IRMA JUST LEFT AND NOW MARIA IS ON HER WAY AND SHES GOING TO SLICE RIGHT THROUGH THE CENTER OF THE ISLAND AS A CAT3/4. We haven’t even gotten over the damages with irma yet and some people STILL dont have water or power and now we’re getting hit with something thats going to be even worse for us PLEASE PLEASE pray for puerto rico and the caribbean because this shit is serious
figured i’d lightly weigh in on this since i’m very aware of the situation:
i support swamp-wizard and i loved his blog content. this idea that keegan somehow wasn’t a good ally to lgbt women is just mind-blowing to me – he’s been such an influential voice (to me, at least, and a lot of other lgbt women i know) in pushing back against the rampant misogyny in both media and fandom, including being willing to actually listen to lesbians and make an effort to understand the experiences of gay & bi women when interacting with media. i’m shocked (but not surprised) to see people who are neither women nor gay leveling these accusations against him
Sigh. Ok, actual last word on this because I’d like to close off on a perspective that is closer to my values and less a byproduct of shock and anger. This is my ACTUAL last word on the matter in public, I don’t want to clog up fun happy fandom times with this nonsense, but revgays if you’d like to talk further you can contact me privately.
At least insofar as I and the people I know are coming from, it’s really disingenuous to pretend this is about “shipping” or w.e the fuck. What this is about is that swamp has repeatedly refused to stay in his damn lane basically and just, you know, be cool? Not be an enormous jackass to people he doesn’t know and incite harassment at them/call into question their LGBT identity as a way of undermining their Progressive Cred or w.e?
No matter which way you cut it, Swamp has mocked, vagued and ostracized several fan creators for having petty disagreements with him. He’s been called out on it and told its fucked up–by ME, when I was under the impression he was a cool dude and was making an effort to be friends with him as well as other people who he directly affected–repeatedly apologized, and then proceeded to do the exact same shit anyway.
As @callmearcturus said, he apparently didn’t even bother to clear up the mess he made wrt his accusations at her. That’s fucked up. This dude has 0 credibilities and that’s because there is a demonstrable pattern of lies and not caring about trust or goodwill w/ said fans he doesn’t agree with! That’s a lot of what has earned him this response so, tough shit.
As for the Hiveswap stuff, my honest opinion is that however reasonable his anger is, his reading of the game is flat out fucking wrong. It’s bad analysis. It is demonstrably, blatantly untrue and says nothing meaningful. His lines of criticism were shut down by wp statements on the few pieces of narrative ambiguity there are.
Criticism isn’t all made equal, or free from criticism itself! Swamp is fundamentally engaging in bad, lazy criticism, in that he says nothing accurate or substantial about the game. This is insufferable given his arrogant posturing about knowing Everything About Homestuck (but like, frankly who am I to throw stones there?) and DOUBLY insufferable when he uses it as justification to rob lgbt creators from profit.
Now all of that said? I don’t hate Swamp. I don’t think I’m capable of hating much in general. as @ao3sburb said, I kinda hope he comes back someday. I don’t LIKE being mean, especially not to fellow LGBT people–there’s nazis out there, the world is scary, we need to stick together etc etc.
But I TRIED to be friends with swamp. Really hard! All I got out of it was a bunch of my friends being harassed and endless bullshit vaguepost drama. And I genuinely thought he was cool for the longest time. I seriously have not had a more dramatic, hurtful, and drawn out experience of being let down and let down by someone I tried to believe in, and every time I chose to give swamp another chance it usually ended in another friend of mine getting vagued or harassed.
I still feel guilty about that, so the idea of giving him a pass over it and letting you turn it into “shipping nonsense”? Fuck that. Swamp fucked up, and he was mean and cruel in contexts where it was completely unnecessary. Over and over and over again.
So like I don’t think he’s satan, I certainly don’t think he’s a FASCIST (LOL i cant believe I heard that one), but I do think he’s fundamentally misguided, and to the extent that he’s hurt he’s internalized a pattern of lashing out in really ugly and unwarranted ways.
I hope he gets better. I hope he takes care of himself. And when he comes back I hope he knows to just like, be fucking chill about stuff with his fellow LGBT peeps and shit. We deserved the understanding and nuance at least as much as he does now, according to your logic, and we. did. not. receive. it.
We are under no obligation to provide what he proved unwilling to give.
Feferi’s like “Ew, you’re just doing this cause you like me.” Eridan goes “Ew bitch, no. I am so far over you, I literally don’t care about you except you’re also technically the Empress now.” Sollux challenges Eridan to their Hate Duel and Eridan goes “Ugh fine”. Sollux gets Rekt, and Feferi gets pissed that her new “pet”(because that’s what Sollux seemed to be to her) didn’t win and tries to kill Eridan. 2/4 Eridan kills her first, destroys the Matriorb to distract Kanaya when she looks like she might go for him next(arguably the only uncalled for action, as I don’t think she’d actually attacked him yet), kills Kanaya, and then leaves poor Karkat alone and goes to find somebody to go with him to join Jack. ¾ So he didn’t just go on a murder spree, he was either winning a duel(Sollux), or defending himself against (percieved) threats(Feferi and Kanaya). If he was really gonna go on a murder spree, he would’ve killed Karkat, too. Also all of this probably wouldn’t have happened if A: Feferi had done her job as his Moiral; or B: Present!Karkat hadn’t called it off with Past!Eridan. (Sorry if this all sounds rude, I just really hate when people don’t actually pay attention to Eridan’s character) 4/4
You have some serious issues with women, anon. From the top:
A) Eridan was cruel, ungrateful, judgmental and unpleasant to everyone who had the misfortune of talking to him from his first appearance. Also, he’s a fucking Nazi. Feferi was forced into a position of trying to cool the temperament of a literal genocidal nazi asshole. Nobody owed Eridan further emotional labor once he was no longer a threat.
B) Your view that Feferi viewed Sollux as a ‘pet’ is as uncharitable as it is based on absolutely nothing. If you’re going to make statements that dramatic at me, be prepared to back them up with the text and have your reading put under scrutiny. I’m not here to indulge the validity of everyone’s pet headcanons. I’m here to talk about Homestuck.
C) You’re forgetting the part where Eridan tried to get Feferi SPECIFICALLY to join Jack with him. The offer was not open to Sollux and was not made to anybody else. Eridan considered her worthy because she’s ruling class, because oh have I mentioned, Eridan is a fucking nazi.
D) I literally do not care to what extent Eridan was personally out to go on a murder spree. He’s still a gutless coward who abandoned all his friends and took dim views of even the ones who went out of their way to show him kindness, like Karkat, on account of his ***LITERAL SPACE NAZI IDEOLOGY***
E) Andrew Hussie himself talked about him in the dimmest of terms, calling him the worst kind of bastard Homestuck has to offer in the context of Act 5–harsher words than I’d use, considering LE and Gamzee exist. But like. You’re gonna have a hard time finding evidence for your pet reading, bud.
F) Maybe when you’re expressing virulent misogyny at a female character don’t LITERALLY call her slurs? It’s kind of on the nose. You might have noticed part of my aesthetic is valuing the effort it takes to read between the lines, so like give me a little room for doubt here as to where you’re coming from ok thanks.
G) I didn’t even call Eridan completely irredeemable in the grand scheme of things, for fuck’s sake. My point was that actually just the opposite: That no matter how bad Eridan was, you still have to read him while weighing the agency of a child trapped in an exploitative system with the literal quasi-Adult GOD that set up that system in the first place.
Eridan is shit, but there’s potential for him to be not shit somewhere in his character. The two statements are not contradictory.
no really though, can anyone explain to me why fictional depictions of violence are only wrong when they’re sexual? why it’s universally understood that simulated violence can be consumed without danger of influencing society, but any depiction of any part of the sexual violence spectrum will inevitably contribute to real world sexual violence? have any antis made an attempt at really explaining that? I’d love to see it
Obviously I’m not an anti, but as someone who has always had an underlying reaction of ‘this comparison doesn’t feel right’ whenever someone calls hating fictional sex but not fictional murder hypocritical, I wanted to respond.
I think it’s a reflection of how society reacts to sexual assault victims differently from murder/attempted murder victims. Specifically: society behaves as if the thoughts and fantasies of a sexual assault victim have an effect on the severity of their rapist’s actions but does not do the same for murder victims.
in other words: in an anti’s eyes, it’s easy to see that only a murderer is responsible for murder. But rape culture (not the rapists) are responsible for sexual assault and anyone contributing to it (i.e. creators of dark fandom content) is/are responsible for cleaning up and ending rape.
*
Frank talk about about rl sexual assault and murder below.
Neutrally speaking, sex itself can be a good or a bad experience. murder or attempted murder can only ever be a bad experience.
When someone says they were sexually assaulted, society zeros in on whether or not the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about the sex instead of focusing on the being forced part. If we treated murder victims the same way we treat sexual assault victims, we’d concern ourselves with whether the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about being stabbed/choked/poisoned/etc to death instead of focusing on the being dead part.
“[A]s long as society pushes the blame for sexual violence off the abuser/rapist and onto the victim, or the state of society… antis will contribute to this mindset by demanding that the victims and society clean up their act first.”
This is good but I’d like to add: “antis”(or, well, their philosophical ancestors) TOTALLY tried to do this with violence.
For most of the 90s and early 00s, people with precisely this mindset fought HARD to ban or censor games and music(exclusively rap and other “deviant” genres) for violence(and, surely by coincidence, anti-establishment messages) with the same sorts of arguments and on the similar theory that violence in art caused violence in society. That violence and crime in US society during this period were persistently falling inspite of its, to their eyes, ever-increasing “deviance” never seemed to register with them, oddly enough. And before THAT -during the 70s, 80s, and 90s- the same folks campaigned against violence in films, tv, and music. Antis lost all those fights, eventually(well, TV censorship is more complex. The FCC was, and remains, very susceptible to their gaming, particularly on language and sex).
And during all these eras, mostly the same folks were caught up in the anti-porn fight as well. Which also failed. So why does this particular arm of the anti-porn campaign continue? Here’s one theory:
All of this -from slasher flicks to pornography- were normalized by society in the wake of their success; they became, or became part of, billion dollar industries and, in the US, how can something worth billions of dollars be deviant? Commodities are as American as Apple Pie. These are all also Industries controlled by, and profitable to, white men. Fanfic is (mostly)non-profit. It’s non-commoditized and, in fact, very difficult to commoditize due to IP laws. It’s primarily controlled by folks afab. Because it’s non-institutionalized, the sort of structural gatekeeping which keeps poc and non-men out of positions of influence and control aren’t as developed and established(racism and sexism are still social institutions that impact and exist in fandom, obvsl; upholding them is the point of the racist+sexist harassment which happens in it). Fanfic sex remains “deviant”, and thus an open target for christian moralizers(disguised, unaware, or otherwise), because Fanfic communities themselves are “deviant”; more open to those excluded by establishment society, and more difficult for capitalists to integrate into their system of profit-exploitation.
I don’t know if anyone has posted this set on here yet, but I haven’t seen anything on my dash about it so I thought that I would post it. Muslims in Myanmar are being burnt alive and I’m not gonna post videos or photos because they’re brutal and I feel like muslims are dehumanized enough and I’m sick of seeing our dead bodies plastered everywhere. Unfortunately all I know is from what I’ve seen on instagram and twitter, so if anyone has anything to add on, feel free to. Keep Rohingya Muslims in your duaas.
for people who weren’t here 2.5 years ago: xkit guy made xkit, he worked for free and was one of the nicest people on this fucking hellsite
then, due to /one/ anonymous message stating that he was abusing someone, that never got proven to be true, the hellsite crowd had decided to make xkit guy’s life a living hell
without proof. nothing but a single anon that someone might’ve sent because they’re a fucking hate goblin who wanted to score hell points for destroying a guy who had poured his time and energy into making tumblr functional
seeing the atmosphere surrounding mcelroys in today’s hellsite crowd i can say that they are itching for even a faked info of them being insensitive even in the slightest way so they’d have the pretext to drag them down
tl;dr: be skeptical, don’t go with the crowd and check the info.
staff You are recommending that I follow a nazi blog I blocked last night. Your site promotes anti-semitism to Jews. Your site shoves Nazi Swastikas in the faces of Jews. It’s bad enough that the Nazi blogs seem to be sprouting up like weeds on a site that claims to have an anti-hate policy, but to actively promote them to people who have taken the steps of blocking these blogs is beyond the pale. Clean this place up. It’s turning into Stormfront.
I encourage everyone who sees this post, Jewish or otherwise, to reblog it. Tumblr has been ignoring the growth of Nazism on this site for too long. It needs to end.
As we all know, we face an upcoming postal vote on marriage equality. Due to the sheer anger and frustration of this unecessary beauracracy, many have urged those voting Yes to send their vote back packaged with glitter bombs or rainbow confetti in protest.
DO NOT DO THIS!!
Your vote will likely be destroyed and therefore not counted. And arguing that “glitter isnt dangerous” doesnt mean shit to people who just see a foreign substance detected and immeadiately assume the worst (Anthrax anyone??)
If you won’t take my word, at least take MP Claire O’Neil’s, who was asked:
PLEASE, do not fuck up this crutial vote for everyone by being stupid and getting your voice dismissed like this. Put stickers on the envelope, draw rainbows on it, if you must protest in this way be smart about it.
Even if you’re not Australian, you’d be doing us a solid to spread the word, since unfortunately a lot of younger voters still think this is a good idea when its literally the opposite.
I’ve delete/blocked like five of these things in the last two days (lol is someone running a campaign) but this one is fucking so masterfully done, I almost want to applaud.
This is like some premium good shit concern trolling, right here. Oh, heavens to betsy, you might have to stop reading my fics if I excuse stuff like that? Setting up a little ultimatum, huh?
Except you’re anon, and you’re giving no context outside of the anti dogwhistles of PEDOS! AND INCEST! These terms that you and I both know inherently incite a negative reaction that not a single person alive wants to be associated with.
But you have zero qualifiers here. So, are you talking about “this person writes and posts shota/lolicon that explicitly fetishizes the massive age difference and power differential between a minor and an adult”? Or are you talking “this artist once drew explicit homestuck art and they’re popular so I want to ruin their life?”
Because guess what, I don’t trust you to be actually on the side of good here. I don’t think of anonymous greyfaces with sad concerned emojis and no identities or context in my inbox as my allies. When I think “who is going to help me with my trauma that still fucks me up today and prevent similar shit from happening to other people,” I sure as fuck don’t think of antis who are digging for dirt to ostracize fanpeople they don’t like. Who, 90% of the time, are victims themselves.
Because antis don’t care about actual people, they care about power.
So no, I’m still not going to play ball with any of these messages. You come to my blog, you come to me anonymously with no identity and no liability, and try to pressure me into this shit with your little scripts– literally every one of these messages has followed the same script! Jesus christ!
You don’t want a conversation. You want me to be shamed into silence or to capitulate. You want me to divulge my own history so you can decide whether I get to have an opinion. You’re the same fucks who start witchhunts and harrass people into the ground. You are the people poisoning the well and making people literally scared to be in fandom, and oftentimes scared to use the tool of writing/creating at to help them with their own trauma!
Flying through Storytelling 