Get back to work.

Ao3 is actually massively culturally important and very very good at being what it is. I’m so serious when I say that ao3 needs to be protected as the anti censorship, by fans for fans, nonprofit, volunteer run, expertly designed archival site that it is. You don’t have to read or like fanfiction to understand that on principle, ao3 is a site that should be defended.

Dude with all due respect ao3 was literally created because other fanfiction sites kept deleting and censoring stories with rape, noncon/dubcon, incest, etc porn as well as LGBT ship fics. The site does have a required ratings and warnings systems and tags so that you can exclude works that have themes or content within them that you don’t want to see.

If you don’t like what the site is showing you, you are using it improperly.

There is no such thing as ‘a little censorship’

The above tagger has subjects they dislike; they need to learn to navigate around them so they don’t need to interact. That’s why tagging is so important: allowing the work to be found or avoided as needed.

The problem with ‘a little censorship’ is…endless. You want to control what other people are doing: how do you not see how that’s fucked to begin with?

You want to remove the ‘gross’ or the ‘inappropriate’ subjects, like that isn’t wholly subjective. Incest bothers you? Don’t read incest.

I can’t typically do fics with cheating, but I am not about to go tell the folks who write it that they can’t, purely to make me feel better. My eldest hates unhappy endings, they don’t get to dig up sad ending fics and yell at the author. My middle kid likes a different ship than I do in pretty much all of our common media. I don’t get to tell him he can’t read it anymore.

Fancy, emotionally charged buzzwords don’t change the fact that yeah, all of those are the same concept. You don’t like it, someone else is writing it, others are reading it, and that bothers you. That’s on you, my dear.

You will never have the right to tell someone else they cannot read or write it purely because you dislike it.

Learn to block, learn to filter, learn to accept that the real world has people who like things you do not.

This is the donut/diet argument all over again: you can’t have or dislike donuts, so you want to make sure no one else can have it either. Hard no, my friend. You have control only over yourself, and you need to remember that.

‘But those are bad things, I’m trying to get rid of the bad things only!’ No. They make you uncomfortable. There is a difference. Just as there is difference between reality and fiction. Just like what you think is bad may not, and probably will not, line up with someone else.

Fiction is not promoting rape, incest, whatever else. Kids aren’t going to go out and recreate things they’ve read for shits and giggles anymore than playing grand theft auto is going to make them join the fucking mafia or whatever it is. Sims players don’t suddenly rip their clothes off and drown in the pool, reading about Vash banging his brother a la Flowers in the Attic is hardly going to make someone knock on their actual brother’s door, etc etc etc ad nauseum.

More importantly: there is no end to ‘a little censorship’. Someone else gets to decide what I’m allowed to read and write, and the organizations with that aim have proven over and over and o v e r to be insane. Anything remotely queer is banned for being Bad or Sexualized (because these people have learned that PROTECT THE KIDS is the easiest way to rally the ignorant masses into believing that the rainbow is somehow preying on children… and thus need to be Controlled…)

You don’t want incest, you don’t want no con, someone else doesn’t want any form of kink, a third busybody can’t stand that boys kiss boys, a fourth can’t handle trans characters, another carves out the ace spectrum, yet more go after the stories exploring gender dynamics in the ABO verse.

That’s not even getting into politics, where it turns into now no one can post stories that explore changes in government, that are anti war, that are hopepunk and show all the ways society could be better. Or, on the opposite spectrum, things akin to the anarchist’s cookbook: how to make weaponry to forcibly make things change.

Oh, can’t have books that talk about different religions, either. Can’t have books that let girls know they should be treated equally, that they can do whatever they please, that they’re more than a walking baby factory. can’t have stories with magic, that’ll lead to evil thoughts. Can’t have stories with explicitly consensual anything, gotta keep the population pure and filled with shame about their desires. (There is a reason so many romance novels have a bit of unsavory shenanigans: the thrill of being wanted so overwhelmingly in a world where feeling that want means you are Not a Good Girl)

We’re living this, right now, again.

This is why knowing your history is so important.

Look at books have that been banned, burned. I’m going to oversimplify but: Picture books (and tango makes 3) because two male penguins adopted a baby, and we can’t let our kids know that’s acceptable, never mind that I, a child of a lesbian, literally bawled my eyes out upon finding that book in my twenties. I would read it every day to my own toddlers, because look! They’re like Awa and Gramma! 1984, because the entire point is how burning books is Bad. Animal Farm, the new government is just as bad as the old and we the people deserve better. Gone With the Wind, for being about the American south and not only making it seem like maybe slavery is kinda meh but also hinting at a woman having a sexuality. The scandal. Harry Potter. Not because JK turned out to be transphobic trash, but because it’ll turn kids into satanists, y’know, because of all the magic. A thing that is totally real and possible to recreate. Are you there god, it’s me, Margaret. Because it talked about menstrual cycles.

As an American, seeing headlines where kids are banned from the library because of policies like this is terrifying. Kids in Florida have zero books in the classroom. They have to be screened to be considered ‘appropriate’. And that means whitewashed, bland, and unchallenging of the norms the neo nazis are pushing. Can’t have anything about the struggles of the non white populace, can’t have anything at all about the queers, can’t have anything that paints the south in a bad light.

There is a bill currently attempting to pass into law, KOSA: kids online safety act. Under the guise of ‘protect the kids’ the government here is literally attempting to sanitize and censor the entire internet, for everyone. AO3 will be on the list of places they’re going to try and nuke. Yeah, even your cute vanilla super straight happy ever afters. All in the name of making sure imaginary little Johnny doesn’t think kissing boys, wearing pink, becoming friends with the Mexican kid down the street, or opposing genocide is acceptable behavior.

Censorship is not about protecting you, me, the mythical children, or anyone at all. It never has been.

Censorship is purely about control.

Censorship is about controlling your awareness, your intelligence, your ability to realize you are living in the worst timeline, and your ability to organize and fight back. Censorship is division. Censorship is deliberate cruelty meant to cripple you and make you malleable.

After all, you’ve given up your ability to explore new ideas, to think outside the box they’ve put you in. You are tamed, declawed, and too stupid to notice now. Don’t worry your pretty little blonde haired and blue eyed head about it now, Julie, the government will tell you want you need to know. Oh, what happened to your neighbor? Sweetie, what neighbor? No one was ever there. Repeat after me, no one was ever there.

AO3 is protecting my ability to read and write whatever the fuck I want, while giving me the search capabilities to NOT run into shit I dislike. AO3 is giving my teens a safe place to read and explore their own sexualities and interests, to engage in uncomfortable situations in a controlled way. AO3 is giving my teens a place to practice being human.

Censorship is always the bad guy.

AO3 is a fucking godsend, a pillar of creativity and freedom of engagement, and should be revered as such.

au where alhaitham is the only one in sumeru who can speak ancient merfolk language so he has to take in kaveh, the last merman whom the akademiya just rescued 🥹

you can read my tiny short fanfic here! (wow it’s been ages since i had the urge to write something!)

Xion wielding Lunatic my beloved 🌙

sumeru boys’ get-together!

(feat. kaveh’s best dish) 🍽🏡✨

Smile !

I Drew kairi

If you're trying to unpack and heal from Christian religious trauma, a thing you really need to understand (if you don't already) is that you were probably misled about Judaism a lot. Christianity generally tries to paint itself as the self-evident successor of Judaism, and one of the ways it does this is by painting Judaism as Christianity Without Jesus.

In reality, Judaism is practiced very differently from Christianity, and Jews have a very different relationship to their Bible than Christians have to theirs. Just about everything you'll hear about Judaism from Christians is total hogwash - literally, it's Christian propaganda. Christianity as most of us know it was shaped by the Roman Empire's political agendas, and that's a huge reason why it's the way it is.

Not just the Roman Empire's political agendas, but also the Roman Empire's religious structure.

There was a secretive Roman cult where the followers ritualistically consumed the blood of the god in the form of wine.

Am I referring to Christianity or the Cult of Dionysius?

There was a Roman religious cult where the primary theological belief structure is that there is a god of light and good in an eternal conflict for the fate of the world with a god of darkness and evil.

Am I referring to Christianity or Zoroastrianism, in its form of Mithraism?

There was a Roman-era religious cult where the main worshipped god was murdered and brought back to life, and it is through this god that his followers can achieve eternal life, but non-believers will be judged and punished.

Am I referring to Christianity or Serapis (Hellenized Osiris)?

The point is that a massive amount of theology and religious ritual practice in Christianity is not derived from Judaism, but from cross-pollination from other sources, brought in by Roman converts in the early decades and centuries.

This, and the Ishtar/Eoster/Easter discussion reminded me of something I want to talk about, and that is how Roman religious syncretism worked, and how it still works, as something baked into almost every branch of Christianity.

So Christianity has this story it tells itself about its origins and way it works that goes like this: all of the good parts of Christianity come from Jesus, who is the bestest most compassionate boy, and all the bad parts of Christianity, whatever an individual Christian might decide those bad parts are, come from Judaism. Those bad parts are the result of failing to properly follow Jesus's teaching, and to prune away bad Jewish ideas. If you've heard anyone talk about the cruel Old Testament God, or about how Jesus was like so Progressive compared to those Pharisees, these are manifestations of those ideas.

Of course none of this is true, Christianity and Judaism, while both are flawed, those flaws tend to be very different, and very very few of Christianity's flaws have their roots in Judaism. But what this does is, as you might guess, fuel antisemitism, and also what it does, is become an assumption that can easily remain in a person's bloodstream, after they have stopped being Christian, or get into their bloodstream if they've never been Christian, but had lots of contact with Christianity.

And this is how you get neo-pagans, wiccans, and even people from extant, contiguous, polytheistic cultures, who will say things like, "those ancient Israelites are responsible for Christianity's burning need to convert everybody, and destroy all other religious cultures". Or more subtly they might say that this is the fault of monotheism. The idea here is that in the halcyon days of the pagan world, nobody cared what you believed or worshiped, or was trying to force anyone else to believe or worship anything, because gods were permeable and worshiping one god did not mean that you did not worship another. This absolutely not true; conquering people's frequently tried to impose the worship of their gods over the conquered, stamp out local traditions, or co-opt the gods of the people they've conquered. The Persian Empire was pretty famous for not doing this kind of thing, in contrast to most other empires of the time, and meanwhile the Jewish people are not a universalist religion, don't care what non-Jews do as far as religion and worship, and don't seek converts.

But the idea that monotheism and the intolerance of those ancient Israelites is what caused Christianity to become the juggernaut of cultural destruction that it would eventually become, is really common, and really annoying, so it behooves us to examine where this tendency in Christianity actually came from. And the answer is the Roman Empire.

As @athingofvikings rightfully points out, Christianity shares a lot of its DNA not with Judaism, but with the Roman religious system, and at its most basic level, it's a creature of Roman syncretism. The Roman Empire really liked its syncretism. The Romans famously syncretized their gods with the Greeks so hard that we refer to it as the Greco-Roman pantheon, and the Latin and Greek names for those gods are frequently used interchangeably in the Western world. And to be fair to the Romans, Roman syncretism probably developed as a means to deal with the fact that as the Roman culture was getting its feet under it, the dominant player in the region was in fact first Classical Greek city-states, and then the Hellenistic states.

But anyway, the Roman Empire really had two ways of aproaching the religions of the newly conquered, or really any of the religions that they came into contact with. The first is the one that said, "hey, you have a cool god or goddess, who is new to us, and we want in on this, so we're going to take this god or goddess back with us and worship him in Rome now, and anyone else in the Empire who wants to worship them too totally can". This is the kind of syncretism that people who want to claim that the pre-Christian polytheistic world was a haven of religious tolerance, like to talk about. But Rome had another kind of religious syncretism that they were also big on, and this was the kind that said, hey we see that you are worshiping your god, and that god is really our god, but you're worshiping him under the wrong name, and with the wrong rituals, and if you've been worshiping him under the right rituals you wouldn't have lost to us, so now that we have conquered you, we are going to teach you better, whether you like it or not.

If that sounds familiar, yeah, we'll get there.

As long as Rome stayed in the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, this worked out pretty well for them, because almost all the people they encountered had already either had extensive contact with the powerful Hellenistic states, or were part of a Hellenistic state, meaning that just about everybody that the Romans conquered for the early part of their empire, was to an extent, Hellenized. Which means, they were either already worshiping the Greek gods, or they had already synchronized many of their local deities with various Greek gods, so they already had practice worshiping their gods alongside Greek gods, and adding Roman names was basically Plug and Play. and it wasn't that hard to add the deified emperors, and the divine embodiment of Rome to the register of deities being venerated. This got more dicey after Romans ran out of Mediterranean and Black Sea Basin territory to conquer, but Rome still stuck to this pattern and did mostly okay.

Except there was this one people, on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, right in the Greek Hellenized stomping ground, who were absolutely not down with Roman syncretism or their state religion. This isn't a surprise, since they also weren't down for the Hellenistic version of the same process. In fact, attempts to force the worship of the Greek pantheon onto them, led to a revolution, which you might know is the Maccabean revolt, in which the Judeans kicked out the Seleucid Greeks, founded their own Hashmonian dynasty, and ruled as a non Hellenized state, firmly asserting their own religious and cultural identity as what we now call Jews.

But then, the Romans exploited a succession dispute in Judea's ruling dynasty to get all invadey, which caused the Jews to get all revolty, but sadly this did not work as well as it did against the Seleucids, and in spite of multiple revolts, Judea remained firmly conquered. But this whole experience gave the Romans time to do their whole "hey let's all get syncratic with your gods and our gods" shtick, only for the Jews to give them a resounding no, and a "how about you shove your Greek pantheon and your deified emperors right up your asses".

The Romans did not react well to that, but since the Jews had made it very clear that this was a hill they were willing to die on, and the Romans really weren't, it was a lot more trouble than it was worth to try to force the issue. But this sure as heck didn't make the Romans like the Jews, whose repeated revolts were extremely expensive, and their refusal to get on board with a Roman state religion, and insistence on maintaining their own separate religious identity, was really weird and creepy as far as the Romans were concerned and also they did this thing where they mutilated their penises.

Meanwhile, The popular cult of the Goddess Cybele, whose worship really took off in Rome, involved her priests ritually castrating themselves, which really brings home the fact that it was not actually about circumcision for the Romans.

But anyway, the Romans really did not like the fact that the Jews would not get all syncretic with them, and join the Roman State religion, and while they were putting down revolts, sacking the temple, killing this one kind of kooky preacher name Jesus, exiling us, and renaming our province after our traditional enemies, they also occasionally got all persecutey on religious grounds, about that whole refusing to worship the deified emperors thing.

Meanwhile, this little offshoot of Judaism, worshiping that kooky preacher, separated itself out from its Jewish origins, and started making its way into the Roman cultic marketplace. It had a major disadvantage, in that to be a devotee of Jesus, a prospective convert would have to foreswear worshiping all other gods. While for the most part, Romans didn't expect everyone in the Empire to worship every god who was part of the pantheon, as previously established, they really didn't like it when people foreswore worshiping the deified emperors, and participating in specific aspects of the Roman state religion that they believed insured Roman prosperity and continued military victory. Belonging to a specific cult dedicated to a specific god or group of gods, and spending most of your spiritual energy involved in worshiping as part of that cult, was all well and good, so long as you also did your bit engaging in the rituals of the Roman state religion. So periodically, the Romans also got all persecutey towards the Christians.

But unlike the Jews, the Christians were not adverse to new people picking up their god and worshiping him. While it was really difficult to convert to Judaism, and there were really stringent standards, the same was not true of Christianity, which welcomed converts, and so gathered a group of religious seekers, many of whom had previously belonged to other Roman cults, and they brought aspects of those cults into Christianity. In short, Christianity was becoming syncretic. if Christians wouldn't worship Dionysus, they would give Jesus some of his aspects. if they wouldn't worship Isis Osiris and Horus, ideas from the Isis Osirus Horus cult would get folded into the Christian holy family. If Christians couldn't worship Mithras, they would bring Mithraec elements into their cosmology. If Christians couldn't also belong to an Orphic cult, Jesus would start to take on some very Orphic aspects.

So at this point, Christianity is one Roman cult among many, and it probably would have either stayed that way, or eventually fizzled out, if it weren't for this guy named Constantine. a few years before, emperor Diocletian split the Roman empire into two, and then into two again, with each half being ruled by a senior Emperor called an Augustus, and then each Augustus having a junior Emperor called a Caesar, who ruled half of their empire. this was supposed to make it so that there was less for each Emperor to rule, and each Emperor could be more flexible, and try out new things, and then the best things could be spread to the entire empire, and also each Caesar and Augustus would be able to respond to military threats more easily, because they were four of them. But really of course what it did was make for lots of Civil Wars. But anyway, Constantine was the son of one of the Caesars, the junior emperors, and he wanted to rule the whole empire. strictly speaking, he was not entitled to become a Caesar just because his father was a Caesar, because Caesars were appointed by their Augustus, but he had an army, and he knew what to do with it. And right before his final victory over his last opponent, he made a fateful decision, to march under the sign of the Christian god.

It is unclear in retrospect how much he hedged his bets, and tried to play it so that he was marching under the sign both of the Christian god, and of Sol Invictus the unconquered sun. But either way, he at least made it so that praying to the Christian god would count as the same as participating in the traditional Roman state religion, and would eventually flat out replace the former Roman state religion with Christianity.

And once Christianity was the Roman state religion, it started acting like the Roman state religion. It had already started getting really comfortable taking on the elements of other religions, and now that the Church had institutional power, it was thrilled to go around doing that whole "we see you are worshiping the wrong way, with the wrong name for your god. we're going to teach you better at the point of a sword" thing that Roman state religion liked so much. It started looking a lot like, "you can keep venerating Brigit, but she's a saint now, not a goddess, and belongs to the whole Church", or "You can keep worshiping Isis/Cybele/Pacha Mama, but now you have to call her the Virgin Mary".

Meanwhile, the Jews were still kicking around, and the Romans, now calling themselves the Christians, went, "Hey, Jews, we made a syncretic version of your religion, will you join us now? Huh, huh, huh?" And the Jews were like, "No Roman State religion, we still don't want to date you. Also that thing you're doing, isn't Judaism, and it's really weird, and keep it far away from us." And the Christians were like, "Yeah well you're mean, and ugly and you smell bad." Seriously, those are all actual antisemitic canards, and every time I hear them, I can't help but think wow, you guys really cannot get over the fact that we wouldn't go to prom with you. But anyway, the Christians had a very measured response to this refusal by the Jews, and by measured response, I mean over a millennia and a half of brutal antisemitism. Which was a continuation of several hundred years of Roman antisemitism.

And this is why Christianity is the borg, and also (one of the reasons it's) really weird about the Jews. And when people blame the Jews for Christianity being the borg, it really feels a lot like the Romans mugged us and stole our clothes, and then ran around mugging other people while wearing our clothes, only for the victims to look at those clothes and go, "I have been mugged by the Jews," meanwhile the Jews are standing here in our underwear going, "We were mugged too! What are you talking about?"

Shenhe My Absolute Beloved <3

i am the very model of a modern gay millennial i have a tumblr blog and a prescription for estradiol i've problems economic, psychological, and medical and sympathies political which border on heretical

I’m very well acquainted, too, with squabbling over media

On discourse I’m regrettably the new encyclopedia

I know the petty crimes of many YouTube personalities

and who’s been cancelled over slightly retrograde mentalities

I’m very good at diagnosing narcissistic tendencies

and calling out fictional people for interdependencies

in short in all things unimportant yet somehow perennial

I am the very model of a modern gay millennial.

Here's my sweat and blood of this week

Had to write in comic sans because paint tool Sai doesn't have the comic/Manga font <//3

Rest

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save tighnari

(my twitter)

:/ i wish “bad guy” by billie eilish came out 7 years ago :(

explain

:)