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She/Her. 🇵🇸🇺🇦

[suicunesrider]

New favorite thing: TBSkyen feeding media literacy and emotional intelligence into the TADC fandom by refuting arguments that the finale / Jax’s writing is somehow bad or problematic

[demilypyro]

"if Jax is a trans woman she's still an abuser so she's bad representation so the show is transphobic" you're an idiot. you want your blorbos to be perfect ideal angels, I want my blorbos to be realistic, nuanced, flawed human beings, we are not the same. I LIKE that she's messy and fucked up and problematic, I think it's a realistic depiction of how a lot of repressed and traumatized trans women are. I think the show goes to great lengths to explore how and why she is the way she is, and to evoke sympathy for this kind of person. it doesn't excuse her actions but it does make them understandable. and I think the fact women like that deserve sympathy is an idea worth stating and worth shouting. yes she's a bully and she hurt everyone around her and that may never change. she still deserves sympathy.

[suicunesrider]

Evergreen:

[solarpunkfool]

What if we win?

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

How would you win?

[solarpunk-eldritch]

This is everything.

HOW would you win?

Find your way to help, no matter how small, and do it!

[glavilio]

japanese serow and brown hyena... a bona fide pair of changelings

[memecucker]

if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do… research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

[memecucker]

Unless you’d consider yourself an expert on medieval history, if it feels easier to get into ‘the mind’ of an 11th century knight than it does a normal 21st century person of a different ethnicity than yours that’s not a sign of ‘being woke’ and you should ignore any weirdo twitblrs that basically wanna reskin racial Othering as a good and moral thing to uphold bc that’s what this discourse amounts to

[baseballigator]

I would much rather have white people wanting to learn about my cultures through trying to write about them than to have them be so scared of getting it less than perfect that they’d ignore them completely. And even if something is not quite right, there’s a massive difference between maliciousness and ignorance, and people treating those two as the Exact Same Bad also contributes to this othering attitude.

[renee-niles]

Being so scared of being disrespectful that you give a nonwhite character absolutely no flaws, ambiguity or just plain human traits is how you end up just churning out bad characters, not respectful ones.

[rabbitscreams]

we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

[rabbitscreams]

female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.

[rabbitscreams]

if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane

[gay-milton-quotes]

briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.

In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.

[vforvalensa]

Ronald Wimberly's comic essay, Lighten Up, stays evergreen

[asneakyfox]

one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but their unhealthy parasocial relationships with one or more of the people who created it

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but some elaborate shared-universe subset of fanfic about it that's only barely related to the original at this point, and/or an esoteric reading-against-the-text reinterpretation of the source material (often if the canon is active and ongoing this leads to becoming actively hostile toward it for its inevitably increasing failure to conform to their preferred fanon)

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but the fandom itself and gathering clout within it, so that the source material basically only exists to them as a tool for scoring points in increasingly arcane fandom disputes

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

[shamebats]

Ngl the panic around HRT happening at the same time as the GLP-1 weight loss craze is some incredible worldbuilding.

[shamebats]

You have all these people just freaking out about the safety of sex hormones being used for the same purpose they have been for decades, meanwhile the same people who didn't even know what GLP-1 was until a few years ago are now eager to get on these medications and nobody cares about possible long-term effects or regret.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

re ehrc guidance. which is not legally binding.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

“should I do this for people of all ages?”

that's a very good addition actually, a solid "you want me to ask people's kids about their genitals? can i have that in writing?" should make upper echelons very uncomfortable.

[storm-of-feathers]

I look at ppl who are "anti medication" the same way i look at anti vaxxers tbh.

[storm-of-feathers]

Like I'm sorry to sound "we can't all be neurotypical, karen" but. some people actually genuinely need medication. like cannot function or even be alive without it. I get that the psychiatry field has a lot of abuse but saying that no one should use it is insane.

[valcaira]

Hope this isn't derailing but I've genuinely had people tell me (e.g. my mom's friend) to stop taking my rheumatoism medication because "big pharma" and "they are poisoning us" and should instead take globuli and pray 💀

You know. The medication. That medication my joints and tendons would ERODE AWAY without.

Anti-medication people are so fucking stupid it's insane.

[vergess]

Anti medication people scared me away from trying antipsychotics as an adult (rather than being forcibly sedated as a kid) for like a decade, until I got a psych willing to start me on a microdose and go up from there.

And it turns out, I spent that decade in a constant state of crisis for no fucking reason other than fearmongering about how I would lose my entire sense of self, stop being able to make art or even read books, would be functionally lobotomized and unable to even understand how broken I'd become, etc etc.

Medication can be misused, especially in high control settings like psychiatric institutions. But if you're living under your own care, medication may be what lets you go from struggling to survive, to actually living a life.

It's worth trying.

This is, IMO, true of all medication, doubly true of psych meds, and triply true of pain meds, which people are notoriously afraid to take.

[shofarsogood]

A (now ex) boyfriend convinced me to stop my antidepressants. I wound up in the psych ward for a week.

Medication is really important.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Take your meds for the next 1,288 days

[fitandfluent]

Because people haven't yet accepted the idea that their brains are a physical body part, which means it has the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of a physical body part. Once you learn that, taking care of your mental health becomes a lot easier.

[cricketcat9]

THIS! I had to beat people off with a stick to be able to take antidepressants in peace. They happened to be incredibly effective; after 8 months, the doctor proposed to stop, I did, and realized that I'm quite a different person. The Black Hole was gone. During the 8 months I was told, in some cases with great insistence that I should: - not take any pills, go out and see people, go for walks, try to be more spiritual, pray, " what do YOU have to be depressed about", it will pass, do not take any pills... Guess what, IF the depression would come back, I would RUN to the doctor and take pills again. Thankfully, I did not have to.

A lot of anti medication for depression propaganda was done at the time by the fucking Church of Scientology. They loved to get depressed and unmedicated people and prey on their vulnerability. "We love you and will cleanse you from your problems, just take 3 more courses with us, oops now you owe us thousands of dollars, but you can join the org, work your ass off for slave wages becuse debt, and bring more depressed people in".

Sorry I got carried away, but I hate these fuckers.

Take your meds, don't feel guilty because you do, and stop taking them when you don't need them - but that's a different story.

[sweetfirebird]

So I saw some people remarking that they didn't understand why "liberals" are focusing on the disaster of the Reflecting Pool paint job, and ok so when you see stuff like that, I need you to remember we are dealing with a wannabe strongman. Anything that makes him look ineffectual, wasteful, and incredibly stupid-- you get that between your teeth and you don't let go. Especially *especially* when it involves laughing at him.

Also... it is funny. Except for the poor ducks, it's funny. Man lost a war to algae. His "American Flag Blue" is green and slimy and the paint is peeling off, and all before his big 4th of July show that no musicians want to play. It's funny. Point and laugh. That is fighting fascism, actually.

[espanolbot2]

Like, this is the same guy who is trying to hide that a judge made him take his name off the Kennedy Centre by hiding the building with a great big tarp to obscure where his name used to be.

Any public slight, no matter now petty, no matter now little it matters to everyone else, gets under his skin like those screwworms he accidentally let Musk reintroduce to Texas (causing the government to call a state of emergency as it's trashing their beef industry).

[elalmadelmar]

Mocking the Reflecting Pool is Springtime for Hitler.

Many neonazis and their ilk are okay with their icons being portrayed negatively as long as that negativity takes the form of a powerful and threatening figure. They like identifying themselves with Big Scary Destroyer. It's a power fantasy for them.

That's why, for instance, Trump's incoherence when speaking doesn't bother them. His incoherence is taken, by and large, very seriously. The man opens his mouth and drops a bunch of verbal turds - and the world panics, or at the least gets very, very nervous. Not unjustifiedly, it's true, but the power fantasy of being able to say whatever they want and get taken seriously is still vicariously fulfilled.

But the Reflecting Pool? The Reflecting Pool wasn't supposed to be broken. It's not something Trump destroyed for the sheer pleasure of destruction, which is how Trump's base experienced his gutting of the government via Musk. The Reflecting Pool is something that was supposed to be improved, which he boasted about improving, and instead it's clearly turned to muck. There's no power fantasy there. There's nothing to gloat over; it's just a damp gross failure. It isn't even a catastrophic failure! Tearing down the East Wing of the White House was dramatic, and had the value of making a big, indelible change to a national icon. No matter what happens, the East Wing as we knew it is gone. Power fantasy. By contrast, the Reflecting Pool? It's just fuckin dirty. It's gross. It's your neighbor's neglected cheap pool that's full of dead leaves and slime. An entirely pedestrian, grody, pathetic failure. It would literally be more salvageable as a PR thing for Trump if it got hit by a meteor and turned into a smoking crater.

And that's why we're riding that fucker so hard. This is what's under the power fantasy. Deep down, he's just pathetic. And that's what Mel Brooks understood with Springtime for Hitler. You don't fight the Nazis by making them big bad scary evil guys. You fight the Nazis (when actual weapons aren't a present option) by making them a laughingstock. There is no way to derive a power fantasy from being the object of derision.

[weaver-z]

I’ve decided that all bats fall somewhere on this horrid little graph I’ve devised. Here are some prime examples of the various Creature Varieties found in nature.

[xerxestexastoast]

Finally made a Pokémon version of this

[dranktwocoffees]

i dont even care really i dont i dont i dont

[scribefindegil]

like it's genuinely absurd how every post by an aro person going "Hey, it's kind of fucked up that marriage is the only way to access certain rights and privileges" gets people coming out of the woodwork to say "You idiot! Don't you know that marriage is important?! It's the only way to access certain rights and privileges!"

like . . . yeah. they do know that. that is in fact the problem.

[pussyhoundspock]

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

[nonevahed]

prev tags:

literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)

[zarohk]

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.

[bevsi]

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with relating to characters, “they’re literally me” etc but if that’s the only way you engage with stories you’re kinda missing the whole point of Characters being vehicles through which we can see perspectives outside of our own. and also you’re going to get upset when the Character acts in a way that is not Personally Relatable to You

[bevsi]

doubly for shipping. at risk if biting the hand that feeds me, a well written fictional relationship should ideally be more than a didactic template for how to have a nice relationship

[thatpinkkwitch]

i just heard the phrase “if you wouldn’t trust their advice, don’t trust their criticism” for the first time and i don’t think i’ve ever needed to hear anything more

[dhia-dreaming]

And once I was told "if you don't agree with their actions, why do you seek their approval"