I just watched the music video for "It's Gonna Be Me" and had a vision of an alternate universe where the popular fanfiction trope isn't "Y/N is sold to a boyband," but "Y/N buys a boyband."
This is why, as the comments already observed, it's important to remember that "religious minority" is a description of relative size not synonymous with "marginalized population."
Mormons are a religious minority. So are the Westboro Baptists and Scientologists.
I'd say they are also "marginalized" in the sense of being less culturally relevant and less powerful than more popular religions but "marginalized" also does not automatically equal "morally correct."
i love how no one's even freaking out about troy anymore. he had his whole "do you really want to be all-powerful" moment in front of everyone this time and we're all just like. yeah. figures
The curious part is that most if not all of the Troy moments we remember have been corrected out of existence as of the start of Season 18. So what other Troy Moments have the Base characters experienced so that this is their reaction?
God. I genuinely love DND, like, on its own merits and in its own right, but as a polytheist some of the mechanics and worldbuilding around religion in the Realms make me want to tear my hair out
you can tell it's polytheism written by folks who by and large have never practiced polytheism nor spoken to any hard polytheists, and also who didn't stop to think through some of the implications of their setting
and in seeking to accommodate one of my players (we're playing DIA, he wanted to be a) from Elturel b) a cleric, meaning he'd be affiliated with the church of Torm normally, except c) he wanted to pick the Grave domain) I'm stumbling into some of those contradictions now
the trouble with the Realms' take on polytheism is that, fundamentally, Ed Greenwood's idea of what a "good church" looks like is a Christian church. specifically, an American Christian take on an English medieval Catholic church.
Every deity that's good or neutral aligned has a Church with clergy that worship them and only them. a cleric of, say, Lathander, will acknowledge the existence of other gods. but that cleric will only pray to Lathander, recieve spells, and make offerings to Lathander. Xe won't ever pray to Ilmater, or Chauntea, or Torm. At best, they'll share a temple or a shrine with a cleric who does.
The only people who actually worship multiple gods at the same time at the level of a priesthood.... are cultists. Cultists of dead evil gods, who get their divine power from something that isn't those gods.
The lore at least attempts to acknowledge that common folks will pray to any god that will hear them. Even a good-aligned sailor might toss a prayer out to Umberlee during a storm at sea. But you can't, as a good-aligned cleric, propitiate Umberlee and have it do anything mechanically. at best it's a bit of flavour; at worst, your DM might decide that that's an evil act.
And I get it: Some of this is Game Design Concerns. The idea of clerics only having access to specific spell domains is a good one to help players create interesting builds and make mechanically meaningful choices. A War cleric and a Grave cleric will have fundamentally different toolsets to throw at an encounter, and that means your party could have two clerics in it and still be okay.
... But... that's not how polytheism has worked, anywhere, ever. For three reasons.
If the gods are real, not pissing them off is important. Even an ~eeeevil~ god needs to be kept happy so they don't take their anger out on you.
People always worshipped small and big gods alike; in a lot of places, people would also worship the same big god in different aspects. The big god that protected your city was also the god you prayed to in wartime, but wasn't the small god who protected your house, and the small god who protected your house wasn't the same god who protected your house door.
The sad truth of pre-modern agricultural living is that for every priest, you need at least a handful of farmers to keep them alive. that balance changes in a world where priests can conjure food out of thin air, but it's still a thing that was true in all the societies your typical DND setting is based on.
I'm going to say this: I don't think you can take the Forgotten Realms and make it a proper polytheistic setting. Religion in the Realms is very heavily based around these different Christian-inflected churches, and changing how religion works changes a lot of the way the setting works. The amount of work it would take is not worth the bang for your buck you'd get. You'd be better off making your own setting or Playing Another TTRPG.
But at the very least, you can tweak things enough so that clerics within these churches honour the god the church is based on and also Another God. They keep faith with both gods- they honour them and pray to them- but they get their power from one or the other. This should especially be true for a theocracy like Elturel. the clerics of one god may rule the place-- but cutting yourself off from every domain but War is stupid even if you're just talking about game mechanics!
For example: the Elturian theocracy I'm worldbuilding right now has a branch of the Church of Torm called the Watchers of the Scales. They're clerics who are devoted to both Torm (the Paladin God) and Kelemvor (the Lord of the Dead). They're Grave domain clerics, and their objective is mostly "honour the dead, smite the undead, and give comfort to the living". In a Paladin order, where fighting the undead is common and not everyone comes back from battle? This is a good and useful kind of person to have around. It makes no sense that they wouldn't exist. And yet Here We Are, and I'm stuck worldbuilding it from the ground up.
Bret Devereaux, a professor of Roman history, has a very good article series on how polytheism tended to work in the ancient world; it's a very basic primer, but it's useful if you're trying to worldbuild your own RPG setting from the ground up.
Justin Alexander, a TTRPG designer, has another very good article (thanks @moral-autism for pointing me at it!) about how to apply this kind of thinking to a TTRPG setting.
In a setting where the evil gods really do exist and run torture-realms or such, it's a) tempting to appease them and b) tempting for other people to get really mad at you for doing that, because if an evil god is taking protection money or such they're probably going to spend it on their operations.
(If you're going with a lighter take on the evil gods, this is plausibly fixable, just be clear that the things they want are sympathy and attention and material tokens thereof because being the god of zombies is very lonely, or whatever. But then you'll need to either tone down divine conflicts or have your 'good' gods be morally greyer or have some clever third option.)
Settings like Golarion do contain some mention of people invoking Pazuzu to ward off Lamashtu for pregnancies, and possibly also appeasing Lamashtu for same.
When this specific criticism comes up my response remains: "why do you assume it's trying to do real-world polytheism and failing rather than trying to do something different and succeeding?"
And many of the points raised in OP easily survive this response, but those don't depend on framing it as a failure to not resemble real-world religions.
I assume it's trying to do real world polytheism and failing because in the earliest editions of D&D, that was explicitly what the rules on religion were for.
If you go back and look at 1e's Gods, Demi-Gods, and Monsters? You'll find rules for creating a cleric who worships real historical deities, like Zeus or Osiris. The fictional gods included (without permission lol) were, like, Cthulhu and the gods of Conan's Hyperborea. That continued through 2e, even as the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk became fully realized settings with their own pantheons- hell, "rules for clerics of historical gods" continued into 3e and the Wizards takeover.
I'm usually inclined to give a bit of benefit of the doubt, but in this case? Authorial intent does seem to indicate that this was meant as a system for simulating polytheistic worship, just abstracted in the same way that everything else in D&D is. The people who created and iterated upon these systems- including Greenwood- did genuinely seem to believe that you could use them as a fair approximation for running a priest of Ares or Quetzalcoatl.
Could you use these rules to create something different that isn't beholden to any kind of historical reality, even loosely? Absolutely. But that's not what the people who created this system thought they were doing, and they failed at what they meant to do.
The only people who actually worship multiple gods at the same time at the level of a priesthood.... are cultists. Cultists of dead evil gods, who get their divine power from something that isn't those gods.
Is that "cultist" in the sense of "member of high-demand group, or something that could be perceived as one from the outside"?
Because that sounds utterly backwards to me. My first instinct--as a lifelong atheist--is that a group focused on one god to the exclusion of all others would be more prone to becoming insular and idealogically abusive than a group in which you're encouraged to balance the differing priorities of many different gods. I'm sure a polytheistic cult is possible, but "good monolatristic Churches versus bad polytheistic Cults" seems like a misunderstanding of how cults work and what makes them bad just as much as it is a misunderstanding of polytheism.
Did the book traumatize you? Or was it the fact that you didn't have a trusted adult you could go to, who would help you process your feelings about the book and not flip out at you for having read it, that traumatized you?
you resisted the forcefemmification beams for too long
Nope. Completely incorrect and wrong.
This is a decision that I made for myself. I made this choice because it's who I want to be. Not because someone else wanted me to for their own pleasure.
hey to all those people a few months ago in mine and Jenny's notifs saying "cis guys are so sensitive lol whats wrong with being called a trans girl" i want you to know you actively made it feel less safe for my friend to transition for, quite literally, years. there is a difference between speculating openly about the gender of a fictional character, and the gender of a living human being who has asked people to stop doing so.
you didnt "force open" the egg. you didnt help. you told her "this isnt your choice, nor is it important. what you are is mundane and obvious, and we can all see it. stop pretending." that isnt encouragement. thats impatient and reductive. that's childishness. you threw an ideological tantrum when she asked you to stop. you threw a bigger one when other trans girls who actually know her asked you to stop.
you arent her friend. it wasnt your place to speak with familiarity as if you were. you made it more difficult for a public figure to come out as trans, and she was asking you to stop the entire time. that is the irrevocable truth.
there is no universal "best way" to have your egg cracked. if you keep trying to crack eggs that you shouldn't, youre going to end up with a lot of dead birds who you denied the opportunity to fly, all because you wanted to be in some part responsible for how beautiful you thought it might become.
Reaction will often precede action. What appears to be senseless cruelty in the moment will be justified in some way, at some point. The people killing you have their reasons.
By the time the whole chain of events shows itself it will be too late, time travel or not.
What kills you is not guaranteed to offer you any respite.
The notion of unconditional love will kill you, badly. You do not love me in every universe. I do not love you in every universe. Cherish the exceptions.
Whatever power you gain will not be enough to make you not-hurt, not-scared, not-dying. If you manage to become a shark there are still bigger fish, more sharks. There is still the ocean.
Despite the temporal displacement your actions still have consequences. The people saving you have their reasons.
It is just as unwise to care as it is to stop caring. You will have to choose over and over again anyway.
At some point you will be someone else (action, consequence). This happens to everyone but for you that transformation is unlikely to go by invisible. The future can haunt just as well as any past.
There will never be a perfect point of balance where everything remains the same, but you know that already.
Many people, some of them probably you, will have ideas on the trajectory of you, citing action and reaction, displaced consequences you have to handle now. By the time you see the whole picture it will be too late. You will have to choose anyway.
You will remember things that have never happened. You will be to foreign places that have been or will be or are your home, around strangers who love you but a little to the left, plus-minus a cowboy hat.
You will wake up screaming from the things that killed you but didn't give you respite.
Hello, I need you to knoe, when i am utterly flabbergasted at my friend's dms, I respond with [Mike Walters] Hwhat. Your podcast has done irreparable damage to my vocabulary
Actual conversation with my father, many years ago:
Dad: My second grade teacher taught us to pronounce the "wh" sequence as "hw". As in, "hwat" or "hweel." Isn't that absolutely ridiculous? No one pronounces it like that!
Me: Dad, your mother pronounces it like that.
Dad: ...really?
Anyway, here's the Wikipedia entry on the sound in question: Voiceless labial–velar fricative
I think the point I've made before about the reductive nature of "ownvoices" is that there are a lot of straight cis people who grew up in religiously conservative families and churches who could more accurately write a story about a lesbian in a strict fundamentalist family undergoing conversion therapy while doing minimal research, than I could as a lesbian who grew up in a liberal family (and in the suburban Midwest, but where socially conservative fundie shit was happening adjacent to me rather than something I was enmeshed in myself). But if each of us wrote that book, only mine would get the "ownvoices" label, and I would also be assumed to be writing about my own life experience automatically unless I clarified that actually, my family was always accepting of gay people, and anyway I didn't realize I was gay nor come out until my 20s.
This is a hypothetical, of course, but not an extreme one. There are books out there where the author technically shares all the relevant marginalized identities with their character, but has had such a different life experience around those identities that what their character is going through is every bit as foreign to them as it would be to someone of another identity. Or for that matter, where marginalized authors are nudged toward writing something that appeals to certain white, cishet, mainstream sensibilities of what a Latino story or a trans story or a Black story should be, that fit into stereotypes, the sort of thing that the movie American Fiction and Percival Everett's book Erasure that it's based on are satirizing. (I'm convinced a combo of both of these happened for instance with Cemetery Boys - so much of that book is playing so hard into what white liberal audiences think is "authentic" Latino identity, I wouldn't be surprised if that was an editor decision to at least some degree.)
On the other hand, then you encounter something like Firekeeper's Daughter that is truly #ownvoices, someone from a marginalized community writing about places and people and cultures they know intimately firsthand, such that it resonates with you if you have even a little bit in common with the characters (as I felt as a white Michigander from the LP reading that book about indigenous people in the UP who were in high school the same time I was). So I think there's a utility to the concept, but I think it needs to be separated from marketing jargon and instead we should ask questions like: Which similarities of experience actually matter the most when doing something like writing fiction? Does it change depending on the type of story, type of characters, type of fiction? If you're doing something that is about creating a broader world to get lost in, giving a strong sense of place and community, might having lived in that world matter more than whether you share specific identities with the main character? Vs. if you're spending a lot of time in the main character's head and not much outside of it, the opposite is true? But the point is, it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, but one you have to take book by book, author by author, or most broadly, genre by genre.
Originally it was something of a shorthand-- presented on Disability in Kidlit as "if you have no idea what constitutes a 'good' portrayal of a given marginalization, looking for ones where the author shares the marginalization can be used as a quick proxy to get started with." It was never supposed to be this load-bearing.
And Corinne Duyvis herself-- who coined it-- has expressed discomfort with what it has become.
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON TOMORROW (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.
Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.
It was about 15 years ago. I was living in London, and my wife's job came with a private health insurance buff that let us use private doctors instead of the NHS. I've had worsening chronic pain my whole life, and I've never found anything that made it better, so I thought, fine, I'll see a fancy specialist. So I started calling around to the quacks of Harley Street, London's elite medical precinct.
Soon, I found myself at the very posh offices of a psychopharmacologist who had good news for me: Opioids are safe! Far safer than we'd ever thought. So safe, in fact, that I should get on opioids right away, and take them every day for the rest of my life. I didn't have to worry about addiction. I'd be fine. He had a whole pile of peer-reviewed journal articles that supported this advice.
I didn't trust the science. I suspected that billionaire-owned pharma companies were engaged in a conspiracy to cook the evidence on the safety and efficacy of their products. I thought that the regulators who were supposed to prevent them from murdering me for money were in on the game – on the take, swapping favors for these companies for a promise of cushy industry jobs after they left the public sector.
I did my own research. I found people online who were citing other research from outside the establishment that confirmed my conspiracy theory. I decided that these strangers on the internet were more trustworthy than the respected, high-impact factor, peer-reviewed, tier-one scientific journals whose pages were full of claims about the safety and efficacy of daily opioid use for chronic pain sufferers like me. I took control over my own health. I didn't fill the Rx for the medicine my doctor had prescribed for me and advised me to start taking immediately. I fired my doctor.
I took these steps despite having no background in pharmacology, addiction studies, or medicine. I was totally unqualified to make that call. I was a science denier – but I was also right.
It probably saved my life.
A decade later, I found myself facing another medical question: should I get a new kind of vaccine, which was claimed to be effective against the covid-19 pandemic? The companies that manufactured that vaccines were part of the same industry that falsified the research on opioids. The regulators that signed off on those vaccines were the same regulators that signed off on opioid safety claims. Neither had ever been forced to reckon with the failures that led to the opioid epidemic. The procedures that allowed that shameful episode were the same, and the structures that allowed the perversion of those procedures were likewise the same. And once again, there was a clamor of dissenting voices from people who distrusted the official medical position on these new pharma products, insisting that they were the creations of pharma billionaires who didn't care if I lived or died, overseen by regulators who were utterly in their pockets.
I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.
This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.
We navigate so many of these life-or-death technical questions every single day:
Is my Boeing plane airworthy?
Are the air traffic controllers adequately trained, staffed and rested?
Is the firmware for my antilock brakes of high quality?
Are the hygiene procedures at this restaurant robust enough to prevent the introduction of life-threatening pathogens and contaminants?
Are the pedagogical theories at my kid's school well-founded, or are do they produce ignoramuses whose only skill is satisfying standardized testing rubrics?
Are the safety standards that specify the joists in my ceiling any good, or am I about to die, buried under tons of rubble?
Every one of these questions is the sort of thing that even highly skilled researchers and experts can – and do – disagree on. Definitively answering just one of these questions might require the equivalent of several PhDs. Realistically, you're not going to be able to personally arrive at a trustworthy answer to all of these, and it's very likely you won't even be able to answer any of them.
That's what experts are for. But that just raises another problem: how do you know which experts you should listen to?
You don't.
You can't. Even experts who mean well and are well-versed in their fields can make mistakes. For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.
But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?
It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties. Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling – why they chose to believe some experts over others.
The transparency obligations on these public servants – whom we call "regulators" – don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.
Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.
The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify. I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I am equipped to look at the process by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:
That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house after that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes – it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:
I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.
It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism. America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.
It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere. Far more important than what the Republican base believes is how they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment – politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters – have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.
Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:
Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide – merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals. To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful – isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.
The twin assault on both the credibility and reliability of expert agencies came to a head with the Loper Bright decision, in which the Supreme Court gutted expert agencies' rulemaking ability, seemingly in the expectation that Congress – overwhelming populated by very old people who trained as lawyers in the previous century – would make fine-grained safety rules covering everything from water to aerospace:
Conspiratorialism is the inevitable outcome of a world in which:
a) You have to resolve complex, life-or-death technical questions which;
b) You are not qualified to answer; and
c) Cannot trust the referees who are supposed to navigate these questions on your behalf.
Conpsiratorialism is only secondarily about what you believe. Mostly, conspiratorialism is about how you arrive at those beliefs. Conspiratorialism isn't a problem of bad facts – it's a problem of bad epistemology.
We live in a true epistemological void, in which the truth is increasingly for sale.
That's the backdrop against which Doge is doing its dirty business. Doge's assault on expert agencies enjoys a depressing degree of popular support, but it's not hard to understand why: so many of our expert agencies have staged high-profile demonstrations of their unfitness, without any consequences, that it's easy to sell the story that these referees were all on the take.
They weren't, of course. Most expert regulators – career civil servants – really care about their jobs. They want to make sure you can survive a trip to the grocery story rather than shitting your guts out with listeria or giardia, that your plane doesn't collide with a military chopper, that your kids graduate school knowing more than how to pass a standardized test. The tragedy is that these honorable, skilled regulators' commitment to your wellbeing isn't enough to produce policies that actually safeguard your wellbeing.
Musk doesn't want to fix the real, urgent problems with America's administrative state: he wants to destroy it. He wants to fire the refs, because once you fire the refs, the game goes on – minus the rules. That's a great way to win support for authoritarian projects: "The state won't take care of you anymore (if it ever did, amirite?), but I will."
So they're firing the refs, and they're transforming the game of "survive until tomorrow" into Calvinball, a "nomic" in which the rules are whatever someone insists they are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
Musk and Trump are in for a surprise. They have the mistaken impression that the rules only reined in their billionaire pals and the corporations that produce their wealth. But one of the most consequential effects of these rules is to limit labor activism. The National Labor Relations Act put very strict limits on union organizing and union militancy. Now that Trump has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (by illegally firing a Democratic board member, leaving the board without a quorum), all bets are off:
Trump won office in part by insisting that America's institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn't lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. Trump doesn't want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat Trumpism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming "America was already great":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Look, I know people want to react to the 'leopards eating faces party' with a big fat 'told you so,' but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.
People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There's a fear that once you leave, you won't be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.
A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they're missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you've joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.
If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you'll see how much of it is 'I didn't see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can't unsee it now.' We've all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.
No, sorry, fuck those selfish puddles of vomit. Why the fuck should anyone have compassion for people who were perfectly happy to let others suffer and die, but oh no, now things are affecting them uwu those poor babies, we should really try to see things from their perspective and never hold anyone accountable for their actions.
I don't post or reblog political stuff on here but this kind of attitude fucking enrages me.
I don't particularly agree with either side here, I just think this is an important discussion to have. It is possible that narrowing the scope of the conversation will be helpful.
When she says "let me shun ex-maga" is she talking about not voting for/ campaigning against a public figure, blocking stranger on the internet, disengaging from IRL relationships with conservatives? I don't think anyone is speaking against individuals right to do any of that.
The two conversations I am interested in are:
Does public ridicule ex "The Leopard's eating people's faces subreddit" push people further into the MAGA cult. If so is it worth it?
(I grew up in a high control group and I know that they use the (often justified) anger of the out-group or ex-members to reinforce the idea that everyone outside of the cult is angry, miserable and hates You.
Does that mean the justified anger should not be expressed? I don't know, I think the cult would just alter the rhetoric to take advantage of the new situation.)
and
When someone expresses that they have been harmed by the MAGA movement they previously supported what is the best way to react, as the public at large, or in IRL relationships.
What approach is most beneficial for encouraging deeper reflection, not absolving them of the responsibility for the harm they caused and not putting excessive responsibility on those populations who are being harmed to do all the educating?
"I feel like I was born a bad person, I corrupt everything I touch, I am so deeply afraid that if you look at me any closer you'll see I am not worthy of your love even though I worship you and I would do anything for you, I don't understand why you love me but I would lay down my life for you."
and
*funky instrumental music* "I AM NOT A VARMINT" repeated fifty times
and
"I went to the future and I couldn't find you there, everyone forgot you except me, they forgot me too but it's fine, it's fine, it's fine."
and
*sad guitar music* "oooooo I'm a cowboy and I love my boyfriend"
this time, the focus was on storytelling viewpoint (1st, 2nd, and 3rd person). 3rd person omniscient is basically the story told from the POV of a godly narrator who knows everything and can pop into anyone's head. think 100 years of Solitude, or Dune, or Lord of the Flies.
anyway, our prof said that we couldn't, for instance, used 3rd person omniscient when telling a story about a queer couple in downtown toronto, because this storytelling viewpoint is irrevocably linked to white colonial patriarchy in the same way the swastika is liked to nazi Germany.
I'm an obnoxious contrarian, so I popped up my hand and said "if you have a background in literary studies, you might have that association, but wouldn't a reader not necessarily come at it with that in mind?" because I was thinking, I don't think Gabriel García Márquez was upholding white colonialism in his writing. and she said "sure, but I'm just telling you what the association is."
I did try looking up more info on this after class, and it's entirely possible that I was using the wrong key words, but I couldn't really.....find anything. still very confused.
...you know what common literary concept *is* kinda linked to white colonial patriarchy? (Which does not mean that it's wrong to use it as inspiration, just that it's important to be able to talk about it critically.)
The Hero's Journey.
I want to study your creative writing teacher under a microscope. First she says every story follows the hero's journey, which made me assume she mostly read simple, commercial fiction. But no, she's a litfic snob who looks down on sci-fi and fantasy. And now this.
I've said it before and by god I will say it again
self censorship is doing exactly what the fascists want. do not asterisk yourself or use euphemisms (e.g. motherf*cker, unalive, etc) because you believe that you'll get slapped on the wrist by whatever platform you're on
if said platform DOES remove or otherwise penalize you for using words like fuck, kill, suicide, rape, etc, this is not a platform you want to be on. don't put power in the fascist's hands in the name of accumulating likes, upvotes, and shares
“Huh, weird my activity feed is spiking way too much considering I haven’t posted much lately, let’s see what’s oh... Yeah, that tracks.”
This is from 2022 but it's still vital Tumblr etiquette. Please don't self censor the way TikTok has taught you to. You can say kill, fuck, sex, murder, suicide, rape etc etc
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been exposed to major triggers recently because people are tagging rape as “grape.”
Please don’t do that. Just say the word so those of us with the filters in place can protect ourselves. Thank you 💖
You can tag it as grape ALSO—it’s gonna be weird for people searching the grape tags for actual grapes, but it may keep a rape post off the dash of someone who is (why? I don’t pretend to know) only blocking the tiktok terms.
Actually, no, don’t do that. That’s tag spamming, and is against the Tumblr ToS (for good reason).
If you’re not just chatting in the tags, keep the tags actually relevant to the post. Not tagged with 20 popular things for “reach”, not tagged with censored words, and not tagged with adjacent words so you don’t use the icky real words.
The thing is, this is an instance of tightrope sitting on linguistic evolution. We’re in a bizarre day and age where grape is used so regularly that it’s on its way to becoming a sort of fuckedy lexical cognate…..it’s essentially equivalent at this point. And i know I’ve at least heard it at least as much in person as I have online (partially because I’ve gotten on tiktok about twice in the last 6 months, but I digress). If you’re tagging it as something it is used in day-to-day speech, It’s not tag spamming.
It is, however, vital for the people who have the rape tag blocked, to use it as god (David Karp) intended.
Oh, dear god(s), please don't let "grape" become an actual synonym for rape. Please don't let grapes, the delicious, nutritious, innocent fruit, become associated with rape.
I'm not triggered by discussions of rape, so I can't really speak to that experience. But based on what I know about euphemism treadmills, I think this is more likely to lead to some people being triggered by the word "grape" in certain contexts, even when it's intended to refer to the fruit, than it is to make discussions of rape any easier.
Just the other day I was thinking about a particular scene in the children's novel The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin. Our protagonist, Mrs. Carillon, has been arrested, and several other characters march on the jail with hand-painted signs that say things like "Free Mrs. Carillon." One character intended to simply paint "Mrs. Carillon" on his sign, but he used a piece of cardboard from a box that had the word "Grape" on it, with the result that the sign ended up saying "Grape Mrs. Carillon." Nine-year-old me thought that was hilarious.
I would like for future generations to be able to enjoy that scene as I did, without their minds immediately jumping to "Rape Mrs. Carillon."
One of the best writing advice I have gotten in all the months I have been writing is "if you can't go anywhere from a sentence, the problem isn't in you, it's in the last sentence." and I'm mad because it works so well and barely anyone talks about it. If you're stuck at a line, go back. Backspace those last two lines and write it from another angle or take it to some other route. You're stuck because you thought up to that exact sentence and nothing after that. Well, delete that sentence, make your brain think because the dead end is gone. It has worked wonders for me for so long it's unreal
I don't remember where I heard this now, but I absorbed the advice, "if you're stuck, count ten sentences back and start again from there". It's not always ten sentences back, for me, but it does force me to look at the last handful of lines I've actually written on a sentence instead of a story level, and that is eminently helpful in unsticking myself most of the time.
I recently resolved a point where I'd been stuck for months not by changing anything in the scene I was currently writing, but by realizing I needed to add another scene before that one to establish key information I couldn't work into the current one
It's funny because for a long time the default advice was the exact opposite of this--that you should never delete or edit a previous sentence while you're writing a first draft, because it's so easy for that to turn in to trying to make the sentence perfect when that's not the point of a first draft.
I suspect it's a matter of finding a balance, and that balance will look different for everyone, and even for the same person at different times or on different projects.
“Deprogramming” is wild. “To fight cults we will kidnap someone and do all of the worst possible things a cult can do to someone except we’ll concentrate it in a week”
"Dentistry" is wild. "To fight tooth and gum disease we will drug someone and do all of the worst possible things physical violence can do to someones mouth except we'll concentrate it in a day."
I mean dentists don’t kidnap people off the street and tie them up in a locked room while denying them food and water until they say the thing their captors want them to say
It sucks if your family member gets sucked into a cult but cult "deprogramming" is "troubled teen ranch" for adults and rests on the premise that the people being "deprogrammed" are incapable of making choices independently and need to be fixed through abuse.
It would be absurd to think that you could convince your sister to leave her abusive spouse by locking her in a room with three people shouting "she never loved you a everything she told you was a lie! All she wants to do is torture you! Everything you like about her is because you're too stupid to think she's abusive!" for a week, it is similarly absurd to think that people would leave a cult because their parents hired a different group to kidnap and abuse them. The abusive partner/cult MAY be harming the person, but the family members kidnapping and screaming at the person are provably harming them without even providing emotional soothing or a feeling of belonging.
The best way to get your sister to leave her abusive partner is also the best way to get your brother to leave his religious cult: provide a counterexample of the isolation from the abuser/cult by listening, sympathizing, and *not shit-talking or begging them to leave the one thing that makes them feel wanted/loved/safe/appreciated*
You can't torture someone into recognizing abuse, all you do in that case is normalize abuse coming from *you* and make the cult/abuser seem more reasonable in comparison ("of course i hate your family and don't want you talking to them, babe, look at how they treat you, they think you're too stupid to make your own choices" "of course we don't want you associating with your family, they are literally suppressive people who tried to tear you away from our community - we need you here, we love you, and they think we've brainwashed you when we just recognize your value better than they ever did")
Deprogramming is abuse and it's quackery! This isn't comparable to dentistry, it's comparable to chiropractic and is liable to do harm in a similar scale to the individual who is supposedly being helped by it!
How difficult do you think it would be to get a judge in South Dakota to sign off on a conservatorship for parents looking to get their 19-year-old adult child deprogrammed from "the trans cult"?
People here keep calling qanon and trumpism a cult, do you think that people on the other side of the aisle aren't calling socialism a cult?
You have to let people make their own choices. You can't force people to stop believing in things you think are harmful. If you believe in freedom of religion, you have to let people believe in shitty, harmful, dangerous religions and just do what you can to limit the fallout (make sure the shitty, harmful, dangerous religion at least isn't killing kids, because kids don't get a choice about the religion they're raised in).
The whole concept of deprogramming rests on the idea that cults have some weird mind control powers and aren’t just abusive environments the likes of which are found throughout society. And I think this is the result partly of really shallow pop culture or journalistic sensatonalization and also people wanting cults to be something Unique and Other bc that keeps them from having to confront the ways in which cult dynamics resemble normal abusive relationship/family dynamics.
Yet another way in which they're doing exactly what they accuse the other side of doing. If "people with different genitalia are fundamentally different Types of People and the boundaries between them must never be blurred" isn't a "Gender ideology" I don't know what is.
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
romaincrisis
