03/30 - MakoHaru

Thank you dear casscaid for the idea LMAO

Watcher, once they read all the comments to their announcement:

watcher leaving youtube... for a streaming service????

What do you mean "it's not historically accurate"? Of course it's historically accurate. It's an historically accurate 13th Century English knight using historically accurate 15th Century Italian weapons to kill historically accurate 10th Century Danish Vikings in historically accurate 17th Century France. What's not clicking?

I swear I’ve gone my whole life not understanding what was even slightly attractive about Ryan Gosling but him being Ken has completely changed my mind.

The man is flawless. A hero. Adorable. Top tier. A perfect Ken and dare I say it, a perfect 10

I see so many people starting to use Threads as a way to escape Twitter and yes, it's owned by Facebook's CEO and giving Facebook the monopoly of social media is bad but I think we should also talk about the fact that, you know, Threads isn't avalibe in the EU for privacy reasons????? That should be concerning to EVERYONE

Levi Ackerman | Shingeki No Kyojin The Final Season PV

GRADE SCHOOL SJWS stop using social justice language to explain shit to your conservative parents IT’S NOT GONNA GO THROUGH now all they have are some new words to make fun of. don’t tell your mom she’s being fatphobic tell her she’s being a dick

if i got possessed demonically i wouldn’t even notice it. with everything else i’ve got going on

I think we as a society need to be pushing for a more realistic and sympathetic wide spread analysis of Holden Caulfield. Everyone thinks he’s either some profound intellectual or is just some whiny kid. Holden was emotionally neglected, and it was implied the teacher that he’d trusted SA’d him. That kid wanted to help and protect other kids from the harshness of the world. He was a CHILD. He was whiny because he was a teenager but he had every right to be jaded and hate the world, but he still held out hope that kids could be protected from the harsh reality out there. He was a BABY. He didn’t know where the ducks in central park went when the water froze over. He hired a prostitute and spent the whole night talking to her. He needed someone to protect him. Catcher In The Rye is about a kid that the every adult in his life failed. Throwing money at a kid and offering them no warmth breaks them. Holden was a spoiled bratty kid, but he was just that. A KID. He needed someone to look after him.

you know what really gets my goat… all the people on that sub got to experience at least 4.5 decades of life. they got to explore and travel, they went to college, they found love, built families, established careers and got their name out there, they got to make some sort of mark in the world….all of them except for the kid. this dude was only 4 years (maybe 3) younger than me. he was barely a legal adult, still a teenager. prob didn’t even know much life outside of school, prob was only now starting or hadn’t been to college yet, hadn’t had a chance to experience life as an adult yet…. and he wasn’t even really supposed to be on that sub. 

he *didn’t* want to go. he was TERRIFIED. he was the only person on that stupid tuna can death trap with any semblance of common sense. dude basically got dragged there by his rich ass dad  (literally the richest family in pakistan for crying out loud) bc yall know how it is with rich ppl (SPECIALLY the billionaires) : business over everything, live to work but don’t work to live, family is secondary, etc etc…dude probably didnt get to spend much time with his dad bc he most likely wasnt around most of the time and was all work work work but knew he (the dad) wanted to go, prob wanted him to go as well and tried persuading him to join. and even though something didn’t feel right to him, it was father’s day weekend and he must have felt like he owed it to his dad to go and took the risk bc he trusted his dad/wanted to make him happy even though his gut feeling said not to and he really didn’t want to do it. ik he ‘was an adult’ technically, but he was literally only 19 and parental approval gets people to do stupid shit they probably wouldnt otherwise do against their better judgement…  

they literally confirmed (his aunt) he only went to bond with his dad…and instead his dad basically dragged him to both their deaths….this is so fucked. irresponsible and selfish. everyone else knew damn well at their big ages that was stupid and it was only a matter of time before something seriously tragic happened. and this guy knew better than to drag his kid into this knowing he probably would do it just bc it was his dad and a grown ass adult that could probably be trusted bc he’s ‘wiser and more experienced in life and knows better than a 19 y.o’ …and now they’re all dead. literally fuck off for this

Not to be cotroversial but it's all "Eat The Rich" until the rich actually die

I’ve been thinking a lot about fandom recently, both as someone who has engaged with it regularly for over a decade on various platforms and also as someone who has increasingly become disenchanted with those spaces. Not only because of pervasive issues of (especially anti-Black) racism, misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, and the like, but the particular way those things take shape within fandom.

At the most basic level I think fandom has a fundamental methodological problem with the way it approaches texts, be they shows, books, movies, etc. What I mean is that people almost invariably approach fandom at the level of character, often at the level of ship - your primary way of viewing a text is filtered through favourite characters and favourite relationships, as opposed to, say, favourite scenes, favourite themes, favourite conflicts.

This is reinforced through the architecture of dominant platforms that host fan content, particularly AO3 - there are separate categories for fandom, character and ship, and everything else is lumped together in “Additional Tags.” You cannot, for example, filter for fics on AO3 by the category of “critical perspective” or “thematic exploration”. There is no dedicated space for fan authors to declare their analytical perspective on the text they are writing about. If an author declares these things, they do so individually, they must go out of their way to do so, because there are no dedicated or universally agreed-upon tags to indicate those things, and if your fanfiction has a lot of tags, that announcement of criticality gets mushed together in a sea of other tags, sharing the same space with tags like “fluff and angst” or “porn without plot.” Perhaps one of the few tags closest to approaching this is the tag “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” which doesn’t indicate perspective or theme but rather that there is, broadly, some kind of “problematic content” contained therein - often of a sexual nature, frequently as a warning about “bad” ships.

Now this is not an inherent problem, as in, it is not inherently incorrect to approach a text and primarily derive pleasure from it by focusing on a given character or relationship. And I think a lot of mainstream media encourages (even requires) audiences to engage with their stories at these character- and ship-levels. The political economy of the production of art (one which is capitalistic, one that seeks to generate comfort, titillation, controversy, nostalgia, or shock for the purposes of drawing in viewership, one that increasingly pursues social media metrics of “engagement” and “impressions”, one that allows for the Netflix model of making two-season shows before cancelling them, as well as a whole host of other things) enforces a particular narrative orthodoxy, one that heavily focuses on the individual interiority of specific characters, one that is deeply concerned with the maintenance of white bourgeois middle class values of property ownership, the nuclear family, normative heterosexual sexuality and gender, settler-colonial ideas about community and environment, etc. If you do not care about the familial drama surrounding Shauna cheating on her husband in Yellowjackets, for example, because you think the institution of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is stupid and violent and heternormative, then you will have a difficult time engaging with the show in general. We exist within a deeply normative (and frequently reactionary) media environment that encourages us to approach art in a particular way, one that privileges the individual over other narrative components (settings, themes, conflicts, ideas, political and moral perspectives, structure, tone, etc).

All of which culminates in priming fans to engage with art at these levels and these levels alone, even when that scope is deeply inappropriate. A standout example I recently encountered was browsing the fandom tags on tumblr for the movie Prey - a movie that recontextualises the original Predator film by setting it in colonial America to make the argument that the horrific violence of white colonists and imperial soldiers is identical to the violence we see the Predator do to human beings. It is a movie that makes the argument that, despite this alien monster running around killing people, the villains of the franchise are these occupying soldiers and settlers, an alien force who themselves have just as little regard for (indigenous) human life.

And when browsing the tags on tumblr, what I found was dozens upon dozens of horny posts about how hot the predator monster was. Certainly there were discussion of the film’s narrative, and these posts got a good amount of notes, but the tags were heavily dominated with a focus on the Predator itself. People were engaging with this film not as a solid action movie with interesting and compelling anti-colonial themes, but as a way to be horny about a creature that is, ironically, a stand-in for white settler indifference to (and perpetuation of) indigenous suffering. And if this is your takeaway from an extremely straightforward film with a very clear message, this is not merely a failure to comprehend the content of a text, this is something beyond it - a problem that I think is due in part to the methodological problem of approaching all texts as vessels for bourgeois interiority, individual but ultimately interchangeable expressions of sexuality, perhaps best-expressed by the term “roving slash fandom,” a phenomenon wherein fans will move from one fandom to the next in search of two (usually white, usually skinny) guys to draw and write porn of, uncaring of any of the surrounding context of the stories they are embedded in, and consequently dominating a large sector of fandom discussion.

This even gets expressed in the primary ideological battleground of fandom itself, the ridiculous partitioning of all fan conflict into “pro-“ and “anti-“ shipping compartments. Your stance on engagement with fandom itself historically was (and still is) always first filtered through one of these two labels, describing your fundamental perspective on all texts you engage with. And both of these two labels are only concerned with shipping, as if all disagreements about art can only be interpreted through the lens of what characters you think are acceptable to draw or write having sex. Nowhere in this binary is space to describe any other perspective you might take, what approaches you think are valuable when interacting with art, what themes or stories you think are worth exploring. It’s not just that the pro/anti divide is juvenile and overly-simplistic, it is a declaration that all fan conflict must be read through the lens of shipping and shipping only - the implication being that any objections raised, and criticisms offered, is ultimately just bitching about ships you don’t like.

Which, again, I think is a fundamental error of methodology. It leaves no space for people to discuss the political and moral content of a work, the themes of a piece of art, the thorny issues of representation not just as expressed through individual characters but entire worlds, narratives, settings, and themes. You are always hopelessly stuck in the quagmire of “shipping discourse,” and even rejecting that framework will inevitably get you labelled as either pro- or anti-ship anyway - and you will almost invariably be labelled an “anti” if you express any kind of distaste for the bigoted behaviour of fans or the content of the text itself, again reinforcing the idea that this is all just pointless whining online about icky ships you personally hate.

And this issue is best perhaps epitomised by reader insert fanfiction, circumventing any need for you to project onto a character by literally inserting yourself into fiction, primarily in order to write/read about a character you want to fuck. This then intersects in particularly disgusting ways with real world politics, such as reader insert fics about Pedro Pascal going with you to BLM protests. Even if this is (incredibly over-generously) interpreted as a very poor attempt at being “progressive,” it still demonstrates that many (white) fans are often incapable of thinking about anything outside of a character-centric perspective, quite literally centring themselves in the process, and consequently they think it’s totally appropriate to do things like that. The fact that this is also frequently a racist lens is not coincidental, because again, a chronic focus on (fictional) individuality prohibits any structural perspective from entering the discussion, which necessarily excludes a coherent or useful perspective on systemic issues, where people come to the conclusion that the topic of police brutality is little more than a fun stage to enact whatever romantic shenanigans you want to get up to with a hot guy.

I will stress, again, that it is not a moral sin to have a favourite character, nor is it bad to enjoy reading about two guys having sex in fanfiction. I enjoy and do those things, I engage with fandom often through a character-centric lens (see my url) - because it’s fun! But I think that this being the dominant mode of engagement inherently excludes and marginalises all other approaches, and creates a fandom space where the most valuable way to talk about media is to discuss which two characters you most enjoy imagining fucking each other

I kinda wish that "oh they don't know they are dating yet lol" was used less as a joke because while it can be funny to think about people not recognizing their obvious feelings it also shows a major issue with amatonormativity and believing certain ways people interact with each other can only be read 1 way. It shoves relationships into a box and assumes the people in their own relationship don't know any better and so can't possibly label it correctly.

"they say they are friends but obviously they just don't know they're dating yet!" Assumes that 1. Friendship is less than romance. 2. That the way these people act with each other has to be romantic and any other interpretation is wrong including the people who are interacting own interpretations of their relationship. 3. Assumes you, a third party observing the relationship you are not part of, know more and better than the people in the relationship and thus have authority to put a label on said relationship.

Do you see the problem here? Do you understand how fucked up it is to constantly be told your relationship is something it's not. Do you understand how rude it is to undermine people's own ability to properly label their own relationships. It does not matter if YOU think they are dating. If they say they are friends then they are F R I E N D S.

The thing Abt relationships is that all parties in the relationship have to agree with what it is. If one says they are dating and the other says they are not, then they are not dating and they will never be until both agree on that face. Simple as that.

same energy

there’s more

SIGH

here’s another one

IT GETS WORSE WITH EVERY ADDITION

how does this get even worse

I think about once in a while…

We have another one…

This is the internet now tho 😭💀

@lifeistooshorttowasteyourtime @marril96 @latent-thoughts @suometar

😂😂😂

Omg so many additions since I last saw this post! 😂😂😂

It’s funny but incredibly telling how entitled/ignorant/insensitive some of these people are… idk if it’s an education gap or purposeful ignorance.

The really bewildering thing to me is that I remember when you needed to get up and pull a dictionary off the shelf, or visit a library to look up the facts you needed. Now people have all kinds of information literally at their fingertips and they can’t be bothered to use it.

Oh dear gods, it’s gotten worse

When you know politics but no facts

don’t take people too seriously on the internet

This hits different when combined with that “Americans don’t learn other countries exist till they’re in 5th Grade” post from the other day.

Demily recently got another one lads

Also, I love that, in the sign language one, it seems like the last image might’ve been a gif of “fuck you,” screenshot at the perfect time to let you know they were about to sign “fuck you”

As a romanian person I gotta add this one too

This is my favourite post on this website

I have literally had people tell me that I’m a gross appropriator for learning sign language while not deaf.

I sometimes cannot speak, but leaving that aside, what the FUCK lol

I still remember the guy who got mad at me because I spoke about the cultural role of the Norse gods in my life and my culture and insisted that I should be “proud of my Christian heritage instead” and quite simply would not believe me when I told him I was from Scandinavia because “that doesn’t exist anymore.”

someone please edit that map of europe with the spain void to also have a void for the whole of scandinavia

Every now and then I just have to reblog this.

(while particularly loving: “Gender of the Day: Wales”)

(also “Port O’Rico”)

Kissing you on the mouth rn Ireland!