⋆☆⋆

Hey guys. Friends. Northern hemisphere pals. Only like 10 days until the days start getting longer again.

“Inspired by a comment which said something along the lines of:

'Astarion walking into the dawn, the morning after Tav passes of old age'

kind of wanted to draw something like that, but decided on Astarion bringing dying Tav onto a balcony, so that they could watch a last dawn together ~”

I couldn’t not share this beautiful art by the incredible artist Hamrikaa on IG and Tiktok. Link to the original work below (therapy warning for Hozier song) 😭

We talk a lot about people rewriting history to claim problematic authors were always bad but there's a inverse phenomena where people rewrite history to give artists they agree with a ridiculously outsized reputation

You see this with conservatives falling over themselves to declare that "Kid Rock is better than Bruce Springsteen!" bc Kid Rock agrees with them but also

TERFs have gone from claiming JKR is the best British children's writer of her generation, a defensible belief (one I'd disagree with, that's motherfucking Philip Pullman, and that's what I thought as a kid too), to increasingly ridiculous and lavish praise about her being the greatest female writer, the greatest living writer, the writer of the best first sentence in literature, after Dickens and Orwell of course, you have to be modest and acknowledge the classics. It's not enough for her to be an acclaimed best-seller, she has to be literally the greatest writer in history, for some reason

Which is wild enough with Harry Potter, but when they apply it to her detective books it gets bizarre. Her detective novels, which only sold well (but not Harry Potter well) after her identity was revealed, and which get mixed reviews as they crest past a thousand pages a book, a ludicrous length for a murder mystery novel. They absolutely do not have a rapturous reception anywhere but in TERF circles, where they're unimpeachable masterpieces and the fact that they aren't more popular is suspicious, so you must buy Mission Earth Comoran Strike, and talk about it, and do anything you can to support visionary author L. Ron Hubbard JK Rowling as she changes the world forever

I feel like it would be useful if people conceived of causing emotional harm to others more through the lens of being the emotional equivalent to stepping on someone’s foot. Like obviously you can step on someone’s foot deliberately and maliciously, but most of the time if someone tells you you stepped on their foot you’re going to go “oh sorry I didn’t realise!” and stop doing it and try not to do it again. Getting caught up in how it makes you feel to be Someone Capable of Stepping on Others’ Feet would be a transparently self indulgent distraction from the other person’s pain, but also like… that’s just a status you hold by virtue of being human. Never ever ever stepping on someone’s foot is not really achievable, and therefore is not necessary to being a Good Person: what matters is that you do not step on others’ feet deliberately, and – most importantly – that you react kindly and calmly to any inadvertent foot-stepping you have been doing being brought to your attention, so that you can make best use of it as something that will help you reduce the amount of foot-stepping you will do in the future.

What's funny is that this was actually the exact metaphorical framing that social justice Tumblr adopted ten years ago or so; but back then, the logic progressed from "You still need to apologize for stepping on someone's foot, regardless of intention" (true) to "intention doesn't matter" (umm...) to "therefore stepping on someone's foot by accident is exactly as bad as intentionally stepping on someone's foot and you're a terrible person if you do it!" (No!) Anyway, I find it interesting that we're now using the foot-stepping metaphor to explain the absolute futility of framing this in "terrible person" terms (and I approve)

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

How fiction affects reality is about how it meshes with your internal templates for how the real world works.

Ratings are based on a rough estimate of when most people will have those templates form. For instance, there’s a standard for children’s media which states that you’re not supposed to include imitable violence more severe than an open-handed slap, because kids are just learning the overrides for the monkey-brain “if someone makes us angry, we hit them to send a message” drive. You can’t make a show for preschoolers that shows how to throw a punch, because they might very well just start punching people.

But you can show your average teenager as much punching as you want, and unless their parents REALLY fucked up, they won’t take it to mean “this is how you solve ANY problem, from a threat to your life, to someone looking at you funny.” When you can show the use of realistic guns to a person without them deciding that shooting people is a good idea depends on a lot of personal and cultural factors, but as a standard we can settle on people tend to agree that, as long as it doesn’t settle into reinforcing stereotypes as a possible invocation of “things that are okay only to defend your own life” or blatant war propaganda or similar exceptions, most adults can see all the violence they want - yes, even glorified violence - without turning into a violent menace themselves.

If you have it impressed upon you your whole life that killing people is bad - as you will, unless you have the worst kind of parents imaginable - you can watch your favorite action star kill tons of dudes, or play games that are just excuse plots for killing tons of dudes, or read about a million and a half creative ways to get away with killing tons of dudes, and you’re still not going to run out and kill tons of dudes or even think it might be okay to kill tons of dudes. This is because your mental template for how the world works strongly emphasizes “death = tragic; killing people = hurtful and bad”. Again, it might fuck with your head if the explanation for why killing tons of dudes is justified in the context of this piece of media aligns with common stereotypes of real people, or your own preexisting biases - this is how propaganda works - but even in THOSE cases a lot more factors have to align to get someone to the full extreme end and think “yes, killing tons of dudes irl is the answer to all my problems!”

It’s where people have weaker templates that’s really a problem. For example, most Americans have no idea that Cairo in the modern day like this:

…because they’ve been inundated with media that portrays Egypt as looking homogeneously like this:

And - and this is the important part - they have had little to no experience to tell them otherwise.

Now, I’m assuming the majority of the people reading this post don’t live in Cairo - if you do, take this shoutout! - and if you are in that majority that doesn’t, imagine if someone tried to pass something like this off as your own hometown. Obviously, you’ll call bullshit! You’ve seen that place and it’s nothing like that!

But if it’s a place you don’t know anything about beyond the fact that it exists and has these famous landmarks for these famous historical reasons, then anyone can…pretty much just say whatever they want from that baseline, no matter how absurd, and you will probably accept it as, if not a fact, at least a believable fictionalization with some basis in reality. At most, maybe you’ll go

This is how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes - by getting in where you don’t know better and forming your mental template. It can even work if you do have real-life counterexamples, when those real-life counterexamples are uncommon enough or you don’t spend enough time with them - if you know maybe 5 members of a minority group and none of them act like the 500 stereotyped examples you see on TV, you’re likely to end up thinking “okay, there are exceptions to the rule”, rather than “the rule is bullshit”.

This is why “honest, varied representation matters” and “not all fiction is 1:1 monkey-see-monkey-do propaganda and it’s really dickish to assume the worst of someone just because they like one (1) game that you see unfortunate implications in or something” are both statements that can and should coexist.

Mean Girls (2004) dir. Mark Waters

HAppy OCTOBER 3RD,, remember to burn your house down so that there’s no looking back and years later your estranged dad will finally come home and be like “where the fuck’s my house”

A message of hope.

screw this helmet!

People defending the writing of s8 as they didn’t killed the black girl, made the cuban boy a farmer, showed the corpse of an abuse survivor on screen, redeemed the abusers and made their victims forgive them , told us disable people are useless. You’re allowed to like season 8 but acting like it’s flawless and unproblematic, that’s clownery

this is the kind of quality content I want to see in the news

hey

guess what

you’re so close to surviving 2018

you can make it

i’m so proud that you’re still here

keep going buddy

i love you

the world hasn’t killed us yet and it’s gonna regret that

this is honestly the most uplifting and hopeful thing i have read regarding my continued existence.

the 99 squad meets: Anna Kendrick’s twitter