@coffeeworldsasaki The key thing to remember is that most people on Tumblr aren't making posts that explicit. They may be doing that on Reddit or YouTube, but they're not doing it here. The post that sparked mine and many others got three notes or so before it was quietly deleted, as was another similar post earlier this week. Comments like that tend to get very loudly and quickly iced out here.
What they are doing, as @ariadne-mouse pointed out in the tags of this post by @utilitycaster, is subtler but no less insidious. The posts that are still around and get notes will instead lament how put-upon Occtis is and how Thaisha isn't considering his feelings. Won't someone come along who will finally be kind to him? He wasn't trying to be mean to Thaisha, he was being practical, and why isn't she more understanding of what he meant? Thaisha honestly reminded me of a lot of people who were mean to me in my childhood, and it made me super uncomfortable. And y'know, Occtis is kinda tan, so he's probably not even white? I headcanon him as a POC.
Everyone will see an "I'm not racist but" post for what it is. What a lot of people won't see, or perhaps don't want to see, is that it's a direct pipeline to bigotry when the priority is what made me uncomfy, what made me feel bad, how can my fave be the more oppressed party in this situation and therefore in the right.
You may have heard of something called the "right to comfort". It's "the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort", and it's the logic that white people use to avoid difficult discussions about modern racism and police brutality—that's too unpleasant a conversation to have, so we simply won't have it. And on this website and in a lot of leftist spaces, it looks like white 20- and 30-somethings Queer and Neurodivergent-ing their way out of accountability for their own biases.
