guys i got this new bong but i’m not sure how it works?

This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol​ said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:

Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.

Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.

You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.

When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.

Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping. 

Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.

Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.

A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.

As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.

And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)

But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.

Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.

That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.

Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”

My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.

Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers. 

Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.

It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.

holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.  

Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.

Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.

“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.” 

A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.

Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.

So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?

(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)

(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)

This. This. A quintilian times this.

I come up against this a lot. Having PTSD brain along with a host of other illnesses, when I see people empathizing with genocidal villains or trying to make out a character who has done or keeps doing terrible things isnt really that bad or misunderstood, a pit opens in my stomach and I’m suddenly quite certain that these are terrible people who dont care about victims or what not. It’s opening up even as I write this when I think about specific examples. It all boils down to - “how can you possibly like this character or identify with them?”

The thing is that I like problematic characters too (but that’s different). I also latch onto and determinedly ignore unforgivable shit they’ve done that crosses all my lines (out of character, bad writing) I also rehabilitate characters in fic who are irredeemable in canon (they wasted them, it didnt have to be that way), I also fantasize about dark Fifty Shades shit where my happy healthy canon OTP is in a deliberately exploitative, predatory dynamic which still somehow manages to be perversely loving (it’s just jerk off fantasy). And yet somehow I don’t connect this dichotomy in my mind easily.

One of the worst things this site teaches the vulnerable, angry and impressionable is that we need to account for every taste, every desire and thought that we have. There was a time during the worst of my mental illness that I genuinely believed anyone who liked Game of Thrones was misogynistic, warped and immoral. Traumatized minds are prone to black and white thinking as a survival mechanism, but Tumblr culture makes sure to validate it and convince us that it’s rooted in reality. It wants us to believe that either society can be wrong or we can, and because society is obviously wrong then everything we feel must be right and moral. It conflates systemic issues (e.g: racist conditioning makes it difficult to empathize with non-white characters) with direct personal failing (they don’t care about black and brown people at all). In doing so, it erases our humanity, where most of us are generally well-meaning but flawed and, while influenced by systemic social conditioning, also like and dislike and love and hate things for intensely personal reasons which most of us can’t really articulate and shouldn’t have to.

There are absolutely media and fic and fic writers and tropes that I abhor, not just because they are triggering to me (hate A/B/O but its not a moral judgement) but because they arent on the same moral page as I am (things that seem explicitly abuse apologist) And that’s fine. I avoid them, bitch about them to my friends, discuss my issues with the subject in general terms while doing my best not to stir up Drama (which I don’t always succeed in). But I think these are all reasonable reactions when living in a conflict-ridden world with other people. Unreasonable reactions would be “EVERYONE WHO LIKES THIS POST GETS BLOCKED!!!” “IF YOU SHIP THIS PAIRING YOU’RE A TOXIC PERSON!1!1!” “CIRCULATE THIS SELF-CARE BLOCK LIST OF EVERYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH ME!!!!”

I’ve actually done some of that shit in my long and storied career of being overreactive and judgemental in fandom, and lemme tell you, the first person it hurt was me. That thing about pointing with one finger making three turn back towards you is TRUE. When I positioned myself as a moral authority, I need to convince myself and others that I have the high ground. if I call other people into account, I need to be able to account for everything I like and think and say and feel. And I can’t do that. I was socialized in the same flawed systems and even if I wasn’t, as OP says, there’s always going to be that shredding in my mind trying to harmonize with something else.

I just became more and more mired in anxiety that I wasnt feeling and thinking and doing the right things (what a terrible expectation of a very ill, lonely, traumatized girl) and I kept paring my own breathing space into a smaller and smaller circle, trying to be as Non-Problematic as possible. It’s a little like being throttled by your own hand just so you can avoid being stabbed by someone else’s.

I’m still not perfect, still prone to PTSD brain and demonizing people unfairly and calling things out which I should let well enough alone. But I have learned the very valuable lesson to not mix progressive politics up with personal morality, to not stand as judge and jury over my own tastes or anyone else’s as far as possible and to learn how to let awareness of social issues co-exist with mine and other people’s enjoyment of problematic things. Healing comes through acceptance and catharsis, not repression and punitive social justice.

“Traumatized minds are prone to black and white thinking as a survival mechanism, but Tumblr culture makes sure to validate it and convince us that it’s rooted in reality…

Healing comes through acceptance and catharsis, not repression and punitive social justice.”

This comment is so important. This whole post is.

An R-18 Josuke(’s Voice Actor) Audio Masterpost

I know a lot of folks have been passing around that audio with Yuuki Ono banging you after you turn into a catgirl… and for good reason! It’s damn good. But Yuki Ono has done more audio porn than that… like A LOT MORE. So I’ve collected all of the NSFW otome audio I could get here! Wear headphones for the best listening experience because 3D audio is almost always in use and boy oh boy does it make a difference.

A few of these were collected from a post by daiya-scenarios. Thank Jesus for that blog! And thanks to dukecosmic for inspiring this!

Translated

Stuff I Can’t Find Translations For

I’m sure there are more but that’s all I can find for now. To be updated?

@platinumvonkarma

This is for you, my children. Also for me because i can’t reblog this on my main oops

-Lettuce

quality 

I’m actually laughing really hard

this show had the budget of five dollars and a tuna sandwich and still managed to have some quality lol’s 😂😂😂

Mugshot of John Wojtowicz who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for robbing a bank in order to fund his partners sex change. August 23rd 1972, New York

via reddit

the only good lgbt ally

also when they made dog day afternoon and bought the rights to his story he used the money to help fund edens surgery so he ended up able to help after all (after serving six years in prison for the heist)

other great facts:

- he based his bank robbery plan off The Godfather and Al Pacino ended up playing him and John Cazale played his accomplice - referred to himself as ‘the gay Babe Ruth’ - when he got out of jail he applied for a job as a security guard at the same bank with a T-shirt that said ‘I robbed this bank’ and put Al Pacino down as a reference - the robbery attempt was broadcast on TV and a crowd of LGBTQ activists came to cheer him on

To all the dweebs whining in the notes about how this man is not a hero and robbing banks is bad…how does it feel to be an incurably boring person?

How I made my wig for Josuke (Pompadour wig tutorial)

I’ve had some questions about this and I’ve only now gotten around to making this. Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures while I was making the wig, so this will be mostly text based!

EDIT: FAQ post is here. Please reference this before you send me an ask!

WHAT YOU NEED:

HOW TO MAKE IT:

captured dragon :3

Genji and Zenyatta as Daft Punk

i know im like a week late to the Team Old jokes i just cant keep up with u kids these days on the internet

also, consider: we’re only one granny away from a six-person no-repeats all-senior-citizen-discount-eligible dream team blizzard make it happen??

what this fandom needs

What fandom, you ask? All of them. There’s not enough in any fandom.

well i didn’t come here to pray

                                                                                                —edit by @kigeky

Hello there, jotahan shippers! I am glad to announce that yours truly, @kigeky and @sloppyjojos are hosting a jotahan week.

The event starts on August 15 and ends on August 21. Let’s enjoy this sweet summer time with some good content: art, fanfiction, graphics, metas, playlists - whatever floats your boat.

The themes for the event are:

We also have a few rules you should follow during the event:

That’s it, if you have any questions you can contact any of the organizers.

✒️ ✒️ Good luck and have fun! 🐬 🐬

I just learned that some websites use cookies to adjust prices. That is, if you visit a certain website a lot the price will increase.

You can tell if that’s the case by checking the same web page on a different browser if you have a different number of stored cookies for that site. I checked something on Chegg and it was $14.95 on Chrome, $19.95 on Firefox, and $16.95 on Safari.

The fix? Clear your cookies for that website.

Reblog, save a wallet.

Plane tickets almost always do this!

PLANE TICKETS DO THIS ALL THE DAMN TIME 

When you’re looking for plane tickets and waiting for prices to drop, ALWAYS clear your cookies beforehand and switch between browsers. A friend of mine was looking for a flight and getting prices that were the CHEAPEST at $800-1000, I sent her a link for a round trip that was like $495, and it read as $900 on her computer because she had been hounding the airline site. 

alternatively: avoid all this headache by using incognito when shopping for plane tickets, text books, etc

Hotel rooms are notorious for this, as well. Just like, go on incognito mode to look at these sites, saves u a lot of time & hassle.

Bruh I ain’t never know dis thank you man

If I travelled back in time and tried to explain this text to young me, there’s literally no way.

hi guyss ^-^ pls enjoy this sheith doujinshi me and law-kun stayed up very late working on.. what do u think?! does shiro-kun have a chance w keith?! will he ever graduate high school?!!!! stay tuned!!!!

I like them all!! 

–

Twitter: @Awdeko Instagram: @Awdeko