[depsidase]

[theaceofwords]

It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.

It has always been possible. It is still possible.

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[roczath]

India’s youth-led Cockroach movement vows to keep demanding reforms after police crackdown

Supporters of India’s youth-led Cockroach movement demanding educational reforms and government accountability say they will continue their

AP News coverage as of July 21.

[elaienar]

Explained: How India's biggest medical entrance exam descended into crisis

An alleged paper leak, an unprecedented nationwide retest and mounting political pressure have thrust NEET, India's medical entrance examina

NEET-UG: India students resit intense medical exam after paper leak allegations

Millions of candidates face biometric checks and frisking as air force deployed to secure exam papers.

‘Come back, my son’: Indian exam leak leaves trail of death, despair, anger

More than two million aspiring doctors took India’s NEET examination. However, the test was compromised and cancelled.

Here's some reporting on the NEET.

[paranoidpaleandroid]

so we're doing propaganda eh

VOTE SENSHI! VOTE SENSHI!

Senshi is love senshi is life! Senshi cares for his friends and nature! Senshi is humble and nurturing! Senshi is a great comic relief without losing depth of character!

Senshi is very caring and passionate about his love of culinary, nutrition, even the hierarchy of the dungeon itself. Senshi's well endowed shape can survive many winters. Senshi helps and teaches others regardless of reward. He is strong and capable of eliminating this year's Sexyman Victim! Senshi is foreveer

We've come so far already! We can do this! Vote Senshi!

@mimosa-sexypeople-contests-2026

[fleshmesh]

Break the stereotype* of tumblr sexyman always being a skinny guy in a suit. It’s time for hairy muscled short fat muscular men with big beards to shine. Vote senshi. tumblr sexyman is whoever tumblr says is the sexyman. bring in the new era

He’ll make you bread

*(people keep poiinting out that sans and stan won who are not skinny suit wearers. i am not saying they did not win. i'm saying it's the common stereotype of what a tumblr sexyman is. sans and stan winning only further proves my point that senshi can win)

Post by @mimosa-sexypeople-contests-2026 · 1 poll

💬 7333  🔁 26795  ❤️ 35026 · Tumblr Sexyman Contest 2026 Final Round Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

[just-pankake]

its not even that I dislike tenna, I just think of how monumental it would be to have a canonically fat hairy character who is genuinely pretty pleasant to be around and tells people to eat 3 proper meals a day win the tumblr sexyman contest.

[mimosa-sex-tea-people-contrsf]

Tumblr Sexyman Contest 2026 Final Round

Senshi (Dungeon Meshi)

Ryland Grace (Project Hail Mary)

Mr. Ant Tenna (Deltarune)

Voting ended onJul 20

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

sometimes I’m reminded that there are still people who don’t know ao3 was literally created by incest shippers — and the site’s sole purpose is to 1. be completely against censorship and 2. host all kinds of dark, taboo fics that are banned on other platforms — and the first ever fic that was posted on ao3 was a fic about an incest ship from supernatural.

you are in the house that was created by freaks. for freaks (affectionate). every disgusting thing you can think of is rightfully allowed and welcomed on ao3, because they are exactly the reasons why ao3 was created in the first place.

ao3 was created because its creators got tired of censorship, they got tired of dark and taboo fics getting banned on pro-censorship platforms, and they wanted a place that was safe for ALL FICS THAT WERE DARK AND TABOO.

ao3’s main principle is being against censorship and being proship / profic.

there are some things in fiction that make me uncomfortable, but instead of shaming people who are just minding their own business and not harming anyone in real life, I choose to curate my own internet experience by blocking/muting what I don’t want to see. ao3 has excellent tagging system, so instead of being a bitch, use their tagging system properly and you won’t see the things you don’t want to see.

it’s your job to curate what you see. it’s not other people’s jobs or responsibilities to censor themselves for your personal comfort. the world does not revolve around you.

also you cannot censor “only the things you personally hate” without expecting everything else, that isn’t of conservative beliefs, to be censored too. because censorship is a slippery slope and a fascist tool. I promise you there are people who think “why do tags for queer love even exist on ao3? they’re grooming children”.

if you allow the things that you hate to be censored — because someone with enough power gets to control what other people can and cannot create/consume, it will not stop at the things that you hate.

*illustration by sillyalexnorris

[nymph1e]

On Discomfort and Morality

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

The next time you see something and you automatically think it's disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?

[decomposingfungi]

fandoms are obsessed with giving children to characters who would HATE being parents

[groovyfran-png]

"Do you insert yourself as the top/bottom of your favorite ship?" No, I'm the cameraman

[headspace-hotel]

how does this even fucking happen

[milanesa42]

that's yellow my colorblind friend

[ao3commentoftheday]

I'm loving the discussions about the role and purpose of fandom, as well and what activities are needed to keep fandoms alive and flourishing!

However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.

I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.

A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).

I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.

I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.

People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:

You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."

Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.

As mentioned above, please do share your thoughts in the reblogs and replies to keep the conversation going.

[leomonae]

Other things people can do:

make a rec list

make a "here's all the fics I've found in this fandom with this one trope/general vibe/very particular setup I just think is Neat" list

make a "welcome to the fandom, here's the fics that people will just assume you've read/know about to get you started" list

make a "if you liked [popular fic A] you might enjoy [less well known fics B through N]" list

[iguanodonwildman]

More things you can do!

Create whumps lists

Create lists of shippy moments

Make screenshot collections

Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom

Make incorrect quote memes

Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs

Make character playlists

Figure out the layout of buildings/cities

Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that

Make your blorbo in various video game character creations

Build a pokemon team for your blorbo

Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?

Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!

Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear

There are so many ways you can engage with fandom that aren’t making fanart or writing fanfics. Fandom is community - Please don’t be afraid to join in!

[tobermoriansass]

Been turning this over in my head for the past few days and trying to articulate it to myself re. Ongoing conversations about racism in fandom --

Because I am increasingly bored with the conversation around racism in fandom coming back to which characters get fic and which characters get shipped. I think that conversation becomes a symbol of racism in fandom because there are clear number to point to -- but simultaneously I think it also takes away from conversations around racism in fandom, because everyone zeroes in on the numbers and then it becomes a question of interpreting statistics and an argument about the quality of canons and a million tedious, heard six hundred thousand times before arguments about why someone may or may not choose to consume fic or art about a character or ship. Its uninteresting, it brings nothing new to the conversation and frankly I don't think it engages with the most upsetting parts of fandom.

But then what are these upsetting parts of fandom? This is really more qualitative and again, this is upsetting to a certain sort of (white) person who wants a simple quantitative fix which is why non-white fans, I think, get pulled into the trap of fixating on numbers as a discursive practice - to make people pay attention. I am not interested in having this conversation with white fans who are interested in absolving themselves of guilt or minimizing their own culpability or who are interested in ensuring that they are good people. I'm interested in the question of what is upsetting as a fan of colour? And well, the answer unfortunately embroils a lot of very well-meaning people who don't think of themselves as overtly racist but who have nevertheless absorbed racist and imperialist attitudes from immersion in cultures that privilege a certain worldview, which privilege a certain method of seeing, understanding and knowing the world and which obscure other possibilities of knowing and seeing the world. (Please note: I am trying to avoid cliched discourse phrases, because I am trying to make people think about what it is I am saying here, instead of fixating on words). Some of the most common ones I’ve seen:

The reproduction of imperial/colonial attitudes:

Fannish arguments about what constitutes imperialism/colonialism/genocide in the context of a particular piece of usually speculative media - the person in question is defining imperialism/colonialism/genocide with such a narrow lens that about 70% of imperial/colonial/genocidal violence in your country would be disqualified.

In an otherwise well-reasoned meta, you see someone using a historical source to make an argument about a reading that potentially opens up possibilities for a more diverse reading of an otherwise white text. However, this source is a deeply colonialist document and is presented decontextualized from that colonial history (with all the epistemic violence and outright textual racism that colonial knowledge about non-white people went with)

Explicit use of the language/imperialist attitudes linked to the noble savage or exotic other to "elevate" or "represent" a non-white character or non-white culture / non-white representational culture. (I see this one so often being reproduced by people who genuinely think they're doing something good here, because they're making an active effort to write/make art of non-white characters/cultures)

Using language with an uncanny similarity to colonial/imperialist denialism to defend their faves

Using settings with an imperialist backdrop/conflict that is largely about shipping a couple of characters (e.g., Any and all fic where characters serve in the Iraq or Afghanistan war as part of the us army) or is largely about a white character's guilt (e.g., 90% of Vietnam war literature and any time it makes an appearance in fandom with all those tropes)

The tedium of well-meaning representation:

On a similar spectrum as the exotic other spectrum, but the reproduction of cultural stereotypes - usually of a dominant culture within a non-white country (e.g., The preponderance of a very Brahminic, Hindu and frankly Jhumpa Lahiri-esque interpretation of harry potter being Indian). Or sometimes just the endless parade of stereotypes / symbols without any sort of complex emotions or relationships with them, only celebration.

Someone is writing about a character of colour! The character of colour spends the entire fic repressing their complex emotions about a white character who has hurt/violenced them in some way and instead dedicates themselves to comforting said character

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour does no wrong and is a beautifully one-dimensional, boring piece of beige

Someone is writing a character of colour! The character of colour exists entirely to be an emotional sponge for the white character

Someone is writing a character of colour...who has no interiority

The reproduction of "I’m not a racist but" attitudes in heated fandom debates

"Racism in Europe is different, stop importing American ideals" there are Europeans who use the first part of this sentence in good faith to open up discussion/conversation, but usually this is meant to foreclose conversation and also, as a non-white person who lived in Europe: lol. Rofl. Lmao, even.

"It’s different here, because talking about racism here is racist and only racists do that" - I, once more, highly doubt this and maybe this betrays a little too much of the whiteness of the circles you move in

"I’m afraid of writing characters of colour because I will get yelled at" - great! Don't write them! Do you want a cookie, do you want us to call Bella Hadid. (Conversely: this one is funny, because I’m on the edge about whether or not I will run into out and out white supremacists (and I mean this in the sense of actual n*zis) in fandom while the most terrifying thing a certain sort of white fan can imagine is being dubbed racist)

Evoking anti-colonial/anti-racist non-white theorists in defense of white characters and their fictional actions - sometimes, it is good, in fact, to have a sense of proportion and understand that you need to be careful about what sources and texts you decide to pull into a fannish argument that is ultimately and frankly not very important in the grand scheme of things

The last category is like, pretty in your face, but the first two are unfortunately common enough that it is impossible to get into a fandom where there may be a character of colour or there may be a hint of imperialism to the text, without expecting to be made to wince hard frequently. The last is easy to spot a mile away and block, but the first really gets my goat, because to explain how these things can be upsetting to see, you have to delve into the history of imperialism and of seeing yourself reflected through the eyes of orientalists and colonists talking, for example, about the indolent hindoo or the wise and sagely hindoo or about the inscrutable oriental smile or the noble bravery of the Pashtun/Afghan/Arab/Bedouin and so on and so forth. It is basically impossible to articulate and describe, unless your interlocutor has read substantial bodies of 19th century texts - themselves bequeathed to you via the medium of a colonial educational system that insists on teaching them as "English literature". It is always from well-meaning people who would be, perhaps (and I prefer to hope) upset if they understood what they had evoked (ergo: immersion in cultures which obscure certain ways of knowing the world and knowing about how knowledge of the world is produced).

And ultimately, I don't know that fixating on shipping or character stat will get us anywhere near unpacking why and how these modes of writing or understanding characters are the easiest ones to fall into, why and how these attitudes are easy to reproduce and where they originate from. I don't know that stats are anything but dealing with symptoms instead of the malaise. But then, I think, dealing with this malaise is far far more exhausting and frankly, it isn't what I want to do with my fannish time - and I hate to think that any fan of colour, simply trying to have fun, must invest themselves in trying to cure the malaise, in order to be spared the ongoing one thousand cuts that come with being a non-white fan in international spaces.

[elumish]

I hope you don't mind me adding on to this, but this is a thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about (perils of being a person who studies how we talk about stuff in fiction), and I have a few other examples:

Talking about or defending anything involving gay/queer characters as progressive and thus immune from critique, even when it involves racist / fascist / imperialist characters or attitudes--essentially, the pinkwashing of racism/imperialism

Relatedly, presenting the "pure" or "more enlightened" or "noble" race or culture or people as supportive of queer people, in comparison to the "lower" or "less informed" or "less enlightened" people who are shown as being homophobic / oppressive towards queer people

Defending / supporting / reproducing fascist or imperialist attitudes in sci fi or fantasy settings (e.g., "this repressive regime is good because otherwise there would be chaos" / "we must come in and save these aliens because we know better than them")

Telling racism allegories through non-human characters (especially when the "white" people are all human and everyone else is non-human)

Writing reverse-racism plotlines

For a really long time (at least as long as I've been aware of fandom norms) there has been a point of view that I see expressed over and over that basically says that fandom is a space to be free to write what you want without fear, that it's the anti-capitalist, progressive, utopic, safe space to write anything you want without fear of reproach or criticism--especially for women, who have historically been shut out of a lot of publishing opportunities.

But as OP laid out the outcomes this mindset much more articulately than me, and as many people have been talking about for years, that safety and that viewpoint that anything goes in fandom only really applies to white people, and it only really protects white people, because fans of color are often left facing and dealing with white people's ongoing unexamined racist and imperialist attitudes in our writing and the way we shape our fan communities and the way we interact with each other.

And time and again, the message to fans of color just seems to be, figure out how to avoid it! Figure out how to keep yourself safe from white people's racism! Use AO3's exclude function! Use it better! Don't Like, Don't Read! Guard yourself! Protect yourself! Find your own space! Leave us to our own spaces, if you can't handle arbitrary unchecked racism even from people who claim to be allies!

For years and years, fan spaces seem to have prioritized the ability for authors to never have to think critically about their own biases and attitudes over the safety of all of the fans of color who are in these spaces or who would be if the spaces were less racist.

To OP's point, it shouldn't be on fans of color to have to invest their time and energy and emotions into trying to cure racism in fan spaces. White people--and everyone in fandom--should look at their own writing and their own attitudes and their own habits and do some of their own work on this, instead of relying on other people to come in and tell us that we've hurt them.

[tobermoriansass]

I'm glad that someone else brought up the dimension of sex & gender in the context of race and fandom, because that's a very tough topic & I appreciate the examples described which are very real and troublesome (including the outright use of fascist/colonial rhetoric to defend fictional social structures - which I have seen give cover to actual literal fascists as in people who self-identify as monarchists and tradcaths), but I also can't count the number of times where I've stumbled into accidental colonial rhetoric about Those Sexual Lascivious Races in fandom and that is so complex to talk about without sounding like a killjoy asshole.

But in addition to the above, I would like to highlight that there is a kind of fannish sex positivity about "other" culture (read: cultures that are not Euramerican inspired) which warps around to a very specific kind of dehumanisation in the description, which I'll try to outline -

1) Those Sexual Lascivious Races - maybe the most obvious version of this, but essentially features wispy, see through clothes and characters who ooze sexuality, where the narrator viewpoint is simultaneously putting them on display re. their sexual availability, but also hostile or denigratory of their apparent sexual availability - there is an implicit madonna/whore dichotomy in this and the character being viewed is failing to match those "madonna" "normative" standards and is therefore, a whore. A lot of this language sometimes comes dangerously close to replicating rhetorical tricks from 19th-early 20th century anthropology encountering non-Euramerican cultures and writing about their sexual practices with the prurient eye of the sexually repressed Euramerican.

2) This Culture Is Enlightened And Can Do No Wrong - this is the other side of this coin, in which the external/other culture is seen through the lens of the narrator and is described as being queer-friendly and many genders friendly and also sexually open, compared to the narrator frame's culture. And this one is so tricky, because on the face of it it is good and nice, but in practice it can become dehumanising in execution and its difficult to delineate the precise moment at which it becomes dehumanising. But to give a perhaps more relatable metaphor, its the difference between writing a female character as a fully rounded individual whose selfhood is acknowledged and valued versus writing a female character whose defining feature is that she's awesome and wise (but we know very little about her interior landscape/desires, except insofar as they relate to the main character's needs and desires).

And I think back to a lot of the fannish wars of nearly a decade ago over whether black characters can top, if latine characters can be sexually expressive and open - and a lot of it boils down to the thing in itself not being wrong, but the question of execution, which is to say: is it dehumanising, does it reproduce historical rhetoric which has been used to enforce racial power relations (that is to say, to humiliate, to exercise control, to cut down to size, to differentiate and delineate the categories of us (good) and them (bad)), does it reproduce historical imagery in a way that accepts the assumptions of such imagery as natural and immediate and without complexity.

The only remedy for this, I find, is not a how-to manual, but rather to have more curiosity about the history and phenomenon of racism, imperialism, colonialism - and therefore to do the research in understanding it beyond the scope of what little makes its way into the popular press. It means, perhaps, engaging with historical sources and writing, with historical anticolonial writing by third world writers, with understanding the forces that have shaped our world. In other words, it is to develop a sense of place, context, of history and power and economics, of sensitivity and humility - through a lens of curiosity, rather than guilt and shame (I personally find guilt and shame the most useless emotions when it comes to this). The question should not be "am I allowed" or "is this okay" but "is this fair to this character, to this culture, to this world" or "where does this fit within the bigger picture of my sociohistorical context".

Noodling around and branching out a bit - also useful, within the context of fandom, is to remove the equation of your self, your faves and your emotions from the picture and to treat these issues with the genuine gravity they deserve. God knows I've had enough of watching people misuse definitions of imperialism (indeed outright definitions of genocide and war crimes) to defend their blorbos or attack other characters, leveraging these very serious issues in fandom wars where really, they do not belong - while at the same time refusing to engage with the places where these very serious issues do surface within the canons that they're relating to. I also very much mean this on the front of levelling accusations of imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism especially at characters and canons - too often these accusations mis-state the problem and fail to situate these issues within a broader sociohistorical context, which turns a serious issue into a matter of defending one's faves against another's. This is hard, but I wish we would treat this with an iota of the seriousness we employ (in a lot of fannish spaces) where it comes to sexual assault and sexual abuse and queerphobia. This is only possible if we take discussions of racism less personally (there are a couple of very special individuals in the notes of this post who have had very long and big emotions about Their Role In Racism in Fandom and I cannot state how much how unproductive, useless and frankly annoying this is) and treat it with academic seriousness. Yeah, I'm suggesting we manage our emotions personally, instead of making it other people's problem.

I think this is all very difficult, but to my mind it is the only one that can help us move beyond the same five conversations about racism in fandom and perhaps actually get us somewhere.

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[wolf-aid]

I want you to stop whatever you're doing right now. Stop it. This is important. I want to ask you something. Do you want palestinians to die? I assume, I hope you do not. If so, you must help. You have to help, because words, reblogs, likes, are worth very little to them. You cannot help them without taking actual, material action. Israel wants to kill Palestinans, and they will if they are not stopped, you must fight this.

[wolf-aid]

Guys, I am trying to help build a small educational initiative please, Please, We need anything to complete this procedure, please we in Gaza are the most lacking thing is education. And we really need that, there are never schools. Now you can help build one, even if it's from tents, which may be the only reason hundreds of children were rescued

Donate to Help the children of Gaza get a safe and free education., organized by Asma Yunis

The Coastal Initiative in Gaza urgently needs your support to laun… Asma Yunis needs your support for Help the children of Gaza get a safe a

[teaboot]

One time when I was like three years old I was laying in my mom’s bed, and I don’t remember what we were talking about except I was being fussy about having to do something, and just like whenever I was being like that she asked, “are you trying to pick a fight?”

And I didn’t really know what that meant, only that I always said no, but for some reason or another I was very annoyed and a fight sounded pretty good so for the first time ever I said “yes”

And I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but I remember my mom just going “Okay, then. Let’s fight. What do you want to fight about?”

And I remember it occurring to me all of a sudden that the onus was on me to generate the energy to pick something to be mad about, and wishing she’d just do something worth fighting FOR me, but she just went, “I’m not the one who wants to fight. If you want to fight, you have to pick something to fight about”

and I just went ugh. Never mind, that’s too much work. So said “I don’t wanna fight actually, I’m just cranky” and she told me “okay well just say that next time” and in hindsight that was actually probably a very important formative experience

[ahundredhundredheartbeats]

Saying “you wanna GO?!” to a toddler as a means of teaching emotional awareness and social skills

[softzosan]

really wish we'd domesticated tigers and lions and jaguars and such by now.. can you imagine one of those giant kitties lying on top of you?? getting crushed underneath its weight??? while it's PURRING????

[softzosan]

post cancelled, just found out big cats can't purr, my dream is ruined