btw disabled people. please make things easier for yourself in any way you can. shit is hard enough already we don’t need to refuse ourselves any help we can get

My mom, after spending an extended weekend with my dad's old college classmates and their families: It's so weird that all of these very weird, intelligent and structured men who got their masters in engineering in the late 1980s have sons that are all autistic and daughters who all have mood disorders.

Me: Yeah, very weird. Why could that be?

One of my favourite things about being disabled is the excitement and happiness when you can do small things that others might find easy

It’s such simple joy to be able to make yourself a cup of tea for the first time (or the first time in a while!) or to just make a simple meal that you couldn’t before! Finally figuring out how to make something that doesn’t overwhelm you, etc etc

It’s a joy in the mundane that ableds need to learn from sometimes /lh

Gotta love how Aziraphale and Crowley represent both sides of the autistic room spectrum.

From “I gotta have everything I love in one single space at once” to “if more than two things cross my line of sight at a time I am going to fucking kill god”

My natural, messy, refuses-to-throw-anything inclinations: Aziraphale's bookshop.

What I actually need to get anything done: Crowley's apartment.

Why be just 1 half of this ship dynamic when you can be both? ;)

(ADHD is hard to deal with because your brain is a living paradox).

hello beloveds ☺️

made an alternate version for the mutuals ive never spoken to

You are appreciated

my grubhub being delivered by a wizard or some sort of apostle

[start ID: a message which reads: This is your Grubhub driver, Thomas. Seek me outside, for I have come /End ID.]

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:

No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.

Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.

Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.

John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!

Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.

The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.

It's all fiction.

None of it is real.

The characters are fake and do not exist.

Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.

[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]

Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression

You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.

Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.

I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.

But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.

You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.

You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.

You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:

You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.

When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.

Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.

In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."

Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”

Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."

Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.

Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.

Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.

My main sources for this post are:

And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:

Many thanks to the posters above who noted that freedom of expression for creators is about more than just letting people write about your squicks.

It's also about letting people write things you believe are immoral, harmful, or wrong.

Because right now, in your country, your state, your town, your neighborhood, there are people thinking the same things about your own beliefs and your own writing. And if you live in a democracy, your side can't and won't always be in charge.

Censor not lest ye shall be censored. This has been a public service announcement.

(React, reply, or unfollow as you wish, but this is a matter of principle and I will only bother replying to new and interesting opinions).

Hmm…that sounds familiar…

Above: Why starting new habits is hard when you have ADHD–even if these habits would make it easier for you to remember your habits!

Related:

Cartoon above shows a balding man with glasses complaining to his wife, “I wanted to buy that medicine against forgetfulness, but I forgot its name!”

Above: Cartoon shows a woman with glasses holding a medication bottle in one hand and a pill in another, complaining to a man, “It tastes good and is guaranteed to improve memory, but I can’t remember to take it.”

Can't believe I forgot to include this one:

Cartoon in which a woman at a computer tells a man, "The library book you checked out on improving your memory is 12 weeks overdue." Ahahahaha.

Hmm...that sounds familiar...

Above: Why starting new habits is hard when you have ADHD--even if these habits would make it easier for you to remember your habits!

Related:

Cartoon above shows a balding man with glasses complaining to his wife, "I wanted to buy that medicine against forgetfulness, but I forgot its name!"

Above: Cartoon shows a woman with glasses holding a medication bottle in one hand and a pill in another, complaining to a man, "It tastes good and is guaranteed to improve memory, but I can't remember to take it."

idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol

One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine

I love that image. It’ll be living rent-free in my head now.

There is one legitimate reason to think carefully before taking headache medicine, and it doesn’t apply to most people.

If you take it every day, for several days straight, especially multiple times a day, you can get a rebound headache (link goes to the Mayo Clinic website). 

However, that is only true for people who have a history of migraines or other severe headaches.

And then you’re not avoiding taking your meds because you think it’s nobler to suffer, you’re avoiding taking meds so that you suffer less.

I mean, I could have made it narrower, but it seemed better to me to pick endpoints beyond where I expected the game to fall, yes?

Unless you're saying that Tiny Frog Wizards falls outside those points on the anthropomorphism scale?

What I mean to say is those are weird end-points for a scale of relative anthropomorphism because they make it difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by anthropomorphism.

The rabbits of Watership Down, for example, are almost entirely non-anthropomorphic in terms of their anatomy and use of technology, but they're considerably more politically sophisticated than a lot of media that's ostensibly much further up the scale of anthropomorphism; heck, they even have rabbit Fascism!

Redwall, conversely, is weirdly inconsistent; early books strongly imply that the mice of Redwall Abbey are roughly the size of real mice, while later books back away from that and adopt a more human-normative scale. Anatomic anthropomorphism, meanwhile, seems to vary not only between species, but also between members of the same species, based on how civilised or, ah, "savage" they are (and isn't that a can of worms).

Let's put it another way: if Watership Down and Redwall are the end-points of your scale, where does The Jungle Book fall? The Wind in the Willows? The Great Mouse Detective? Bambi?

Well.....it’s actually a completely reasonable scale, is the thing?

Like. Try this phrasing instead: “Where does this story fall, onn a scale from ‘To an outside human observer, these would be completely normal animals doing completely expected animal things (and not because they’re hiding/faking it)’ to ‘these animals wear clothes/armor, write/draw, use tiny human weapons, cook food that they eat at tables, and otherwise act like tiny humans’?”

And your examples kind of....make the point? Bambi would be just inside WD (there is a zero percent chance of any WD owl ever giving playful relationship advice to a rabbit), and Wind in the Willows/Great Mouse Detective would probably be about even? I’d argue GMD would be less so than WitW because due to the presence of human stuff in their setting, it’s much more relevant/restrictive to the characters that they are in fact mice, whereas there’s functionally no humans in Redwall to ground it.

Personally, I am VERY firmly of the opinion that anything further along the scale than Redwall is no longer an animal story. Like--I adore Disney’s Robin Hood as much as anyone, but that’s not an animal story? It’s Robin Hood with furries, which is extremely valid, but it’s not anthropomorphic fiction, it’s a normal story with anthro character designs. 

Again--that’s not, like, derogatory, or a criticism, it just is what it is.

I suppose you could argue that the back marker in the Watership Down direction should really be something like Black Beauty, where there’s no culture worldbuilding and the horses really don’t have any rich inner lives or mythology of their own; but I think that’s measuring “anthropomorphism” on a totally different axis than the one the asker was thinking of.

....Okay I might actually need to make a larger post about this because I saw this post and then spent the entire bus ride home thinking about sliding scales of anthropomorphism and I got, like, really into it but I’m genuinely just thinking out loud here and don’t want to come across as starting an argument on someone else’s post for fun.

HI I’M BACK AND I MADE GRAPHS

For me personally, I think there’s two primary axes here--the first is like I said above, a scale from “a real-life human observer, looking at these animals in a brief snapshot of their lives, would experience them as normal animals” to “these animals live their lives as tiny humans complete with clothing and period-typical technology”.

The OTHER axis is the degree to which the animals have a distinct culture independent from (though generally not untouched by!) humans. As in--do the animal characters, as in Watership Down, have their own mythologies, their own worldview, their own ways of living that would go on just fine without human influence? or, as in Black Beauty, do the animals primarily define themselves according to the roles humans give them?

(Note that the latter isn’t a mark of, like, bad writing--I literally used Black Beauty as the ur-example! If you’re writing from the perspective of a DOMESTICATED ANIMAL, having them mentally define themselves by their place in human society is the only thing that IS realistic! This is actually where the Warriors books lost me as a kid--it got to the point where even as a member of the target audience I was going, “but they’re domesticated cats? the fact that they have to live in and around humans is like, the Point, that’s what made this interesting--”)

So, for example:

You will notice this gets super weird if you go ANY further right than Redwall--Robin Hood: Men With Fursonas flipped to the other axis for no clear reason because if you go any further along the scale than Redwall, there ceases to be any relevance to the characters being animals at all*. It’s no longer an animal story. If they behave 100% like humans and there’s 0% human influence (ie, no humans in the setting at all), then they’re just...............people. The Y axis ceases to have any meaning.

*(Anthro characters having animalistic traits isn’t the same thing and I’m not dismissing the use of that trope! Their TRAITS are still relevant and can be part of a super compelling story--but it’s no longer an animal story, no longer anthropomorphic fiction, ie telling a story about animals with human traits. Frankly, NARNIA falls into this--Talking Beasts are full citizens 100% and Narnian culture belongs to all Narnians, so they don’t really fit into the concept being discussed.)

So Robin Hood flips the axis because on a technicality, you literally cannot have a Robin Hood adaptation that’s not dependent on human civilization, but normally, after you pass Redwall you break the quadrants and enter non-euclidean furryspace.

Then there’s that z-axis I added, which I’ve made a reference for--the Z axis is there to account for “talking animal” stories, where an animal might have totally natural-looking behavior but also be able to speak to one or all humans and confuse the placement somewhat.

I used 101 Dalmations as the anchorpoint, dead center--they can clearly understand every word their humans say and can even read, but aren’t capable of communicating back in any way other than dog behavior (tm). 

On one end of the scale is The Rescuers (all the animals are clearly ABLE to speak to humans at will but choose not to for their own protection). The other is again Watership Down, where human speech is comprehensible to the reader but the rabbit characters don’t understand it, and in which only a few of them are--just barely--capable of almost grasping the vague concept of writing or even of pictures/images being capable of conveying meaning.

For media like Redwall where humans just don’t exist or don’t functionally exist, they’d join 101 Dalmations dead-center because the question is irrelevant.

[sticks my head back in here while trying desperately to control my twitching as I realize that a misclick while trying to align 101 Dalmations and Aristocats accidentally resulted in Watership Down being narrower and thus just slightly out of line and thus implying it’s somehow LESS realistic than Aristocats a minor error which will haunt me for fucking years now--]

I would like to clarify that in my opinion at least when placing Disney movies or other musicals, anything that happens solely during a musical sequence doesn’t apply. Broadway rules--a musical sequence is a storytelling tool and isn’t meant to be a literal representation of what’s happening. (The characters aren’t LITERALLY bursting into song and dancing in the streets--that’s a narrative device that’s inherent to the medium).

I love Tumblr because in between all the fandom squeeing, pretty pictures, and pornbots, you find coherent, well-thought-out, original literary analysis.

People of Tumblr, never change.

I kind of love that one of Jane Austen's biggest fans was the Prince Regent (later George IV). She didn't think very well of the nobility in general, but she motherfucking hated him, a wastrel who very flagrantly cheated on his wife.

But he loved her writing, was the first recorded purchaser of Sense and Sensibility, and kept copies of her books in all his residences. She never made enough from her writing to live on during her lifetime, so this wasn't support she could casually toss aside. His librarian kept suggesting ideas for new books to her, which she turned down with exquisite politeness. Much to her aggravation, she found herself obliged to dedicate Emma to the man.

Local Novelist Is So Talented She Can't Beat Royal Patron Off With A Stick

You can read more about this here

I've thought about it and this is so funny because a moral novelist having to civilly endure being patronized by a dissolute nobleman who loves but also totally doesn't get her books is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in a Jane Austen novel.

#when life imitates fiction

#things that make me appreciate Jane Austen even more

#I feel like this should be a fanfiction concept for some reason

That wasn’t where I expected this to go.

Not sure if I love it or hate it, but it’s a wild ride from start to finish.

For those using screen readers, the above Twitter screenshot from someone named Frankie Boyle @frankieboyle​ says:

Point by point:

No one on Tumblr lies

That's why this has 1500 reblogs

Sometimes, I occasionally reblog posts.

Note: THIS NOTE IS MISSING THE VERY OBVIOUS FACTOR OF WHETHER YOU ALSO CREATE CONTENT, WHICH IS AT LEAST AS IMPORTANT AS REBLOGGING.

Do you create a relatively high amount of content, and reblog a relatively low amount of content? You're excused. Now go make and reblog things. :D

#I reject your attempt at guilting #and replace it with encouragement

#there are different ways to contribute to a digital social ecosystem