Pandora

Chapter 44 of my Puyo Puyo fanfic “A Soul Rended, A Soul Mended” is online!

Please read it at!

I find it suspicious that you never see posts along the lines of "cishet people should stop using the word 'queer', that's a word that only queer people get to use." Not because I think that it's necessarily true, but because that's the normal way social conversations around reclaimed slurs & pejoratives evolve. You rarely hear people on tumblr saying "black people/hispanic people/asian people aren't allowed to say [slur that has been used specifically against them]." Because most of us recognize that that's nonsense, and that you don't get to tell minorities which words they can and can't reclaim.

But tumblr didn't do that with the word 'queer'. It didn't go the usual route of discussion around who can and can't say what. Tumblr just jumped straight into trying to erase the word completely. And that is because the discourse around 'queer' isn't a conversation that evolved naturally within our community. It was purposefully (and successfully) created out of thin air from a sudden, relentless onset of terf propaganda. Terfs who hated having a trans-inclusive umbrella term for our community, who wanted nothing more than to disrupt unity. Well congratu-fucking-lations, it's been disrupted.

2 years is all it took. 2 years of relentless comments and inbox messages from people pretending to be concerned strangers, friendly anons who wanted you to know 'you should maybe not use that word 🙂.' 'a lot of people have trauma around it so maybe use a different word 🙂 a less inclusive word 🙂.' 'queer isn't an identity it's a slur 🙂.' and suddenly our most powerful trans-inclusive umbrella term is blacklisted.

2 years of this and suddenly you had half a generation of lgbtqa+ teens who had been told this over and over again, by friendly trustworthy strangers, to the point it passed the evidence threshold and just became a Belief. because young teens heard it so often from so many 'random’ people, and weren't aware of where it was actually coming from. hint: the discourse around queer has ALWAYS been about disrupting unity

Timothée-Venice Film Festival-9/2/2022 ✨

INVENTING ANNA (2021) → 1x08 Too Rich for Her Blood

also in trans news that should be talked about. laverne cox has stated that on saturday her and a friend were assulted in a park and it’s not really getting the same attention as elliot. we can still be proud of him without ingnoring what happened to laverne and her friend.

if you claim ally ship to the trans community then you can’t ignore the bad things that happen to especially trans woc. and if you’re a white trans person you can’t just talk about other white trans people. it just shows that you only care about trans people if they are white and that shouldn’t be the case.

if your gonna talk about elliot please also talk about laverne. she deserves better and we should all do better to raise up the voices of black trans women.

learning about a piece of media exclusively through tumblr posts is really funny because you'll probably get the wrong idea about the show in one of four very specific ways

learning about a piece of media exclusively through tumblr posts is really funny because you'll probably get the wrong idea about the show in one of four very specific ways

So the latest ‘Soul Hackers 2′ discourse before release has been over this line:

Which in standard fashion has been immediately panned as ‘bad localization’.

And it’s not even a bad localization. It’s essentially the same joke in Japanese.

The whole point of the line is ‘Ringo does a shitty rap about a reaper in order to mock a shitty rapper whose entire aesthetic is the ‘grim reaper’, and culturally the way that people in the US would usually diss someone and rap is different than how someone in Japan would. There isn’t a huge difference, but there’s a pretty notable rift between Japanese and American rappers.

Personally, for what the scene is trying to do, I think the English version actually landed it a bit better. This is also just… how Ringo is characterized. Just from the short early-game footage I’ve seen, she’s super flippant and casual. I know someone’s going to get caught up on her calling ‘Soul Hacking’ her ‘Fancy Aion Superpower’ without realizing that she literally calls it ‘Aionの超パワー” in the Japanese version.

So many people say ‘bad localization’ instead of ‘I don’t like this line’. The line’s basically the same. The dialogue isn’t better just because it’s in a language you don’t speak.

Localization is a seriously tough job- especially in this day and age where you need to make the dialogue accessible while also having to deal with the weebs who haven’t even looked at the source material and are just assuming the worst. ‘Localization’ for these sorts of games isn’t just ‘translation’. Not everyone knows everything about Japanese culture, so you need to make adjustments. Changes. Slight tweaks to lines to make it so that your average player can go ‘oh, yeah, makes sense’. 

And based on the line reaction- it worked in a way. 

English-speakers went ‘Haha, ohh that’s so lame’, because it was meant to be lame. So congrats, localization team! Sometimes a lame joke is a lame joke, no matter the language.

https://www.dropkiwifarms.net/

The official campaign to pressure companies to cease doing business with the infamous troll farm and hate forum is now live.

If you haven’t heard of it, Kiwi Farms is a forum for users so vile even 4chan won’t host them. Their forum is dedicated to organizing targeted harassment campaigns against Trans folks, such as harassment, cyber-stalking, doxing, swatting attempts, and suicide-baiting. So far, three deaths have been connected to Kiwi Farms.

My god, I hate what happened to Keffals. She got doxxed, death threatened, hate crimed, swatted, forced to evacuate her own country, reswatted, redoxxed, etc. just for being openly transgender. Why is the world so vile to those who just simply want to exist? Other people have opinions, but they aren't targeted to the degree that trans people are. No wonder why people are scared to be themselves.

I was talking to one of my cis guy friends, and I called him “the big man” and he said, “that just made me very happy.” And the tone in his voice, I just knew exactly how he felt, “that’s gender euphoria!” I exclaimed. 

I don’t know why I never realized, but yeah. Cis people experience euphoria. Like many cis guys who go to the gym do it to affirm their gender. The cis men who get mad at being emasculated–they’re experiencing dysphoria! Trans people aren’t different or odd for experiencing these things. We’re just like everyone else, and somehow nobody talks about it! 

Like my femboy friend gets euphoria from being gnc, but he gets dysphoria by the idea of someone calling him a girl or using the wrong pronouns. Cause cis people have their own gender identities, they just happen to align with their agab. 

It all makes sense. 

I feel like cis people might understand if we explained it like this. Maybe I’m just being hopeful though. I’ve always just thought the “well they feel like the opposite” explanation is lacking any amount of personal relation that a cis person could attach to. 

𓏲⠀miya  তㅤ⠀icons⠀ 迷  ⠀  ⠀𝑏𝑦    𝗳͟𝘀͟𝗿͟𝗼͟𝘀͟𝗶͟𝗲͟𝗿͟ ͟𝗶͟𝗰͟𝗼͟𝗻͟𝘀͟    ⤻ *