#not to say necessarily unilaterally lmao but you know. anything else it's like say at least basically simultaneous initial interest.... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

waveridden · 3 years

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can i get commentary for the scene in growing pains where gloria and pedro first meet?

OH BOY YEAH this is going to be so long lmao

so some context: i think @leonstamatis was the first person who suggested that gloria should be friends with the crabs, in general, because they would understand that de-monster-ification is not necessarily a unilateral good thing. i think actually the first thought was that bertie tosser would be a good pick bc he had the crab arm that got decarcinized, but that was a different kind of loss because carcinization is different than the way the garden Changes People actively.

i am not 100% sure on when pedro entered the picture - i think that one of us asked someone in the crabs and someone somewhere along the way suggested pedro. the very simple pitch was that pedro has done research on carcinization, and so he would be a good person for gloria to talk to.

a brief tangent: i read an essay in high school (i think it was called "seeing" but i can't remember the author offhand) that included a section about people who were born blind but gain sight later in their lives, and how incredibly frustrating it is learning to see. because we, as adults, know what things are like "shadow" and "distance" and "sphere" and "window" and "colors," but if it is your first time seeing then it is really hard having the language of vision, the intellectual knowledge of seeing, and also the faculties of your average two-year-old in terms of actually understanding what you see.

i have described growing pains as a story about learning to be a person, but i think it is so much more complicated than that. gloria does not have context for personhood, or for the world at all. gloria is learning everything from scratch.

so the pedro-gloria dynamic is important to me because all the love and affection comes from a very simple place. pedro is a researcher and he wants to know about gloria, and he wants to help xem. (i think like everyone else there is a learning curve - like, him meeting with margo to talk about gloria without actually talking to gloria - but more than most of the flowers, he understands that this is An Anomaly, that just because gloria looks and vaguely acts human does not mean that xe understands what xe is doing.) pedro is willing to answer questions, and gloria has found someone who does not care about all the questions that xe is going to ask.

almost none of this is about that specific scene so i'll add: one thing about that particular scene that i've always liked is that pedro really does not care that this weird plant person could and realistically would maim him. it's not even necessarily him going "this is a person in need and i can help xem," it is him going "this person doesn't understand, and i can help xem understand." this is why he asks about gloria's nose. this is why he says that he knows what it's like for your body to regrow. because before there is empathy and friendship and anything like that, he just saw this person who was lost and decided to help.

#waveridden.ask #birdlord5000 #growing pains #long post #IT'S SO LONG I'M SORRY i hope you enjoy. something here shdflk #also thank you!!

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tonyglowheart · 5 years

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Since you asked for clarification, I was asking under what circumstances, if any, you think it is morally unacceptable to ship fictional characters. But thank you for your previous response, I laughed.

oooh okay. well this gets thorny and tricky, as is the wont of anything to do with like morality and ethics and nonesuch.

I think it’s hard for me to say definitively there are circumstances where something is NEVER okay, ever, for every single person? I mean probably if we get down to it, I can start nuancing some limits…

hmmm okay I… may be straying outside my lane here, but I feel like an analogy can be made with kink-related stuff? Are you shipping for yourself or shipping to participate in a community? And is your community spilling over and disrupting others who maybe do not consent to be participating in some of the conventions of your community? which kind of gets to the “are you being an anti and harassing other people” kind of dealio. I mean, I’m not necessarily morally decrying, say, ship wars. I’m just saying that’s where I start thinking it gets shitty.

In terms of like… “what is your comfort level shipping one character and another”? …without any concrete examples, I’m inclined to say if they’re fictional, then they’re your playground. If you personally aren’t comfy with a ship, then don’t feel forced to participate in it, I think? But be aware if you ship something that other ppl may take offense to it, and their objections may be valid for themselves. If THEY start harassing YOU for something you ship, then they’re in the wrong. Like people want to make the argument that “fiction affects” reality, which I think is valid, but also I think arguments that that’s a fallacy are valid too on the basis that shipping communities form a relatively smaller facet of society and hardly affect overarching societal structures the way, say, compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia do.

RPS is also not my personal cup of tea generally, but I can see the appeal, and this starts getting a bit more sticky but like, again my view on this is like the kink thing, if you’re keeping it contained either to yourself or your community and aren’t harassing ppl about it, it’s… less bad? I mean RPS does get stickier because we’re dealing with real actual people who could be uncomfortable about what the RPS is in relation to them, without their consent.. But I’m hardly going to decry it completely as unilaterally immoral. (edit: OKAY I WAS SPEED-READING and only just saw the specification of “fictional characters” yeeaaahh whoops)

I’m glad you liked my other response tho lol, I was like… yeah asked cold, I had no clue how to respond. I mean, even now, I’m not really sure what brought this on and why me of all people (if you are genuinely asking because you trust my judgment then oh my god I am so sorry anon lmao).

I mean also, for context, I sit on like… a handful of Problematique™ ships lmao so I’m hardly going to start throwing stones (glass houses, etc etc ya know). And like. I can see why people would be uncomfortable with some of the ships I like(d)! And that’s fine, they’re allowed to do that! But also like. I like what I like lmao and I sure don’t have any, like, Catholic guilt about it. It’s more like.. being discrete because the prevailing atmosphere is just Rough and I want to avoid getting on like.. the purity wank crowd’s radar, just in case :’)

(okay I’m editing to add some more thoughts or ramblings or stream of consciousness I guess)

okay so. here’s the thing. I think there’s some things that SEEM like they’re a no-brainer. “no incest. no pedophilia. no abuse ships.” that spiel. But like. the thing is those things aren’t neeeecessarily as clear-cut as they may seem on the surface. Fiction is created; two characters that ended up siblings might have started off as childhood friends and then the author decided they worked better as siblings. Characters that were siblings up until the final draft might have ended up as neighbors. And god I don’t know if I’ve ranted or not about “abuse ships” but where do we even start with THAT. How do we even define what that is. Are we also, then, discounting some canon ships that perhaps have abusive overtones in some of the interactions? Like... a lot of the way straight dudes write straight relationships... to me can be read as kind of abusive.

My other gripe with “pedophilia” is the overuse of it as a moral signalling buzzword. Like, I get why! It’s visceral! it’s the kind of strawman that’s like “oh what, are you defending pedophilia?” but I also have seen it unironically used to describe a hypothetical relationship between a fictional 16 year old (the character wasn’t even 16 in the series) and someone else over 20. My dudes I’m p sure the 16-year-old is post-pubescent. Or at least I sure hope so.

Like ultimately, I think the thing with fictional character is like... they’re fiction. no individual persons were harmed in the imaginings of what’s happening with this fictional character. And with shipping and fanfic, I think it’s a character-driven genre (I think someone wrote a post about this some time?). I can see where characters can be simplified down to sets of tropes or character dynamics that can be compelling to people and make them want to imagine those dynamics in other settings. And it’s possible for some of the other things to become set-dressing.

Speaking to when I think it’s WRONG to ship something.... I guess most of my answers are “when it translates harmfully somehow into meatspace”? Like if someone is using shipping as performative activism, or shipping as relationship advice (which isn’t to say ALL shipping is bad as relationship advice). But like. The purpose of shipping is not relationship advice, so any relationship advice that comes out of shipping is incidental and like.. a pleasant byproduct. But I don’t think it should be an explicit goal or aspiration, to only ship what seems to be idealized. Also that just flat-out sounds boring to me lol. How can you have that sweet sweet H/C if you don’t have any H, ya know?

#I think ultimately you just gotta decide what you're personally comfy with #and what you're not #and it's fine if it's different from the person's next to you!#if you decide shipping a certain ship is Wrong that's your prerogative #just don't go around being a shit to other ppl about it #I wank about seeing performative outrage but I also go in the tags and I sort of know there's going to be SOME #and then I just vent and block so I don't see it anymore #like if you want to put up a ''xx shippers don't interact'' sign that's your prerogative too #I might get salty about it tho lmao as a Problematique shipper #but again: I try to keep it contained! I don't tag with public tags #I try to censor to prevent things showing up in searches #etc etc #anyway what are your thoughts?#I am curious what brought this on - if anything did bring it on #Anonymous #asks answered

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