The anon who finds Archangelz annoying
I agree with her messages on political subjects!! Im not saying im not! She's just really preachy and Will Not Shut Up About It!! And the way she discusses things is objectively really fucking annoying.
I dont care if I sound privledged or like an asshole (im not privledged, im transgender and disabled 😐) but i have GENUINELY never been interested in politics. Never. And I dont know about anyone else, but it is near impossible to engage in subjects you dont care about. I am incapable of masking, I cannot pretend to be interested in things I dont give a shit about. I hate when politics are shoved in my face, I find it annoying as all hell when people insist that EVERYTHING is political (its not).
I do my best to avoid political topics. Im just sick of Archangelz and now feel awful having some of her designs since she took a hard left turn into being Really Fucking Annoying
Example: If you are white, even if you are trans and disabled, you have a form of privilege over BIPOC. Please make peace with that now, because you do.
And I could sit here and map out ten different axes if I wanted to, because that’s how this works.
No one is sitting at zero across the board. Everyone has areas where they are harmed and areas where they are insulated.
Are you housed? You have privilege over people who are unhoused, who don’t get to log off and be safe anywhere.
Do you have consistent access to food, water, electricity? That’s privilege over people who don’t.
Do you live in a western country, or even just a relatively stable one? You have privilege over people living in places being actively destabilized, sanctioned, or turned into war zones.
Are you able to access medical care at all, even if it’s frustrating or expensive? Even if it put you into debt could you go to the ER right now?
That’s still privilege over people who have none.
Are you able to use the internet freely, to have hobbies, to participate in online communities like this? That’s privilege. A lot of people don’t have the time, resources, or safety to do that.
Are you a native speaker of the dominant language in the spaces you’re in? That’s privilege too. It shapes how easily you’re understood, how seriously you’re taken, how much effort you have to put in just to exist in the same space.
This is the reality you live in. Get used to it. Open your fucking eyes.
You don’t get to point at the ways you’re marginalized and use that to shut down any conversation about the ways you are not. That’s not how intersectionality works. It’s not a shield you hold up to avoid self reflection.
You don’t get to cash in some hardship and walk away with a universal “I’m not privileged” pass.
You want your struggles to exempt you from having to examine anything else.
“I’ve never been interested in politics.”
That is not a personality trait.
That is a position you are able to hold only because your life allows you to treat politics as optional.
Being able to be bored by politics is a god damn privilege.
Being able to disengage, scroll past, mute, block, log off, and have nothing meaningfully change for you is a privilege.
For a lot of people, politics is not a topic they can opt out of.
It is the thing determining whether they can access healthcare, whether they can transition safely, whether they can afford medication, whether they can exist in public without being killed, whether they can keep their housing, whether they are protected in any way under the law at all.
So when you say “I hate when politics are shoved in my face,” what you are actually describing is discomfort at being reminded that other people do not have the luxury of ignoring it.
You don’t have to like that reminder. But calling it “really fucking annoying” is you prioritizing your comfort over reality.
And then there’s “everything is political (it’s not).”
This is always said with the assumption that people mean “every single action is political,” which is not what is being argued most of the time.
What people mean is that the systems you live under, the distribution of power, resources, rights, and safety, all of that is political, and it shows up in places you might not personally think about.
Art communities are not magically outside of that. Who gets popular, who gets harassed, who gets believed, who gets platformed, who gets pushed out, those patterns don’t happen in a vacuum.
Art communities in particular are aggressively political by default whether you like it or not.
If you don't like that you need to get out of every art space. Tata, byebye.
So when someone talks about politics in those spaces, they are usually talking about the conditions shaping the space itself, not randomly injecting unrelated topics for fun.
You don’t have to engage with that. I suppose, you have the Privilege of that freedom.
But acting like it’s unreasonable or inherently annoying just makes it clear you don’t want to think about it, not that it doesn’t exist.
The part where you say she “will not shut up about it” is also something you need to look at.
No one is making you sit there and read every post she makes.
You have full control over your own experience online in this way.
You can unfollow, mute, block, blacklist tags, whatever you need to do. Those tools exist for a reason.
Instead, you stayed in proximity to someone you already knew was outspoken, continued to expose yourself to content you don’t like, and are now framing her as the problem for continuing to talk about things that matter to her.
Nothing about the designs changed. The only thing that changed is that you are now more aware of who she is as a person, and you don’t like that she talks about things you’d rather avoid for the sake of your own personal luxury, it's practically hedonistic really.
So now the association makes you uncomfortable.
You have options there. You can separate the art from the artist and move on, or you can sell the designs and disengage.
What doesn’t make sense is continuing to consume her work while complaining about how unbearable she is.
And I’m going to circle back to the beginning, because it matters.
You tried to preempt criticism by listing your own marginalizations as proof that you’re not privileged.
That is exactly the kind of thinking that causes people to ignore the ways they still benefit from certain systems while being harmed by others.
It’s not an either or. It’s both.
You can be oppressed in some ways and still have the ability to ignore issues that other people cannot.
I don’t want anyone here who uses their lack of privilege in one area to claim they aren’t privileged in others, and I certainly don’t want milquetoast centrists or anyone who behaves like one here regardless of the politics they claim to have.
