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mamawasatesttube · 8 months

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14. hello comic book enjoyer have you written something that u wish u could see a comic of? and or 5

5. What’s a fic idea you’ve had that you will never write?

hmmm. right now the one pingponging around in my head that i don't think i'm ever gonna get into is the tim and cass (ft. dick and kon) "a LOT of issues about gender" fic, in which cass is trying really hard to understand what gender and gendered language even fucking are, doesn't get why gendered pronouns are different for different people with seemingly arbitrary reasoning, and accidentally misgenders transmasc tim, who tries to explain to her that no he just really strongly prefers not to be called that, but she can tell she's hurt him but she doesn't get why.

it would get into a) tim's very convoluted feelings about gender (tim drake, jack drake's all-american son, is a boy. robin can't bind, though, because of all the strenuous activity; robin only has stiff shapewear in the costume. so robin isn't as good at being a boy as tim drake. and so on and so forth) and also b) cass's general "what the fuck do i do with any of this" approach to gender, attraction, and all that, and the way so much of it is tied to language. ft. kon, who gives tim gender envy he doesn't have words for (and whose automatic implicit assumption that of course robin is a boy, why would he even question that, always makes tim feel a little better when he's having a dysphoria day), and dick, who is best able to communicate things to cass bc dick's gender is "acrobat" and there is always an aspect of performance to it for him.

i am never gonna write this bc i don't wanna think about gender this much. and also it's complicated and subjective and just. augh. it'd be so much work. but i do think about it a lot

14. If you could see one of your fics adapted into a visual medium, such as comic or film, which fan fic would you pick?

HM!!!! i think sun-kissed. sotm is too long and introspective to make a good comic i think, but sun-kissed has a lot with visual imagery that could be fun, plus a balance between physical description, action, dialogue, and internal monologue that'd make for decent visuals with narration!!! that'd be really cool actually lkdjsdhjk omg

fanfic writer asks!

#answers #ultimatecryptid

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aronarchy · 10 months

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hard disagree; I think his transmisogyny shows in his analysis in the book pretty clearly already

this is just some notes bc i have actual drafts elsewhere & really want to do a proper writeup but adhd will not let me

main pts:

his theory of socialization-into-abuse boils down to, basically, “monkey see, monkey do”—that boys grow into misogynistic men bc they saw male role models (for example his example of fathers) and copy. this presumption that simply bc they see therefore they’ll copy relies on a preexisting automatic alignment/identification with “male” gender roles—that cisness is natural/biodetermined, basically. he doesn’t state that outright—he obfuscates, claims “well yeah patriarchy is not rooted in biology”—which is the TERF POV, “well technically it’s not bio,” but instead they target “gendered socialization,” but their prediction for the result of the socialization is rooted in biology.

he weights his examples so that it’s more likely to “prove” this theory. some particularly egregious ones are how he talks about some boys supposedly seeing the father abuse the mother and then starting to abuse the mother too, and commenting on it in a way suggesting that mothers are the central victims of domestic abuse (he also generally centers mothers over girls), that sons abuse mothers (in general) and mothers don’t abuse sons (or that if they do, it’s just basically a stress-result of the father’s abuse of her, eliding the intersecting axis of adultism—also why his views on vaccines & children rn etc are shitty) (also goes w/how he treats child abuse as a side, always, to intimate partner abuse; doesn’t consider that maybe child abuse might be the core violence of the family, and partner abuse structured around that/from that, the other way around; just overall fails to center children’s experiences of abuse) (plus the outright child abuse apologia/advocacy where he refuses to condemn all child abuse, says some of the stuff fathers do is bad bc “takes away from the mother’s authority over her own child,” says it’s fine & necessary to force children to do homework etc, has multiple passages where he says stuff along the lines of “abuse bad bc don’t treat women like children”)

transfeminists argue that “cis male” socialization is a product of material power granted to cis male identity & misogynistic violence in a patriarchal society, not tautological relations btwn “identity/biology”—lundy doesn’t recognize this though, so his analysis locks out transfem survivors from legibility (his understanding of queerness is also simplistic and tends toward more binary thinking/being closer to assimilationist het standards than what many of the rest of us would say in analysis, which is unsurprising given the rest)

there’s a section where he tries to talk abt race issues, and claims that an Indigenous culture did not have any misogyny/patriarchy/domestic abuse pre-colonization, but after TV was introduced they also started having dv issues bc, basically, apparently the men saw the white men abusing women & so adopted the ideas. presuming, again, that “man” is an identity which cuts across all cultures (relies on bioessentialist assumptions abt “humanity” & gender) and that just bc a “man” anywhere shares this supposed “male essence” then he will automatically see any other unfamiliar “man” as a role model/identify with the same gender role. also leaned on some pretty gross assumptions abt, basically, “innocence”/ideological/epistemic purity of the ~pre-modern~ & that basically ppl don’t abuse if they haven’t been introduced to the ideas yet (analogous to his views on children being “socialized” into abusers—implicit innocence/purity again, simplifying their thinking processes in a paternalistic way, idea that they can’t think of complex things for themselves w/o adult guidance).

also as he centers domestic (cis, het) motherhood as primary victim of patriarchy he also erases sex workers’ positionality (his section on pornography & it ~causing violence thru objectifying Women~ is a pretty good example)—it was very SWERFy, which lines up

I feel the cissexism (& adultism, that usually goes hand in hand w/it) is pretty clear to me from a read (esp w/materialist, transfeminist, youthlib, decol. / anarchist lenses), it ticks off a lot of the usual radfem boxes—which is especially disappointing to me as a trans survivor (& also a minor & person w/an abusive mother who does apologia for my father’s abuse; limited nonintersectional radfem/TERF activism has left us behind a lot) though I get why ppl might not see it/feel it’s as obvious, it is a book that in many respects is extremely helpful & revolutionary. but that just makes it worse, imo, when we (intersectionally marginalized survivors) are pressured to rely on incomplete resources like these that don’t like us and are fundamentally exclusionary of us and ultimately lacks a lot of what we need

(side note, another complaint I had abt the book but which isn’t as directly related is his investment in the state/policing/prisons/the psych industry, generates power imbalance (inherent to his position as a legitimized therapygiver) and also gives him major blind spots like his cop advocacy for solution (doesn’t mention the whole 40% thing, ofc) and what seems like an aversion to survivor militancy as praxis? (can’t be certain of that, but for example he had a part where he said that women physically attacking abusive partners is “assault” & bad (& don’t do it, you might get urself in legal/adjacent trouble (iirc?)) unless it’s self-defense in response to direct present immediate physical threat—I was a bit shocked reading that, was a really ignorant statement imo & acts like physical self-defense against “non-physical” psychological abuse is not a valid tactic that many survivors use or would like to use, and the direct/present/immediate danger requirement ignores the context of persistent ongoing (incl background) threat abuse occurs in)

(i found the book very helpful too but ultimately we deserve much better)

#OP #ramble #currently reading #book review #cissexism #adultism #lundy bancroft #domestic abuse #transfeminism #youthlib

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sol1056 · 6 years

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Lotor's story vs Romelle’s story

two asks on Lotor, Romelle, and the Alteans:

I genuinely thought that the altean colony was the one Lotor spoke about back on Oriande. That we would learn Romelle is a survivor hiding among the rebels waiting to strike against Lotor for his (perceived) slaughter of alteans, and the situation isn't helped when Lotor later attacks Shiro for the whole Kuron thing, and he's pushed to the breaking point bc Haggar and Zarkon are STILL a poison to his image, making him appear the evil villain he's not.

Clearly you’re not alone in making that connection...

Until we got, you know, The Colony, I honestly thought that the altean colony was the one he spoke to Allura about on Oriande. That he was put in charge of captive Alteans, befriended them and got to learn about Altean culture, and then Zarkon forced him to watch in person as they were (mostly) destroyed. Because he does seem the guy who would "pick-and-choose" info and history to share. (Romelle's EXACTLY the same as we saw, though)

Which actually would’ve been a wonderful twist, if you ask me.

Skip the metaphorical concentration camp + gassing/de-quintessencing that paints Lotor as less gray and more just a single-minded manipulator with no redeeming qualities. Instead, use that earlier reference and bring it around into Romelle’s story? That could’ve been powerful stuff.

Of course, you’d have to lay the groundwork much earlier: a story where Zarkon doesn’t actually care about decimating the Alteans, so long as he can claim the lions. Once he figured out none of them knew, he left them to their own devices in whatever rat-hole planet they’d claimed, and found some other means to track down the lions. (This would be the only way to make S1E11 work, too, because otherwise it’s notable that Zarkon -- having supposedly found Allura as the ‘last’ Altean -- doesn’t promptly kill her. If he wants the lions more than he cares about her being dead, then sure, keep her as bait.)

With Lotor put in charge of various planets, and discovering the Alteans have found a way to harvest their planet for quintessence, then Zarkon could’ve reacted positively. There, Lotor would’ve faced a true dilemma, having finally achieved his father’s approval: force the Alteans to produce, or protect them and risk losing the approval he’s always sought. Perhaps Lotor had refused to force the Alteans to produce more, or been unable to reproduce it elsewhere, or perhaps Zarkon found out the origin was Altean. And the consequences were severe: Zarkon chose to teach Lotor a lesson.

Lotor’s version would be that Zarkon had slaughtered the people and destroyed the planet; technically, he’d be right. It was Zarkon’s order. But then Romelle’s version -- that Lotor turned on her people without warning and slaughtered them -- would also be right, because it was Lotor who’d followed his father’s orders.

Lotor’s off-hand comments wouldn’t necessarily come immediately to Allura’s mind as a point in his defense either, not with Romelle right there, eyewitness to Lotor’s flagship at the head of her planet’s destruction. For Lotor, New Altea would’ve been both a point of pride (for saving the Altean people) and a point of shame (for being unable to protect them, for wanting his father’s approval more) -- and that ambivalence would’ve been taken as guilt by Allura et al.

That change would cast Lotor as less the victim of circumstances -- whether from his parents, his upbringing, or the rift’s influence -- and more as someone who’d made a terrible, if comprehensible, choice. It would require groundwork for Lotor’s characterization, too: a few hints of when Zarkon had approved of thim, and a bit more personal fury and self-hatred in his vendetta. His focus would be less on the empire, so much as Zarkon’s tyranny.

And then his insanity in the rift would be comprehensible, too: the breaking point of someone who has lost everything. He couldn’t please his father, he couldn’t save the Alteans, he couldn’t gain the paladins’ trust. It could be the desperate cry of someone chased by a mistake he can’t undo.

It could’ve been a bitterly tragic moment, to put the pieces together and see he’d acted out of a genuine (we might even say human) need that every creature has for a parents’ love and approval. To know he’s spent the time since trying to gain power to undo or ameliorate or just compensate for that mistake -- there’s a potential for redemption, there.

As things stand, Lotor is a brutal indictment of anyone raised in an abusive household, underscored by the EPs’ comments after S6 aired: a product of his upbringing; if only he’d had the ‘good influences’ that Keith might’ve had. There seems to be an implicit assumption that he was doomed from the start, as if kids from neglectful or abusive homes can only ever become abusers in turn.

Of all the ways in VLD delivers bleak messages, frankly, Lotor’s is one of the worst. Not only because it’s hopelessly fatalistic, but because it’s personally detrimental to all those in the audience who related to his struggles. And JDS’ dismissive responses on twitter were just insult on injury, spoken like someone who cannot empathize with either the villain he created or the fans who saw themselves in that villain.

#vld #voltron #lotor #characterization #revising vld #analysis

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goneontherun · 4 years

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notes on graeber’s bullshit jobs

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of work and about the work I’m going to (have to) be doing — what makes it useful, how can i make it useful, and what does it mean to do valuable work? How can I know if the work I do creates negative social value? I’ve been afraid of coming back, not because I’m afraid of starting work, but because of what that is suppoed to signify. And about all the shit I’m going to have to swallow on account of “this is just how things are.” Graeber talks about:

The dummy jobs that pass for real work – he lists five categories whose common denominator is that, basically, nothing would happen if the worker (within a company) decides one day not to show up to work anymore or if all the workers (at the level of industry — this is levied against the FIRE industry), life won’t grind to a halt. He talks about “managerial feudalism” and the rise of the manager roles and people who are literally paid to “look busy.”

The myth of being “on somebody else’s time” which says that since you’re being paid for your time, you shouldn’t be doing anything else, even if you have nothing to do. And the absence of real work as quite literally de-humanizing and contravenes/contradicts the human need for purpose.

The myth of needing to seem busy and value as appearing productive: “My mind keeps going back to the pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not being doing. I believe this attitude exists in the air around us. We sniff it into our noses and exhale it as a social reflex in small-talk; it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right.” (198)

The difficulty that people in such jobs have of even expressing their displeasure without being told to fuck off and be grateful they even have a job. [Very familiar]

How we got here and the history of production, e.g. puritan work ethic, hard work = character formation and the theological (judeo-christian – i mean just look at genesis lmao) roots of work, how this continued into the industiral revo – e.g. carlyle’s gospel of work. Specifically, work/labour as self-abnegation, something that is deliberately supposed to be punishing and not pleasurable – i.e. very Carlyle – “Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.” (221) And how “life” [think about the whole bs about work-life balance] as something that has to be “eked out” in the temporal spaces between periods of work.

And also how seeing labor as The Male Factory Worker – “both the words “production” and “reproduction” are based on the same core metaphor: in the one case, objects seem to jump, fully formed, out of factories; in the other, babies seem to jump, fully formed, out of women’s bodies.” (203) He sees the original labor theory of value as gendered bc it focused on production and so erased women’s work.

Or more specifically, work that women are expected/typically thought to do, e.g. “looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects, than it involves hammering, carving, hoisting or harvesting things.” (215)

The gap between work that creates social value and how they are valued ($$), resulting in “carping labor” or “interpretive labor” being un/undervalued and which markets don’t pick up on because markets are always looking for things being produced, being made and being put out into the world. i.e. “caring labor” has been not just undervalued but completely overlooked because “values […] are valuable [exactly] because can’t be reduced to numbers.” (241)

The difficulty of organizing movements around “bullshit jobs” and also the contradiction between care and stability: even if, logically, we can wake up one day and decided to change things, to stop “producing capitalism,” which is not something abstract and impersonal but something we create everyday, “love for others — people, animals, landscapes — regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despite.” (219)

And what can be done about it: He points to a “crisscrossing of resentment” that proliferates within the world of work, and also acknowledges an inertia for change and also to barrier to actually admitting your job is bullshit, that it’d be better if robots just took over etc.

He makes an interesting point on the division between the workplace as the “domain of production” and the home as the “domain of consumption” and “the domain of values (which means that what work people do engage in, in this domain, they largely do for free)”, and which obviously has a gendered dimension too! Graeber published in 2018 but it’ll be interesting to relook this idea within the context of the pandemic, in which work and home are so thoroughly meshed.

#5 was particularly painful for me to read because it put in another way what I’d already known �� or rather what took me all these years away from singapore recovering from how much i’d let the education system fuck me up to realise. There was a time when I glorified hard work and self-punishment and I was so fixated on the idea of academic rigour and challenge that I went all out and lost any idea of what actually made / could make me happy. Somehow convinced myself that enjoyment = slaving over something and overcoming that challenge, i.e. econ. Something had to be difficult to be worth it — to be real work — because if i didn’t have to slave over it, if i didn’t have to work myself to death for it, AND if i had fun doing it (i.e. literature), then it wasn’t real work. There was a belief that value could only come by sacrificing a part of myself — in high school, it was a real, visceral happiness. I believed that i could postpone being happy to after those final exams. And the hard work had to be painful and self-effacing, and which in turn ought to be worn as some sort of a badge of honor on my identity and sense of self-worth (Graeber: “sadomasochistic dialectic”).

#11: I wonder if the way things are panning out in this pandemic is (the beginning of? the conditions for?) the “revolt of the caring classes” (242) that Graeber wonders about towards the end of the chapter? We see nurses asking for more pay and I’m reminded of this article in The Atlantic. The pandemic has shifted the nature of work by opening up options for remote work and more improtantly drawing into sharp relief the work that cannot be done from home — the work that requires care and contact — and which has so conveniently been overlooked. People whose workplaces were never closed.

This includes those done by foreign workers in singapore. There’s one strand of rhetoric about the foreign worker situation in Singapore that goes something like, their working and living conditions are far worse at home, so they already have it good. Some activists have discussed the false premises of this argument, e.g. the assumption that workers “know” what they are getting into. Implicit in that logic is the assumption that giving them less than ideal work/living/wage conditions (read: exploitation) is normal — in Graeber’s words, “such is the nature of the sacrifice” they are making by coming here to eke out a better living for their families back home. One group that I’m also thinking about is foreign domestic workers, for whom the boundary between workplace and home was always absent. Foreign domestic workers take over the “caring labor” that usually done for free by those in the home, but they are severely unpaid for the work that they do. There are all these stories about how they can’t even rest and relax because of the logic that they’re on the employer’s time and occupying the employer’s space. Is it about paying them more? Maybe, but it’s also a question of why aren’t we already paying them more? This is caught up again with exploitation and class, and within Singapore with our reliance on low-wage workers to fill labor-intensive jobs so the rest of us can go on with the sort of bullshit ones that Graeber talks about. And becuase they are not paid highly, the work they do is not valued ($$).

Anyway in may 2020, I’m less interested in how the pandemic lets me work from home in my pjs as how it challenges the inertia for redressing power imbalances.

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antthonystark · 7 years

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yeah i think people don't really realize when it comes to alec that choosing to be immortal is like a REALLY REALLY big decision it's not just whatever

i mean, i’m sure people interpret things differently so i don’t want to say that they haven’t thought about it enough or whatever, but idk man the massive and enormous difference between mortality and immortality is so significant that, as i’ve said before, really makes it hard for me to even really fathom this issue on a character level - like there are very significant burdens to immortality as, like, every single piece of fiction with immortal characters can attest to lol

like again because immortality doesn’t exist in our world it can be difficult to really think about which is why i dont like to bc i get too caught up in it lol. i think a lot of people think of immortality as just an extended distance between point A (birth) and point B (death) but immortality isn’t just a longer lifespan, it’s point A without any point B and therefore no possible linear progression from the start to the anticipated destination so it really Changes the entire game of, like, living and aging lol it becomes agelessness, in a sense. we’re obviously all mortal so we don’t always realize, i think, how very very very very much our lives are framed by their own finite-ness and the implicit understanding that we are in, essentially, a linear progression to the point B that represents death BUT that’s entirely irrelevant to immortality as it relates to alec that was just a huge tangent lol

to preface: none of this is me saying that malec should have a tragic mortal/immortal ending, or that i don’t think alec could or should choose to be immortal at some point down the line (he could! he should!), but just factors that i think should be considered when the immortality problem is solved in the show so please just please be calm

but back to alec, i think the loss of loved ones who aren’t magnus isn’t something people think about in its complete implication - like i see a lot of people treat alec’s love for his family as an obligation he deserves to be freed from. and don’t get me wrong, one of my favourite juxtapositions Ever in life and fiction is the contrast between alec’s love-from-duty for his family and alec’s love-equals-freedom for magnus so there is a significant and not-incidental sense of obligation there compared to with magnus that is one of my favourite things about the malec relationship, but i don’t think that undercuts the immense love that alec feels for people like izzy and jace and max, for one thing, and the utter devastation that having to experience their deaths would bring.

but that’s pretty intuitive, but i don’t think people always take into consideration the fact that the lightwood line isn’t going to end there. i presume (hope) that clary and jace would have kids, and maybe izzy and simon if simon gets de-vamped as in the books. so having to watch those children grow up and loving them as family, they have children, then they die, and watch their children, and their children’s children, your entire lineage, everything that ever connected you to someone else, everyone who was even ever alive when you were young, every memory and keepsake you had of these people you loved with all your being, just fade into oblivion…………as im sure magnus can attest to, that would be frickin harrowing. so it’s not just “yeah izzy and jace will die and it’ll suck but he’ll get over the grief after like a hundred years or something and plus he gets to be with magnus forever” like the burden of immortality isn’t one to be taken lightly tbh like im sure there will be a million happy wonderful things to look forward to with immortal husbands magnus and alec but there are two sides to every coin that i’m sure would need to be taken into consideration by alec as well as by the writers who would need to bring this organically into his character arc - like the benefits should clearly outweigh the costs in the way that it should be depicted on the show imo

also, im sure this isn’t one that alec would be like, focused on over the idea of all his other loved ones dying before his eyes, or the thought of having to lose or be lost by magnus aka the eventual love of his life, which i think would be the two main (and warring) impulses behind the choice of being immortal (assuming that that’s even a ready choice, but really this whole thing is stipulated on that assumption) - but i would be interested to know what the implications might be on his career and work as a shadowhunter, being like the only immortal shadowhunter ever, or at least one of few. i feel like it would be affected in some way, but i dont really have any thoughts that merit discussing, just a random point that might be interesting to think about lol

so yeah. immortality is like. Significant lol. so, you know what i mean, i really really really really dont want it to be just “oh magnus i want to be with you forever let me sip this immortality potion!” after, like, a two-episode arc. like i know and have faith in the show that they would never do it that stupidly and callously, but i’m talking like a season-long arc at the very least lol like i need this shit to be handled with a Lot of care and attention to character of alec before it happens, if it happens at all in the actual canon, is all i’m saying and all i ever usually say lol like i have 100% faith that the malec relationship will easily become something that can justify something this huge, because it is already a beautiful relationship even as it is in its fairly early stages, but i need it to be done so properly you know what i mean because the implications on both the character and the relationship would be So Damn Huge that it shouldn’t be taken lightly but i mean who knows SH could be cancelled after like season 4 and then where will we be lol so this entire discussion could just be for nothing

#my thoughts #immortality discourse #it's just such a meaty topic i wonder why it gets so simplified #i love the idea of immortal husbands like yes please but #it's so fun to think about everything that it entails and implies no #that just me #malec #alec lightwood #anonymous #letterbox #text post

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