#misc text posts

[mswyrr]

i don't even go here but i am constitutionally obligated to want the autistic doctor and the "mean" lesbian doctor to kiss

[assbutt-of-the-readers]

I've been gone for a hot minute but I just wanna say to any new Twitter users, deleting a post doesn't matter here if people have already reblogged it. Good luck hiding your shame now<3

[mswyrr]

Coming across this in a queer history book published 2011 like. "This tension remains with us today." Yeah. That's still fucking true.

[mswyrr]

When Americans literally don't know that every country has more or less privileged groups - rich people and poor people, ethnic and religious divisions, multiple languages and accents associated with greater or lesser status, regional variation like starkly different opportunities for people in cities vs rural folks. And that a story about privilege would have to handle that intelligently in each specific character's case, not simply present people as a monolith of "community loving folks who embrace the hive naturally uwu" because they're from the complicated, extremely different from each other, countries that are actually the majority of the world.

One of my colleagues in grad school was studying the modern history of Hindu nationalism and persecution along lines of caste and religion. Buddhist leadership and community has played a key role in genocidal acts against the Rohingya. People are complex and power varies dramatically *within* as well as *between* countries. Often those variations of power have both connections to imperialism *and* their own deeper histories that predate that.

[mswyrr]

He's explaining their pov and intent, which isn't the same thing as saying the story believes their pov is accurate. You know who else probably thought she was just doing the right thing to correct a misbehaving child? Carol's mom.

I've read the files of staff at 1950s US mental hospitals participating in acts of evil against mentally ill and disabled people while thinking they were doing the right thing. Interviews with nurses in Nazi Germany who murdered disabled children as part of "Project T4" and thought they were preventing suffering. The writings of Spanish colonizers who truly thought they were "saving souls."

(There's even a whole discourse around colonizers referring to people as "children" to justify their actions. "Little brothers" in need of guidance.)

Intent isn't a magic beam that prevents your actions from crossing the line into evil acts. Most atrocities have been committed by a lot of people who thought they were right. It feels like people really think atrocities aren't evil unless the all the persons doing them are cackling about how evil they want to be. That pov would place almost all acts of evil done in history outside of the category of evil. That would be absurd.

[mswyrr]

Years ago now, a quote from an article about a teenage girl who killed Nazis as part of resistance efforts during WW2 got popular on this site. The post was very rah rah #girlpower. I was doing graduate research on ww2 and mental health at the time and, when I looked deeper, I found something unsurprising: she dealt with trauma for the rest of her life from the experience.

There's this weird thing where the website that will condemn "toxic masculinity" actually often buys a lot of the things it sells. Often thinks that those things are good and elevating for girls in particular! The lies about what violence is and what it does, even if your cause is righteous. A weird disgust at the "mushy stuff" work of survival and victory and how messy and long that fight is. That sort of thing.

[mswyrr]

On the one hand, annoying people who can't stand when a female character is well written. On the OTHER hand: multiple writing teams currently who are writing female leads so well it pisses people off. What a gift.

[mswyrr]

Lowkey scared by how casually people in Pluribus fandom express eco fascist logic (that humans must be reduced and their agency stripped from them, that mass death and dehumanization is the only path to "saving the planet") and call it social justice when the two things are antithetical. But I'm also sympathetic to how painful this period of human history is, and one piece of art that really helped me process it was the Poison Ivy comics by G Willow Wilson, especially this part re resisting the logic of eco fascism:

We are the green. We evolved here, and we belong here, and we do not have to treat each other and the planet in desecrating and violating ways. Eco-fascism is animated by the same violent logic of domination that got us into this mess, and it will not get us out of it.