#(and in case anyone comes for me I have critiques of misogynistic choices with female chars on this show just check my Karen tag trust me

[adanseydivorce]

ya’ll be like: show Daisy is too much angrier than book Daisy, show Daisy is too weak/dependent compared to book Daisy, I don’t like that show Daisy thinks she’s better than Billy and challenges his decisions with confidence it makes her look too arrogant, show Daisy’s lines are too corny, she’s too much of a manic pixie dream girl, she’s boring compared to book Daisy, her character development is ruined because she said she didn’t regret a good day she had with her terrible spit marriage husband even though he was terrible (like it’s a bad thing to look back on your past actions and forgive yourself/not blame yourself for how things went???), her character development is ruined because Billy saved her after she ODed and I’m going to pretend I’m mad at this because I want her character to have agency and not shipping reasons (but then at the beginning of next ep they gave you the scene where she kicks Nicky out after realizing he left her to die just like in the book so argument completely moot I giggled), she’s too shameless about the emotional affair I could respect her in the book because she fought her feelings but in the show she’s too flirty with the man the story revolves around her having an intense emotional affair with and should be crucified for it, she isn’t doing enough substances or being chaotic enough, while complaining about how her addition is/isn’t portrayed I’m going to actively ignore how her being an addict is a part of her character writing in the show and effects her actions/how she responds to things because I’d rather just make fun of and have no sympathy for her, they made her too mean and messy, they softened her character too much and she’s not chaotic enough, I hate that they focused more on her parental issues and trauma because her character isn’t about that (which could be fair ig but what do You think it should be about instead?), she’s unprofessional, she’s way too good at everything too fast and succeeds too much, also I hate that the show is focused on her so much over other characters when she’s the mc of the story which is named after her, oh and she’s a pick me girl because of a funny little comment she made while she was high and a mess to the point of injuring herself without noticing while really really depressed and heartbroken.

Ya’ll: but the writers are misogynists who didn’t write her as a complex character and that’s the issue!

#s speaks #like don’t you see your arguments about this are really contradictory as well as everything else #daisy jones #djats #like at a certain point it’s not the writers misogyny that I think is the biggest issue #(and in case anyone comes for me I have critiques of misogynistic choices with female chars on this show just check my Karen tag trust me #I’m not Not critical. But ya’ll are ridiculous!) #addiction mention tw #self injury mention tw #daisy jones and the six #like really i want to know what you liked about her in the book if this is how you feel #also there’s literally a line in the book when older Daisy says that back when this all happened she was selfish/mostly thinking about #herself and her own feelings and heartbreak. That line that’s like heartbreak and addiction are two things that make you so self centered #she was always being portrayed with those flaws just older Daisy in the book could reflect with hindsight and maturity #Daisy in the show does not have yet. #I’m not even going to touch people hating how Riley plays her those people are just plain wrong and stupid

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

#long post #anonymous #ask

[evilelitest2]

What do you think about the argument that the first fascist in known history was Jesus? Well, he was a leader/founder of homophobic and misogynistic cult who wanted slaves to be obedient to their masters, and, like all strongmen, demanded worship from his followers and was unable to tolerate any dissent?

So you think that the first fascists was a Jewish pacifist religious leader from a country occupied by a military dictatorship who invented the term fascist?  Oh and then was tortured to death publicly by said dictatorship?  Yeah that checks outs

It is saying something that I am living in the age of Trump during the Covid virus in New York, and that was the stupidest argument I have heard in weeks.  Like this portrays not only shocking ignorance of the definition of fascism, Christianity and Rome.  It goes further, I think it shows ignorance of every subject relating to those subjects, like how utterly uninformed must somebody be to get this world view?  

ugg, lets do this 

There is no universally agreed upon definition of fascism, but the general list of terms involve the following

An authoritarian, ultra nationalist, hyper militaristic regime founded on racist notions “the Volk” in competition with everybody else in the world.  Fascist regimes tend to have a semi populist edge, combining top down dictatorship with a sort of “Chosen by the people” prestige.  Its also a distinctly modern movement, since Fascists tend to engage in popular politics in a similar way to Communist movements, just Right wing rather than Left Wing.   The most famous fascist states include 

Nazi Germany

Mussolini Italy

And Imperial Japan 

Now I think the term fascist tends to be overused a great deal already, but all of that pales compared to calling a Jewish pacifist from an occupied country the first fascist.   Like if you were going to claim a pre modern figure to be the “First Fascist”, Julius Caesar would be a far better choice than Jesus since he you know

Was the leader of a military autocracy 

Overthrew a democratic goverment through appeals to the people and military force

committed multiple genocides

Justified his regime through war abroad

is the person who modern fascists draw most of their iconography from, including the literal term fascist, which used to mean “A bundle of sticks”  

Like, I wouldn’t agree with that view, since an Emperor is different from a Fuhrer, but it is at least an argument.  

Yeshua ben Yosef or Yeshua ben Nazareth (In Greek translated as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus of Galilee) was one of many preachers in the province of Judea, then occupied by the Roman Empire, living a century before Rome would inflict a horrific genocide on the Jewish peoples in the Second Diaspora.  In contrast to many anti roman Preachers, Yeshua actively opposed war with Rome, and as far as anybody knows, he never killed anyone which is kinda important for you know...a fascist leader.   He never commanded any armies, he never ran a state, and was tortured to death by the Roman Empire, specifically in a method reserved for criminals. The religious sect he founded was most popular among women and slaves, and woulds be horrificaly persecuted by the Roman Empire until the rise of the Emperor Constantine I, aka Constantine the Great, in 306 AD.  Constantine the Great who was a Christian and started the process converting the Roman Empire to Christianity.  LIke if you wanted to point to a Christian figure and say “That is a fascist” i’d still be objecting, but Constantine is a far better choice than Jesus, since Constantine was you know...a military dictator who ruled over an Imperialist Empire and justified his reign through victory in battle.  Its still fucking stupid, but at least Constantine was a dictator.  

Now I think that the notion calling any pre modern figure a fascist is pretty fucked up on the face of it.  The Ancient World was rift with autocracy, militarism, genocide, and of course, homophobia misogyny, and slavery.  I mean Rome at the time of Jesus death is a literal slave state, with as much as 1/4th of the population living in bondage.  Like the Neo-Ayssrian Empire is far more fascist than any pre Modern Christian state, and I still would want to call that fascist.  

Also...Jesus never said that slaves should be obedient to their masters, that is a deeply manipulative misreading of Saint Paul, who is in fact a different person than Yeshua of Nazareth.  Like I get the confusion, because it was Saint Paul who took what was then a minor sect of Judaism and turned it into a distinct religion and most of what we consider Christian is owned to him, but I really want to make this clear, they are different figures and Jesus didn’t speak about the treatment of slaves.  In fact we know very little about what Yeshua said, no written account of his writings (if there were any) exist, and almost everything we know about him comes from Roman sources or Christian sources written a century later (the Gospels).  Saint Paul meanwhile, has a bunch of letters (though some of them like Letter to Timothy are faked).  

Saint Paul meanwhile, asks for Christian slave owners to free their slaves, and says 

“There is no Jew nor gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)

Christianity’s relationship to slavery is deeply complicated, contradictory, and varies dramatically from time and place, and it is deeply dishonest to say that Christianity was pro slavery, especially when you take into account in the world when Christianity emerged was one where slavery was both widespread and normalized.  “Slaves be loyal to their masters” was a strictly enforced part of Roman law, to the point where slaves were often expected to die with their masters.  During the Sullan Proscriptions, there was a case where a slave turned his master, who was declared a traitor, over to the state in exchange for reward money. Sulla paid them and then had him executed for betraying his master.  Slavery is not something invented by Christianity and with its focus on universal equality, it is understandable why so many slaves found Christianity appealing.  

Now Christianity as a more complicated relationship to misogyny, and most forms of modern Christianity have some degree of a sexist legacy they have to address.  however by the standards of the time in the First Century AD, Christianity had at least some advances for women.  For example, the notion of female chastity is pretty sexist, but in the time when it was established, it actually confirmed that women had some degree of choice over marriage, which wasn’t true under Roman law.  The story of Thecla provides an interesting example.  

As for homosexuality, that wasn’t understood as it is today, and while Christianity does in fact have a long history with homophobia, it is important to understand that in the context of the discussion of homosexuality at the time, which was linked to the larger spread of Hellenism.  

now one critique you can 100% make of Christianity is it is sex negative attitudes, but again....being sex negative does not make you a fascist automatically. 

Christianity also has an international focus which makes it actually pretty ill suited to fascism, this is why most of Hitler’s inner circle were actually pretty contemptuous of Christianity since they were ultra nationalists.  

Again, this is probably one of the least informed takes i’ve seen and that is saying a lot in the age of Trump.  If you extend the definition of fascism to include Jesus, then you should probably just call every figure in the pre modern world.  Like was this question asked as a joke to annoy me?  

#ask EvilElitest #Fascism #Jesus Christ #roman Empire #Julius Caesar #history doesn't work that way goodnight #history #Ancient World #Second Diaspora #antisemitism #Political Theory #Augustus caesar #Neo Assyrian Empire #Dictatorship #Monarchy #Religion #Christianity #St. Paul