☭ Hi, I'm Sarah ☭

I'm a trans woman from the Netherlands. I use this blog to reblog and post whatever I feel like, mostly anime and nature with a side of Marxist-Leninist politics. Age: above 18 Pronouns: She/her Header by Tumblr user Boccher One Piece RP blog: bloody-leopard Dungeon Meshi poll blog: dungeon-meshi-tournament

[nature-nerd-sarah]

With how many transfems staff's been terminating just for being transfem, I don't think it's out of the question that I'll be terminated as well. Mutuals, DM me if you want to add me on Discord.

[nature-nerd-sarah]

I'm also considering moving over to Bluesky because of Tumblr's racism and transmisogyny. If you want to follow me there, I'm @ nature-nerd-sarah.bsky.social

[yvfu]

is there an ai bubble bubble?

[aorish-deactivated20251222]

picturing a scenario where so many people have shorted tech stocks in anticipation of an ai bust that the economy will collapse if the economy doesnt collapse

[something-truly-evil]

[rabbitkinglune777]

demon sheep boy (WIP)

[mopdog8]

Yeah yeah yeah he still brews coffee for wife

[earlypalaeoart]

Engraving to accompany 'Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus' poem from Punch magazine, February 14th, 1885, pg. 82

https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/punch1885/0092/image,info

[nature-nerd-sarah]

19th century Brit seeing a reconstruction of an ancient marine reptile: "This proves white supremacy, somehow."

[nature-nerd-sarah]

I have one Bocchi the Rock headcanon, and it's that Eliza was born Eliza Smith and changed her last name to Shimizu to sound more Japanese.

My reasoning is that she's a white British woman who moved to Japan because she loves anime so much, and changing her name to sound more Japanese is a move that's in line with that.

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

Following up on that post about slavery in Ancient Rome, if you’re ever wondering why, for instance, Rome kept launching wars in Parthia and Germanía, there are multiple reasons, especially pride once the people of both regions had defeated them, but more than anything it was access to more slaves. The soldiers and civilians captured in these wars were the primary source of slaves other than those born into slavery. The entire project of the Roman Empire only truly makes sense when you comprehend the degree to which it was economically reliant of mass slave labor, particularly in its mines, on its farms, and in its mills and bakeries. The grain dole, the famous Roman welfare program which guaranteed grain for its poorest (free) people was in large part propped up by slave labor

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

Child sex slavery was also rampant. Part of the Roman obsession with always being the penetrating, masculine man in sex between two men led to a bias towards younger boys, and that’s on top of the already massive trade of enslaved girls forced into sex slavery. I remember reading a collection of Saturnalia epigrams (hypothetical tags you could put on holiday gifts to friends) by the Roman poet Martial that casually mentioned gifting someone a young sex slave from Cadiz. And that’s just off the top of my head. It was everywhere, and it was seen as completely normal

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

#I was curious about the 1/3 people being slaves figure #and how it compared to the US in 1860 #according to a google search #the percentage of enslaved people in the total us population was 12.6% #so just slightly over 1/10 people were enslaved in the US during the height of slavery #so every third person being a slave in ancient rome is truly bonkers #obviously every tenth person is extremely appalling but i was just curious #how the two compared... #this info might be wrong tho so if anyone has better stats lmk

-tags by @mikumiotics

So I talked to prev about this a bunch in dms cause this prompted me to go a bit more in depth in my comparison, so I’m going to add some of what we talked about to this post.

None of this is to absolve the northern US during slavery, but you cannot really consider the proportion of enslaved people in the US without focusing on the South specifically because there were very few enslaved people in the North during the peak of slavery and it was generally more populous, so it heavily skews statistics. At the peak of slavery, 40% of all people in the US South were enslaved. In Mississippi, a state with an even more entrenched slave economy than somewhere like Virginia, the figure is closer to 55%.

This led me to talking about Haiti, where, before the revolution, about 90% of the population was enslaved, and that figure would be even higher if not for the fact that about half of all enslaved Africans kidnapped to Haiti died of yellow fever within their first year there.

So much of human history has been founded upon inconceivable amounts of enslaved bodies, and it’s still happening today. The US largely outsources its slavery to the imperial periphery, so it’s difficult to make direct comparisons of enslaved vs free inhabitants, though enslaved prisoners still account for about 1 in every 200 people in the US. For an example of a state where slavery is more prevalent domestically, 60% of the UAE’s population are South Asian immigrants, but they comprise 95% of the workforce and most of them work in conditions that are effectively slavery.

At some point I’m going to put together a more thorough version of this post with sources but that’ll probably take a while longer. I encourage those reading this to do research into the subject themselves as well, it’s harrowing but essential to understand

[clumsypuppy]

LMFAO ARE YOU SERIOUS

[nature-nerd-sarah]

Our Age of Empires is collapsing

[qqchurch]

genuinely cackled at this

(source)

[katlovesshrimps]

fursona doodles <3

[anim-ttrpgs]

There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.

[catgirltaxreturndocument]

please. i need to see a nine on the jerk-off scale. rebel scum? old forge games? hyper pretentious osr? i need to see the horrors

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eat the Reich was actually what inspired this post, but Candela Obscura also comes to mind

[anim-ttrpgs]

@batmanisagatewaydrug @utracjuszka

Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:

[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. 

If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud. 

The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive. 

To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:

(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)

Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.

The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)

The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them.. 

(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)

..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:

(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)

There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:

Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals. 

You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.

That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!

Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.

(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:

You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel. 

You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.

It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.

The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”

On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.

It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.

However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."

We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!

[ironmyrmidon]

I'm intrigued by this city where sex work is legally permitted and culturally acceptable, and yet is also entangled with the illegal drug trade and police corruption, and yet also coexists seamlessly with positively genteel coffee lounges and theaters.

It's almost as intriguing as the decision to put a red light district in your game and then not include any brothels.

[boyfeminist]

transmasc and transfem describe sex-gender positionality, not specific gender identity

"transmasculine" = trans people who were AFAB. we are viewed as transitioning "away" from cisfemininity, regardless of our specific gender identity.

my bestie (she/they) is a nonbinary woman. but she's not transfem! she was AFAB and thus is transmasc, despite not being masc-aligned in specific identity. realizing a nonbinary, androgynous, expansive vision of womanhood masculinizes them in the eyes of cispatriarchy. they are transmasculinized, and thus transmasc.

"transfeminine" = trans people who were AMAB. they are viewed as transitioning "away" from cismasculinity, regardless of their specific gender identity.

my sibling (any pronouns) is a gender-apathetic nonbinary person. even though she does not give a fuck about being gendered any kind of way, she was AMAB. and thus they're transfem even if they aren't a feminine-aligned (Or masculine-aligned) person, bcs realizing a nonbinary, androgynous, expansive vision of gender for a person AMAB feminizes them in the eyes of cispatriarchy . thus transfem

[boyfeminist]

i keep seein people claim it's about specific gender identity?... it's not? these convos are gonna get really confusing to you if you think these just describe "the thing you're transitioning to" , that's not what that means . that's gender identity that's just feminine or masculine or agender or whatever that's not sexgender positionality which is what's being analyzed w transmasc transfem . hello? taps the mic. is this thing on?????

[c0ulrophilia]

I'm just going through and blocking more people and even looking at them for a second is a pain in the ass.

Do you think we also choose to be white too? Should I be getting mad if someone calls me white because it's something I was born into rather than choosing?

Sorry you don't like being called "TME." I don't like experiencing transmisogny.

[pocket-deer-belly]

this is literally just what happens with descriptors of social class, you fall into them because you fit the description.

[coughloop]

WE HAVE TO STOP WARS!!!

[aflo]

[coughloop]

THANK YOU !!!!!!!

[foodandfriends]

[coughloop]

NO!! NOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

[nature-nerd-sarah]

Top five anime characters you relate to o:

This is a difficult one, mostly because it makes me wonder what relating to an anime character really means. I guess:

Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock. I have similar things wrong with my brain.

Hibiki from Symphogear. I relate to her backstory of being bullied. I actually cried most of the time it came on screen.

Falin from Dungeon Meshi. I relate to her transfemininity and her autism.

Laios from Dungeon Meshi. I relate to her transfemininity and her autism.

Nico Robin from One Piece. I haven't been persecuted nearly as much as she has, but it does make me feel a certain affinity with her.

[nature-nerd-sarah]

Top 5 mammals youve seen in the past year

Let's see, what mammals have I actually seen last year? I haven't been going out into nature as much as I used to and would like to, but I'm pretty sure it's still more than five.

Roe deer. Remarkably unbothered by people, especially for an animal that's hunted that much.

Wild boar. Very tough animal, although I'm a bit scared of them. I try to keep my distance.

Red squirrel. I like their long tails and quick movements.

Red deer. The cool macho of the forest.

European hare. Always fun to watch them and see what they're up to.

[ironlily-art]

Wrapping a single long, rectangular piece of fabric around the body was exactly how many ancient culture made their fashion.