[caspercryptid]

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.

I don't say any of this to excuse it. I think everyone needs to be more aware of this because if you think abuse has to be intentional you will never realize you are capable of abusive behavior. You will never realize you are being shitty to the people you love, because YOU know what you mean, YOU know you don't mean any harm. But you're doing harm. You need to pay attention to the impact you have on other people, and you need to do it all the time, Especially when you feel least capable of doing so. Sorry! You live in a society. Get your head out of your ass.

[vi-gilante-1010]

Are people actually accusing tadc-crit of bullying Gooseworx off of Tumblr and blatantly ignoring Tumblr staff's egregious habit of banning trans women for daring to breathe. Not everything is the fault of critical communities oml

[vi-gilante-1010]

This is the only post I plan to make on TADC, because it's not exactly what this blog was originally made for, but I guess this is my critical sideblog so this is where it's gonna go. Barring any and all issues I have with the creator and VAs of the show for their racism outside of it(which IS deeply upsetting, and shouldn't be handwaved away because "it WaS sEVen YeaRs aGO"), TADC still ultimately missed the mark for me because it ultimately failed Ragatha as a character.

Ragatha, for the first 4 episodes, appeared to be equally as important to the story as Jax, and the two of them had been set up to be narrative foils and opposing views as to how to survive the circus. Aesthetically, this is still technically true, but Ragatha's overall impact on the story ended up being extremely lackluster as a whole, with her having way less time and no real character arc to speak of. Every other character in the show has an arc you can reason out over the course of the show except for her.

Pomni acclimates to the circus and starts building relationships with the rest of the cast despite it sometimes feeling like a chore, because she doesn't want anyone to feel alone.

Jax's relentless abuse of everyone around him as a result of his repression until it kills him eats up half of the show, and even after he abstracts, we spend half an hour in his mindscape learning about his worst fantasies he's made to cover up his fear.

Kinger's bouts of clarity in darkness allow him to open up about his past and comfort Pomni and Ragatha, and teach the others about the circus.

Gangle struggles to regain a semblance of control over herself between her lack of regulation over her emotional state and the abuse she suffers from Jax.

Zooble struggles to learn to love themself, but starts building his own self-love while helping Gangle find herself. Even without having a dedicated episode, they still manage to fit this in, if only barely.

Caine grapples with his need for love and company coming out violently and accepts that he can't force love from others, and needs to meet the humans on their own terms.

Ragatha..... gets mad at Jax once and immediately apologizes. Her important conversation with Pomni happens offscreen, and we're just supposed to assume a lot of their friendship between then and the finale. The one time she tries to open up, the entire group just stares at her and it's quickly brushed past. There is no character arc. There is no moment where her role is really needed by the people around her or appreciated by the narrative. There's just... nothing of substance you can point to to say "this is what makes her story" because she doesn't have one.

I was holding out hope that, despite everything, the finale would finally, finally give Ragatha some real spotlight in the story, even if that came down to her dead friendship with Jax. Not fucking even, as Ribbit, Kaufmo, and Jax barely interacted with her, and their "friendship's" only notable moment even after seeing Jax's history in the circus was when he used her to get what he did to Ribbit off his chest and then swear her to silence. And Ragatha's hatred of him, that one scene we do get between her and Pomni, is so unearned and unfocused on Ragatha. There's absolutely no buildup to it, and she doesn't do anything else for the rest of the episode. We spend more time watching her and Pomni stare at each other while walking away from each other than anything else.

You can say anything you want about how Jax is supposed to be a bad person who brought about his own ruin, how his repression of his queerness(whatever form that may take) leading him to destroy himself and everyone around him he cared about was villainous on purpose. I know that. I can see that. I don't care. It consumed half the show, and Ragatha completely fell to the wayside. Narrative foils, my ass. Ragatha exists to be a victim of Jax, and isn't allowed to be anything more.

[mooneserval]

I noticed people have been dogging on critical tags recently and I’m just going to say:

Most of us are not D1 haters in our lives or something like many people assume lol. We just found a media that we were passionate about in a positive way. Then, we found out something negative about that media, subjectively or objectively. It can be something more minor, like being frustrated with a writing choice, or it can be deeper, like writing perpetuating harmful stereotypes/narratives/etc., and sometimes, it even bleeds into real life, when we find out the creators behind something we liked are… less than stellar people. Perhaps they even partook in bigotry or a harmful act that overshadows their work. Or at the very least is something that should be kept in mind.

And so, that passion gets translated into a different type of passion. A drive to talk about what we wish was different or what bothers us. Some of us might do both, we might talk about the bad things while also still engaging with general fandom content separately because it fulfills certain aspects that canon might not or is just fun to see.

We NEED crit spaces to talk about certain media when we feel mixed or negative on them. And we usually don’t cross tag with the main tag. We vent our frustrations in critical tags because we want a space where people understand where we are coming from, and we also don’t want to bring down people in the main tag (excluding serious issues, which do happen sometimes, but you know what I mean).

I’m more of a lover than a hater, corny but true. I don’t critique anything I despise. I critique stuff I like/d that I got disappointed by for one reason or another. Maybe I even still like it but I’m exasperated and would rather not stress about the loud minority of fans who cannot accept anything but positivity. And yeah, you’ll find the occasional crit blogger who is doing it for malicious reasons, there are people who hate to hate out there, but that’s not most of us. So please, don’t go in this tag expecting just positive opinions, and then pick a fight when you see people using the tags what they’re meant for!!!

[manfedrainbows]

Is your favorite show really the "pinnacle of queer media" if queer poc voice concerns with its racism and your gut reaction is to dismiss that? You can enjoy the show all you want, go nuts, but don't say it's "the best piece of queer media" when it's created by racists. If it doesn't include all of us, all of us, it's not the "pinnacle" of anything.

[undertalepilled]

i think part of the reason i think about arcane season 2 so much a year and a half later, is not only because I had waited with rose tinted glasses for years for the release of one of my favorite shows, but also the reception for it. if everyone agreed it was dogshit, then its like, okay they dropped the ball, thats disappointing. but nah, the vast majority of the reception is praise and not only that but people are coming out of the woodwork and revealing their centrist and fascist biases and their alignment with the shows political message which is what really pisses me off. we could argue over bad writing but the centrist political moral it pushed is undeniable. media influences minds and I do not think arcane season 2 had a good influence, judging by how many people I've seen defend police brutality, martial law, or abuse against butch women.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[vi-gilante-1010]

I've always been the type to enjoy flawed products, so Arcane specifically making me progressively more upset with its conclusion has always given me pause on why exactly I struggle to interact with it. But I think I've finally identified the exact point of hypocrisy in its messaging that disturbs me so much. Despite the overarching theme being "violence begets more violence" and being a warning against continuing the cycle, the hopeful ending is achieved by having almost half the main cast kill themselves on-screen. Suicide, violence enacted upon yourself, is treated as penance, as noble self sacrifice for the good of everyone else who's been touched by violence. And I cannot emphasize enough how abhorrent of a conclusion that is.

Jinx, who spends the show as a groomed teenage girl struggling with severe psychosis, has to kill herself and leave behind everyone who loves her for the sake of peace. Viktor, a man slowly dying from lung damage, is turned into an ethnic-cleansing cult leader by magic against his will, and is then blamed for this because he "wasn't accepting his imperfections" and has to allow the arcane tear him apart to be considered forgiven. Jayce, an innovator who invented expressly to better people's lives, is treated as having been inherently wrong for using the arcane at all, and allows himself to get torn up by the arcane alongside Viktor to apologize for keeping him alive too long.

All three of these characters have committed acts of violence and done wrong to the people around them. But to act as though the only true way to atone for this is by accepting death as the end is deeply, deeply flawed messaging, and glorifies suicide as the height of redemption.

Let's not forget Heimerdinger, who also "kills himself" to send Ekko back to their original timeline as his way of correcting the mistakes he'd made with Jayce. This also applies, as any Arcane watcher unfamiliar with LoL lore wouldn't know that he'd come back, and would just see his letting his body be torn apart by the arcane and assume that's that. He lets his body be torn apart by the technology of his first student to save his second.

There's is another notable suicide in the show, that being Isha's, but rather than being penance, it acts as a permanent immortalization of goodness. It's no coincidence, then, that it's the first of the 5 suicides to occur. Isha, a child, kills herself to hold off a rampaging, Shimmer-infested Warwick, and does so to demonstrate the true goodness of her character, how she stands as a representation of how the cycle of violence affects the innocent. She stands for revolution, she heals Jinx by existing and caring, and she dies trying to save her with her own weapon from her own father.

In sacrificing herself, Isha demonstrates to Jinx and the audience that this is the morally right thing to do, and is what someone who sees and embodies goodness would do. So when we see Heimerdinger, Jinx, Jayce, and Viktor do the same, we as the audience know that they are doing the Right Thing™ by killing themselves because it means less people are getting hurt. It encourages self destruction. It praises ending your own life. It celebrates and immortalizes this choice as a spiritually cleansing one, a final act of goodness to redeem your crimes.

To reiterate- Suicide is violence. Committing suicide is not glamorous or beautiful, and it's not something to solve your problems or correct your mistakes. Suicide is part of the cycle. Treating suicide as necessary, as a moral duty to others, is so beyond foul. It drives me absolutely batshit insane that a series supposedly demonstrating why and how violence builds upon itself would treat this as the solution when you've "gone too far."

[nostalgicmermaaiid]

I just love that one of the only poc characters was brought back as a plot device to progress the arc of a white character, then promptly discarded because the duffers wanted a death but didn’t have the balls to do it to the main cast! I love that she didn’t get to interact with anyone besides hopper and jane, so nobody really cared about her. I love that this sentiment is echoed by the general audience who forget to include her in their lists of characters who “deserved better”. I love that in this show for weirdos and outcasts, the two most traumatized and outcasted characters’ stories end in death, and/or the inability to live a normal life in society. I love this writng. I love this message so much yay

[moonfruito]

put aside the shipping discourse for a moment and lets talk about how the duffers portray the abused female body as spectacle in this show. that scene where kali was running through rooms and rooms of dying pregnant women? karen fighting through her grievous, near life-threatening injuries to be a mother? the treatment of el/jane's character? over and over this show makes victims of its female characters and makes it 'ok' by having them be strong and fight back. the constant dehumanisation of jane throughout the show and the denial of her autonomy by entrapping her in a relationship the moment that she escaped her prison and gained a scrap of freedom is not by chance. it is a consistent and concentrated effort to keep her in constant pain and clip her wings so that she can never heal and her wounds stay open, just so that we can sit back and entertain ourselves watching her try to fight for her freedom with her supernatural powers without ever giving her real narrative power. the whole operation of el's creation was built off of the exploitation and torture of vulnerable pregnant women by a power-hungry man, but the show never reckons with that legacy. the suffering and abuse of female bodies becomes backdrop, a prop aiding the dark tone and aesthetic of the show rather than a serious narrative theme that jane should be grappling with as a descendant of that legacy. instead, she becomes an continuation of it. her suffering is an extension of her mother's: a tortured woman being controlled and used by men around her in a bid for power, ultimately reduced to a plot device as the narrative succeeds over her.

[eeriesilkworm]

They actually killed her. They fucking killed Jane Hopper and her sister. Young abused girls who never got to become full-fledged, healed young women.

And they had the gall to self-insert with Mike and say, “Hey guys—imagine an ending where she didn’t die! Imagine an ending where she was finally free after a lifetime of being imprisoned and in hiding!” Oh, but even in this hypothetical “good” ending, her brown sister still dies. Of course.

They very lazily resolved Jane’s fear that she was a monster, and then had her call the next generation of innocent abused children like her “more monsters” which was entirely out of character.

The children who did get their happy ending were “normal” and shoe-horned into the final season.

We talk about the Will Byers humiliation ritual… what about the Jane Hopper humiliation ritual?

After a fight in which her boyfriend triggered memories of her abuser (while too busy focussing on his “relationship” problems with his platonic bestie) he brings her cold eggos and refuses to apologise for not being supportive of her struggles. He makes it about him. He calls her ridiculous. She begs for him to verbalise his affection for her—write it even—and is then thrown into another prison where she is re-traumatised by her abuser, only for said boyfriend to chauffeur her away after days of homoromantic heart to hearts with his best friend.

They had her wear a fucking collar. Her abuser was the one to unlock it. They didn’t even let her remove her own literal and metaphorical shackles.

Mike professes to her while kneeling at a fucking pizza dough freezer as she’s being choked out. No eye contact. No intimacy. Because his gay best friend reminded him to. She never even gets to respond to this monologue in the canon series, because I guess her feelings don’t actually matter.

Even in her final moments before death, her character was reduced to her love story with the boy who found her in the woods and kept her in his basement. And he still couldn’t say “I love you” back for some reason.

She was never free. She went from being trapped in the lab, to being hidden in Mike’s basement, to being hidden in Hopper’s cabin. She got in trouble and yelled at for leaving these confined spaces and doing normal teenage things. The only exception was when she made herself useful to them by using her powers, endangering herself, and often to the point of physical exhaustion.

Her father figure supposedly learned to allow her more freedom at the end of season 3, but he returns to being over-protective, angry and condescending at the beginning of season 5, undoing all character development.

And we’re expected to thank these men for “taking care of her” all these years, when everything she ever accomplished was no thanks to them but to her own merit, her own desire to do good, her own zest for a life and freedom she never got to have.

Was she… really just used as a tool to help Hopper process his daughter’s death? Was she used as plot armour to ensure our characters could survive the supernatural antagonists? Was she used to give Mike Wheeler something to do other than play games in his basement?

I’m going to throw up. Jane Hopper I’m so sorry. Millie Bobby Brown I’m so sorry.

[powerlin3princ3ss]

and if i said not enough people are mad about how they handled kali and that she arguably has had the most trauma bc she lost her freedom, autonomy, and only family she'd ever have and was treated horribly by the characters in the show and the viewers until the very moment she was shot and died for zero reason. oh and she was never going to be more than a plot device to save el, when both of them deserved to be free, loved, and happy after surviving abuse.

you can just tell this shit was written by men.

[brainrotdept]

if you're review bombing an episode in which a queer character comes out, released in this current political/cultural climate, I am going to need you to: take a deep breath, think, hop offline, and retether yourself to the reality of the situation.

[vi-gilante-1010]

Too many people complaining that the guy with a girlfriend didn't dump or cheat on her with her brother in the final act, not enough people pointing out that the lesbian relationship was used solely to make a guy realize it's okay to be gay and then proceeded to be the only couple excluded from the epilogue.

Too many people complaining their non-canon yaoi stayed non-canon, not enough people calling out they reintroduced tortured pregnant women and a malicious government experiment just to make Kali suicidal and them unceremoniously killed them offscreen.

Too many people crying that Will gets the chance to move on from his unrequited crush on Mike, not enough people pointing out that the only black man in the series has been reduced to Max's boyfriend.

Too many people only pointing out the flaws in stranger things that have been there from the second season now that their yaoi isn't canon, not enough people admitting that's the only reason they're doing it.

I get it. I like Byler too. And they shouldn't have marketed them so heavily if nothing was gonna come from it. But don't act like that was the pinnacle piece that would make or break the series. It's been bad for years.

[vi-gilante-1010]

If I had a nickel for every time one of the female leads of a Netflix series ended their story by contemplating suicide for the latter half of the final season, only to be talked down by one of the people closest to them, only to then fake their deaths and run away from everybody anyways because being around them is too dangerous for them and glorifying their decision to kill themselves as noble and heroic and The Only Way without actually directly confirming whether they lived or not and separating them from everyone they've ever loved "for their own good". I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but two years in a row, Netflix, really???

[kaoskuantico]

Seeing how fandoms react to "redemption" arcs like the ones Caitlyn Kiramman and Endeavor allegedly had make me realize people don't actually know what redemption is. They just like saying a character was redeemed without having the process.

Their best defense is that they lost stuff on the way. Endeavor his arm, Caitlyn her mother and an eye. But those loses weren't because of that redemption.

At the end of their stories, Caitlyn kept being a privileged enforcer who still abuses zaunites, and Endeavor has the woman he bought and abused for decades as his caretaker and is rich. None of them really faced the consequences of their actions.

Even if they were called out at some point (Caitlyn by Vi and Ekko, Endeavor by Natsuo and Shouto), they're painted as if they have higher moral ground. Midoriya encourages Shouto to forgive his abuser. Vi stays with her even if they never talked about what happened, Ekko is literally forgotten.

One could say they had a bigger enemy to face and needed all the support they could have, but afterwards, they're still privileged.

Endeavor forces his way to see his dying son, all under the excuse of atonement. The fact this man isn't arrested nor given the non-grata status is simply sad.

Caitlyn becomes a dictator and abuses Zaun citizens under the excuse of grieving her mother. Meanwhile zaunites lose family and friends on a daily basis and they're the bad guys for fighting back.

The thing here is that none of them actually suffered consequences, they were called out once or twice but it was shrugged off. And then people go praising them for their "wonderful redemptions". That wasn't redemption, that was glamorisation.

I really liked Caitlyn's personality in the first season and what could've been. I love Endeavor's name, quirk and design. But those two are terrible people in-universe and never got redeemed. Those are facts.

I'll also add Bakugo to this list:

I also hate how Bakugo's redemption worked out. Bakugo had been tormenting Midoriya for a decade and no one cared. Bakugo attacks him in fr

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

Idk how much this has been discussed before, but I've heard a lot of argument about what The Gray exactly is meant to be, while it's safe to say there's no 1:1 real-world equivalent, I've heard it likened to certain real-world chemical warfare tactics such as tear gas. But, I was listening to a video essay on Libby, Montana and came to a realization.

It's asbestos.

First off, I know asbestos is a dust, not a gas, but as I said before, no real-world material is going to be perfectly 1:1. There are some notable differences: asbestos is not a gas, airborne asbestos is not visible while the Gray is, and asbestos was used in many products and structures while the Gray was not, etc. But I do think that this is the closest substance to which the Gray can be compared in the real world.

Both are associated heavily with the mining industry, with asbestos contamination a prevalent issue in vermiculite mines, both of which are somewhat remedied by the use of industrial ventilation. Both of them, while being prevalent in the mines, spread to the wider settlements around the mines and cause health issues for the people living there. Long-term exposure to these substances causes chronic lung disease (Lung Blight, Asbestosis) and can lead to an illness of the lungs that progresses rapidly, is largely untreatable, and usually fatal (Viktor's S1 diagnosis, mesothelioma).

Again, while it's not 1:1, I definitely think asbestos was a dominant inspiration of the Gray, although I am not versed in any of the LoL lore that wasn't included in Arcane, so I'd be interested to hear if there's anything else that further confirms or contradicts this.

Anyway that's horrifying.