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suspendered disbelief

@ministershwooby

queer disaster, 26
ENG/PT/ES

*dark souls npc voice* Hahahaha... Accursed one, dost thou really think that one can bust it down sexual style without being blighted with the curse?... Accursed one, thou still hast much to learn... The heart seeks freedom, but the body seeks ruin and decay... Hahahahahahahahhahaha...

idk why we’re all laura posting but this is my contribution.

[image description: two tweets by laura jane grace. the first reads. “If a fascist dystopian nightmare scenario were to ever actually play out where Trans people were rounded up for some kind of imprisonment or extermination, I guarantee there would be a handful of trans people that would put names on a list.” The second continues, “you can for sure sniff some of the boot lickers by now.” /end ID]

i feel like tags like these (& there are several ppl in the notes talking abt conservative trans ppl specifically) are missing the point. while this sentiment definitely applies to prolific conservative/fash trans people it's not much of a statement to say an open fascist would support fascism. these people (at least blair and caitlyn, idrk buck angel's deal) are fascists first and trans second and would be running under the assumption of getting an exemption as reward for selling themselves out. this is more about trans people who maybe consider themselves liberal or leftist, who think their politics & identity puts them at odds with authority and fascism but who willingly engage in online witch hunts of other trans people, who view it as rooting out the Secret Monsters in their own community, who share cancellation posts of trans women uncritically, who view themselves as ontologically incapable of violence. there are already lists made of the allegedly problematic, predatory, capital-E Evil trans people (who deserve nothing but scorn, alienation, erasure and/or death) shared widely on social media and the trans people who make and share these would gladly hand over such info to the authorities if they could justify in their own minds that these people would be Getting What They Deserve. Even if the accusations are justified (which they are often not, and very often just stem from anti-kink/conformist respectability politics rather than any actual harm done) we need to be able to recognize this cop behavior for what it is and how it incredibly easily plays into the hands of those who want us all in the ground. In the eyes of transphobes we are ALL perverts, we are ALL groomers, we are ALL degenerate and differentiating oneself from the "real" Monsters will not matter one bit in the end.

kill the cop inside your head. kill the cop inside your head. stop trying to police everyone around you. kill the cop inside your head. punitive measures / punishments are not the solution to society. kill the cop inside your head.

No kink at pride is so funny cause what is and isn’t considered kink is inherently ambiguous and based on a power structure of who gets to be considered normal in society. And here you are enforcing it, siding with it.

Like how it’s considered a kink to be into fat people and fat bodies are considered fetishistic in any sexual context but toned, skinny bodies are just for normal people? Yeah.

Like how it's considered a kink to have sex with disabled people? Yeah.

There are many ppl that consider BEING queer as a kink. Be it trans or gay or bi or what have you. Kink belongs at pride.

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Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.

Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.

I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.

Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.

Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.

Editor here. Can confirm.

"Two centuries later" just triggers a mental note to check if timing is consistent throughout the book, because it may mean more time jumps are ahead. "200 years later", or heaven forbid, "201 years later" will have me draw up a time line. The more specific the number, the more critical people become.

Strange phenomenon. Well spotted, OP.

actually i think i might have an explanation for this from linguistics? i think folks get more nitpicky if you have specific numbers because of gricean maxims, specifically the maxims of quality and quantity

basically gricean maxims are a set of guidelines that we all carry in our heads that we expect other people to follow when having a conversation in good faith - i’m copying and pasting definitions from someone else because my attempts at summing up quality and quantity weren’t going so hot

The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.

so basically, when you put a rough number in a text, people think subconsciously ‘oh, the exact number isn’t important, because if it was they would tell me an exact number, so i don’t need to worry about this’, whereas if you put something precise in, people’s brains go ‘wait, they think i need to know this information so i’ll remember it, but now it’s later and they’ve said something that contradicts it, so at least one of those times they were lying and i must figure out which time it was’

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This is also true of specific months and days of the week!

I had to draw up a rough calendar to keep track of things in my novel because I decided it was important that a certain event happen on a Tuesday, and also I needed to remember when weekends happened and if a given character should be at work on any given day. It was really REALLY difficult, and I cut whole paragraphs sometimes in order to avoid mentioning a specific day of the week wherever I could.

My editor also tracked this thoroughly and had to correct me once, despite all my efforts to keep things straight. She also helped me cut more to make things easier, because yes, this is something readers get tripped up on and try to keep track of!

Can confirm. The 1992 Sailor Moon anime took so much shit for saying Silver Millennium was 1000 years ago, instead of “in the far distant past.” Why? For the simple fact that it’s implied Elysian was somewhere in Europe AND IF ELYSIAN HAD EXISTED IN-UNIVERSE ARCHAEOLOGISTS WOULD HAVE FOUND IT ALREADY. It was a massively influential place. It would have been attested in texts from elsewhere. It was a sovereign nation, so it DEFINITELY would have been bitched about by the Romans. And we see evidence of advanced metalsmithing in Endymion’s plate armor—you’re telling us NOTHING survived? It might make sense if it’d been in, say, modern-day rural China, much of which is unexplored due to hostile terrain, but Europe? No.

And don’t even get me started on Yu-Gi-Oh fandom and the attempts to figure out where in the king lists Atem is supposed to fall, because Kazuki Takahashi attributed him to a point where he’d have to be Tutankhamen’s son.

ah.

"Average fan spends 10 hours a month reconciling numbers in canon" factoid actually just statistical error. Housemate Alex, who spends 525,600 minutes...

also religious texts did this! will let someone more familiar elaborate on specific instances in like judaism or elsewhere but big round numbers were often used to just mean “a long ass time”

how to not get cancelled

dont talk about sex

talking about sex on your blog that people have to actively choose to follow is exposing them to sexual content they don't want to see and tantamount to sexual assault. doubly so if you're into thoughtcrimes maladaptive fetishes like cnc or petplay or [something else i personally dislike]

don't defend yourself

defending yourself is what abusers do, and definitive proof the accusations are true, never mind whether what you've been accused of is actually bad. humbly accept whatever penance is asked of you and come to terms with the fact that any harassment you receive isn't about you, it's about keeping the community safe for everyone

don't defend your friends

the only reason someone would defend their friends is if a) they're doing the same thing or maybe even something worse or b) they've been groomed/brainwashed/blackmailed into supporting an abuser

don't have friends in the first place

the only reason someone like you would have friends at all is to groom them or manipulate them into believing your own harmful beliefs about "private sexual practices between consenting adults" [read: sex crimes that you should definitely be locked up or chemically castrated for], so just avoid talking to others to begin with. this gives your enemies less ammunition and definitely doesn't socially isolate you

delete your blog

this doesn't actually stop people from trying to cancel you, but it does make it harder for them to send normal and well-justified harassment and suicide bait, so you should do it as a precautionary measure anyway

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

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got-doctor

Still call it out and question it ….

Bruh. No. Listen. Call out what people do now, absolutely. If they haven’t changed, call them out on their record. This post is explicitly not about people who HAVEN’T changed. What this post IS saying is, if someone is making an effort to be a good person, don’t go digging around in their past for evidence that they were once for what they’re now against, or once against what they’re now for, as “proof” of what they “really think,” because people’s opinions and beliefs can change. 

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

If someone has changed for the better, don’t harass them about what they were like before they fuckin’ changed. That’s shitty and it needs to stop.

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We can’t change the world if we decide people can’t change.

Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not  Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Folks. This shit needs to stop.