominantly white cishetero society to allow transfemmes to explore their gender, they are, in fact, still functionally people within the spectrum of transfemininity even if they haven’t fully accepted their gender expansiveness for themselves. Harm they cause to the perception of transfemmes does not lessen them from that societal assignment, any less than we can say Caitlyn Jenner, Blair White, or Kelly Cadigan are less trans women because of the harm they’ve done to the perception of trans women. They are all, in effect, varying levels of transmisogynized whether they realize it or not.
When I was in DC I knew a lot of drag kings/queens and literally 95% of them are trans and either came to drag/ballroom as a way to explore their gender through art and/or make money bc poor, or started it and it was a gateway to unlocking their gender. Not counting the cis performers elevated by stuff like RuPaul, who is explicitly transphobic, I think I can count on my hands how many cis performers I’ve met. Hell, even with RuPaul shit a number of drag artists who have been on his shows later come out as trans (such as Bosco, who I literally grew up with), in part because they suppressed their transness publicly to maintain their career until they reached a point the blowback of coming out wound impact them less. Pulling a F1NNSTER to keep cash flowing for survival, if you will.
Iunno like. The earliest Balls we have records of were literally 1880-90s, predominantly Black (the oldest drag/ballroom performer we have records of was a Black trans woman from DC), and was one of the only safe places for trans people to exist as themselves. So I find the idea of writing it off due to a much more recent gentrification and commercialization of it as ignorant as how people often treat other demonizes or commercialized Black art.
“I just don’t like the spectacle it makes of transness and harm it causes-“
Baby all Blackness is spectacle to crackers and An Amount of modern drag is white people doing minstrelsy of all Black women - not in the sense of gender at all but in the sense of race.
Like. A lot of Black culture in the US specifically is Big and Loud *because* of the repression of it we’ve faced and the force towards respectability politics, which has echoed to queer culture because queer culture in the US is made vast majority from Black culture. Our existence is a spectacle so why not make a show out of why they hate us and try to erase us so that they can’t get rid of even more.
Hating “the spectacle” of an actual performance art form is solidly rooted in white supremacy and white cultural notions of propriety/respectability. Many aspects of “spectacle” seen in drag are directly taken from Ballroom or adapted from it/vogueing.
In summary: traditions are meant to change with situational, cultural, and environmental need but still be sustained as part of a culture. Gentrification is a poison to this that makes it harder for those the culture belongs to to practice it as it should. White ancestral shame is a poison that makes them think they should nuke everything historic/cultural that makes them uncomfortable regardless of whether it’s theirs or whether it’s something they stole and gentrified. Also yeag like,,, it’s a job/gig income predominantly for societal “undesirables” to make money when they’re under/unemployed due to marginalization. And it’s also been gentrified to *gestures at RuPaul, et al.*
No matter what you think about drag or ballroom, poor predominantly racialized trans folks still gon be doing it because it is part of our culture no matter what tv shows and big names and people who have only seen those do to it, and it’s always going to be seen as one of the “disreputable” pathways to transness that makes other trans people look down on them because of the complicated ties to transmisogyny, because until someone publicly says the words “Im also a trans woman”, WE also view them as a personification of what we fear the world sees us as—a man in a dress—rather than an egg finding their way to gender in a way we deem unacceptable because it doesn’t align with how we think it “should” be done.
And I think that’s on us honestly, not on them. If we say it can take as long or as quickly and as easily or messily for someone to sort out their gender as needed, this also has to be extended to the transmisogynized we view as “disreputable” regardless of if/when they reach a conclusion we deem acceptable or whether they die in the shell, never able to remove their masks fully.
Also as a clarification, I am not saying that you, personally, must enjoy/like/do drag or ballroom. Im saying that drag, crossies, sissies, femboys, etc. are all transmisogyny paradoxes because of the way they interface gender exploration with surviving doing so in a transmisogynistic system by compromising for safety or a degree of acceptance within spaces they’ve found accept it.
Like, as an example, I *hate* sissies because of the racism endemic to sissy culture, but I still recognize they’re transmisogynized regardless of the harm they do or the disgust I feel towards them.
I also had someone comment on it as a facet of US cultural imperialism, of which I do want to note - drag/ballroom based on Black origins was spreading outside the US back in the 1800s/early 1900s too, there’s photos from other countries of balls explicitly influenced by Black Balls mainly started by Black folks in said countries, an example being early 1900s photos from France of both transmasculine and transfeminine Black people. While modern gentrified drag is 100% exported as part of US cultural imperialism, its original spreads outside of the US were via Black diaspora in-culture. I honestly couldn’t tell you definitively where it stuck and where it didn’t from that original wave, but it’s important to know it existed that way.
I have some physical books on this I might see if I can add to the archive tbh, if I can I’ll reblog this again with links.
Girl do you have any idea how many white transfemmes got their starts as trans women through sissy kink and some *still* claim it even after years of hormones and multiple surgeries, not just for SW reasons either. Shit, a couple of the most prominent white dolls in DC still actively identify as sissies.
Is it uncomfy as hell to know this along with the horrific racism levels innate to sissy shit? Yup! Do a significant amount of trans women still start out as sissies? Sure do!
I need yall to sit and understand im talking about the *material realities* of how the transmisogynized are treated by society, not whether it makes us comfortable or happy to fucking know it. Your personal disgust or uncomfortability with being even peripherally associated with them because of them coming across their gender in a “disreputable” way does not change whether they are transmisogynized or not.
“They can take it off while we can’t! They’re all just men!” Ok so are boymoders not transmisogynized? Are those fully in the closet not transmisogynized? Are the very societal forces that drive them to access any hint of transfemininity they can through any method they can—whether it’s playing a girl in a video game, drag, sissification, crossdressing, or becoming a femboy—not intrinsic proof of their transmisigynization BECAUSE they feel they cannot directly access that transfemininity? Because I thought we had arrived at the conclusion that transmisogynization occurs even before someone comes fully and openly out as some type of transfemme, before they say the words “I am a trans woman”, when or *if* they ever publicly do.
We spend AGES looking at people, dead or alive, and going “oh, that’s a transfemme who hasn’t gotten/didn’t get to come out as one” - We are extremely hypocritical in how we allow or disallow transmisogynized people access to transfemininity based on how we feel they reflect on us as a community. Shit, Kurt Kobain was “just” a crossdresser—and a lot of the girls HATE interacting with crossies personally—but half of the dolls on this site (rightly) claim her as a transfemme who didn’t get to come out before she died. She’s provided that access because she makes us “look good”, “despite” being a crossdresser. In this way, we treat respectability as the bar by which we determine whether we let the “disreputable” transmisogynized be recognized for what they are or not.
Do they experience the full effects of transmisogynization full time? Of course not. But transmisogynization is a spectrum, as we’ve discussed in whether eggs/closeted girls are transmisogynized prior to coming out. The “disreputable” transmisogynized often (though not always) exist in life situations where they cannot safely access transfemininity through other methods or full time, so they do not suffer the same levels of constant transmisogyny as trans women do, but to pretend they aren’t transmisogynized at all flies directly in the face of our own theories and is supported solely by politics of disgust.
Im not saying you have to go out and adopt a sissy or some shit, but we HAVE to acknowledge this shit and incorporate it into our work if we want to have theory accurate to material reality and not just incorporating transmisogyny as a policy within transfeminism.
Comrade not only have I talked on this before helpfully linked in my pinned, but also, yes, the racism is innate and ingrained. The primary and critical difference between a sissy and a crossdresser IS the racism! Without the racism deeply ingrained into every goddamn part of it, a sissy is just a crossdresser with a humiliation fetish.
Secondarily, as a Black doll, I am not required to be kind to or about racists or transmisogynists even in my analysis of them. Crossdressers are often eggs behaving in transmisogynistic ways as their perceived only access to transfemininity. Sissies become fucking Lindsey Graham types unless someone or something hard pulls them out of it, and even then it often takes years to deprogram sissies from the deep levels of antiblackness in particular that makes up the vast, VAST majority of sissy shit.
I hate sissies because I hate racists. Because almost every sissy I’ve tried to “give a chance” to or even just looked through their profiles for a minute before blocking them has been a virulent racist if not also spewing anti-transfemme rhetoric BESIDES their sissy shit. Trying to “reclaim” sissydom beyond transfemme SWers using it in their content to survive is simply trying to reclaim antiblackness, because thats its critical divergence from crossdressing.
None of this counters what I’ve said above. They are still within the spectrum of TMA. Just like racist trans women don’t stop being trans women just because they’re racist.
The older i get the more i understand why some people become obsessed with privacy, not because they’re hiding something, but because being constantly perceived starts to feel spiritually exhausting.
Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?
I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.
Trigger: Danny and Taylor get caught in the middle of a fight between Hookwold and the PRT and are torn to sherds; the PRT initially fails to capture the nazi, but when they eventually do he escapes a few times; 'concerned' citizens complain about Annette assigning queer books for her classes, she loses her job; alone and with no pay she loses the house with nobody willing to help her. She triggers her first night sleeping on the streets.
Joining the Undersiders: She starts looking for a building to squat. Finds the Undies' loft and is surprised by them. Lisa mediates and manages to convince Annette to help them out with a job. She sees them as kids in over their heads and, with Taylor's loss still pretty close, accompanies them for their safety.
Personality: Pretty similar to Taylor, just more pathetic, as she's a 40 year old woman that hangs out with teens all day. Let's say that her daughter got her intensity and violent tendencies from her too, not just Danny. Has her daughter's cult leader charisma.
The story progresses pretty much like canon, but without ever planning to betray the undersiders to Armsmaster. Coil's not dumb, so he doesn't reveal the 12 year old in his basement high on opiates. Annete saves Armsmaster, but because she's never contacted him, his endbringer plan is not revealed, so he stays in Brockton Bay. Sophia's not targeted by the Undersiders to carry out their arc 10 job so she reamins in BB too. Lisa still reveals her situation with Coil because she thinks she can take out the boss with Annette. S9 happens(not thought about it, sorry). They take down Coil, Echidna happens. Annette has no life outside of caping, so the identity reveal is pointless and does not happen. Behemoth kills Alec and she freaks out hard, so she immediately goes to kill Heartbreaker with Aisha and ends up with a gaggle of taylor-shaped kids. Time skip, Gold morning, she makes it through (also loses her right arm).
The important part: shipping
She's bisexual and we all know it.
She needs to hate fuck someone. Armsmaster would be a fun choice, but they don't interact at all outside of fights. The other (and better) choice is Miss Militia. Taylor thinks she's super neat and is somewhat parasocial, so let's invert those feelings for Annette who sees her as a government stooge, a chimera made up of the worst parts of the military and law enforcement. Hates her and her 'just following orders' attitude with a passion. Still thinks she's hot. Hates it.
Another fun choice is Sarah Pelham, aka Photon Lady. Both of them dive into capedom as much as they can. Sarah's built all her life around powers for the last two decades, and, after she loses most of her family, dives into it even more. Annette's just lost it and doing the same, just on the other side of the law. Appreciates the ideals of New Wave of transparency and accountability. Closest in age to Annette. Two recently widowed women finding comfort in each other. Could be cute. 'Net will punch your teeth out if you call her Photon Mom instead of Photon Lady (even before meeting her). Also, Crystal's reaction would be fun.
Faultline, Lisa walks in on them fucking, takes 30d6 of psychic damage.
Annette does not turn herself in, so she doesn't meet Alexandria like Taylor did. IF she did, though, Lexie's hot and 'Net looks close enough to Contessa, so they fuck and never speak about it.
Armsmaster still gets visited by Mannequin and becomes Defiant. He and Dragon do some unicorn hunting, maybe.
Number Man reminds her of young, blond Danny. Finds him hot, that's it.
Jack Slash, thinks he's hot, hates it. Instantly clocks him as gay .
Marquis, thinks he's hot, hates it. Instantly clocks him as bisexual .
Other relationships
Chastity's about the age Taylor was when she died, and looks somewhat similar, so she gets really attached to the 13 year old Vasil. Tries teaching her some feminism when she catches her talking about her worth as a girl for the first time. Finds her relationship with Cassie cute.
Aisha hangs out with Annette a lot because of the heartbroken. Encourages her to read and learn at her own pace. Accommodates her learning, even if she's not sure if Aisha has ADHD or something else.
Lisa's her number one hype woman, Annette's her sopping wet adult, who is scary when she needs to be and praises her intelligence
Talks taxes and budgeting with Brian, who thinks she's the coolest woman ever (not that he's talked to many older women, or girls his age).
Rockier start with Rachel than Taylor. As she does not ever plan to betray them and Armsmaster cannot reveal that, she still manages to help her out like Taylor did. Rachel still starts her settlement in Gimmel with her people and ends up in a similar place to her canon counterpart.
Alec looks like a boy version of Taylor. She's thought about recommending him estrogen, never actually does.
Also, really need to say that she's not maternal with the undersiders, they are coworkers with a 20 year difference. Still cares about them( and the mom instincts may flare up sometimes), but they're coworkers and flatmates first, weird maternal relationship second.Doesn't stop them from projecting their mommy issues onto her, though
In my original expansion on this idea, though I pictured the Undersiders becoming invested in her as a mother-figure, I must emphasize that I was NOT picturing her being maternal with them. She just... is an adult figure who shows them some modicum of (professional, mostly) care.
All of these children are so fucked up that her just being there in a semi-stable manner is enough for them to latch on to.
To give a bit deeper context to this since I don’t expect this sundown-town-ass website to know any Black history,
Im mainly thinking of Marshall’s early career, before he became the first Black Supreme Court Justice. He was a traveling attorney for the NAACP, and won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he took against the Supreme Court, including ending “Separate But Equal” doctrine via Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and resulted in a ruling that segregation was unconstitutional.
He was a master of using the words of the system against itself to force it to lose by its own rules, often being able to use existing sociological data to prove the ways that Black people were not just being discriminated against, but were being disproportionally harmed by segregation. He was responsible for releasing a large amount of legal shackles placed on Black people in the US as a whole, though he did focus hard on school desegregations - in part because he had been rejected from schools on account of being Black himself, including Maryland’s state law school.
This is obviously a brief summary, but this is the kind of person trans women need fighting for us specifically right now. Who knows the fucking pains of how we are treated and the horrific segregation, discrimination, and danger trans women face personally. The system aint gonna *save* us but having people do their best to toss a wrench in the gears killing us Officially and slowing things down means even one more person might survive, and even one more person surviving than would otherwise is a win.
That is what I mean by “we need a Tranny Thurgood Marshall”
okay so anyone who follows me knows I am always always always bitching about artists depictions of trans women but like holy shiiiit this is REALLY good. Like soooo much art that isnt by trans women fall into two camps of "draw a cis woman and later say shes trans" or "draw the most virulently transmisogynistic caricature possible" but this piece is just so..... real? Like, there are real actual trans women who look like this for once in a billion years. this kicks ass
i want a Superman story about Superman realizing she's a trans woman. how would she tell people? who would she tell? how could she tell them? through what possible ways would she transition? Kryptonian biology may not necessarily be compatible with human hormone replacement therapy and needles are certainly out of the question. if she figures it out, at what point does her presentation change? superman can't take a break, people need her, even if her haircut is getting awkwardly long and her body is uncomfortable to be in. everyone on earth knows who Superman is, knows her face. is her secret identity threatened if Clark Kent mysteriously starts to transition at the same time as Superman? if she only lets one be publicly out, which one? and what would it feel like to put on that costume -- in either case -- if so? if someone tries to attack her on the street, as Ms. Kent, how does she hide her secret identity? how would the world itself react to someone with the strength to juggle planets being a tranny? with her super-hearing there's nothing she wouldn't know about what people are saying, nevermind what's being written in the press. how does SuperMAN, one of the most definitive icons of masculine indomitability and resilience, cope with changing? would her strength, her confidence, her ability to do anything suddenly be used against her? why can't she be more like wonder woman? why is voice training so hard even for someone with super-ventriloquism? does anyone know what it's like to be able to run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound but to not be able to find a cute pair of shoes that fits? to be indestructible but afraid to use a public bathroom? would even the most powerful person on earth not feel just as helpless as i do?
i want to stress that it is crucial, like genuinely imperative, for this story in my mind that magical super special magic sci-fi kryptonian HRT that instantly rewrites Kent's DNA does not exist. it is not on the table. the entire thing is that Kent would have to transition slowly and awkwardly just like everybody else while also bearing the nonstop pressures and responsibilities of being "The Man of Steel" to literally every single human being on the planet. she doesn't have time to agonize over whether her shave was close enough before leaving the house if a plane is about to fall out of the sky
again i think some people are fundamentally missing a key point. this would be a story about how violent of an idea it is that a woman cannot be "Superman" and "Superman" cannot be a woman, and the myriad social forces that actively and passively enforce this ideology on everyone, including the very real and very strugglingly transgender Kent. it's about the vulnerability and frustration of it all, it's about secret identities and shame and choice and the unfair burden of tact, and all the superheroics stuff would just kind of a framing device. i swear to god give me a two week vacation from work and i'd have a script written
Things that I knew about: that the mass incarceration of people in the USA , particularly black men, has direct ties to/is an extension of slavery.
Things I did not know: this specific shit about Louisiana HOLY FUCK this is evil.
I’m from Mississippi and it’s like this in my home town. Enslaved prisoners clean roadways, pick cotton, everything they’ve done since before slavery was supposedly ended. What they teach in schools is nothing but propaganda.
I very good detail of the Manga Anthologys is that in the end, it is a little section write by Ein Lee, one of the original three artists recluited by Monty to start RWBY, where she talk about the process behind the final character's design.
If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.
It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
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