[I don’t understand why some people act so scandalized by Dukat/Kira. How is it any worse than popular ships like Spuffy or Reylo? Shipping the hero with the villain is nothing new.]
If someone is against Kira/Dukat, odds are they’re also against Spuffy and Reylo. Because those relationship dynamics are horrifically toxic and abusive and the majority of the people who are shipping them are doing so non-critically, with no acknowledgement of the fact that they are abusive and toxic, and also against the characters actual characterization – generally, the male characters are written as conflicted and pained and hurt, in need of love and forgiveness to achieve their redemption, and the female characters are reduced to a prop to advance his arc, giving her none of the characterization that she has in canon.
Kira/Dukat is among the worst of the worst, because of that horrible dynamic – at any given point in the show’s run, within the previous decade, Kira lived at a time where if Dukat demanded it, he could fuck her and she could only say no if she was willing to be executed. Kira lived through a time where literally, she had no option of consent had any Cardassian approached her and demanded that she sleep with them.
Dukat wanting to fuck Kira is, to a Bajoran, equivalent to Hitler, somehow surviving WWII, telling a survivor of Auschwitz that he would fuck her. And I’m not citing Godwin’s Law here, Dukat was literally compared to Hitler by the show’s producers. To the Bajoran people, Gul Dukat is their answer Hitler. The fact that people look at the dynamic between them and say ‘yeah, they totally should be together’ is horrifying, because those people are literally saying that an abuse victim and her abuser should be paired up, generally on the idea that “she’ll make him a better man.”
It is not the victim’s duty to ever be personally responsible for their abuser’s redemption. Ever. And I say this not just to the Kira/Dukat shippers, but the shippers of the above mentioned ships and the ones like it throughout media. These are toxic and abusive relationships when they are about the actual characters in canon. And if you’re making up characterizations wholesale to justify your ship, maybe you shouldn’t even be shipping this one, because it means you don’t actually want these particular characters together, just characters who look like them, but are not based on the actual canon characters.
This last gif is actually really cool when you consider that Kuvira bent the meteor rock (the ferrous fluid) as if it were just a soft metal – while Korra is bending it like water because she’s trained in water bending and knows how to do that. In the words of Guru Pathik: “If you open your mind, you will see that all the elements are one. Four parts of the same whole.” To the Avatar, why can’t rock be water?
Gotta say I just looooove white fans trying to dictate whether a fan space driven in large part by Black fans is allowed to exist, and on what terms. Especially when, in this particular case, she doesn’t even know that anti-shipper communities are not a monolith and that I don’t know and am not involved with anti-pedoshipping communities.
Don’t get me wrong, anti-abortion people ARE authoritarian–maybe not every one of them, but the movement is dominated by authoritarianism. I have no beef with the statement that the anti-abortion movement is authoritarian, or that most anti-abortion movements are. I have a problem with the statement that anti-abortion beliefs are inherently authoritarian. Try wrong, sexist, illogical, and horrifying, none of which is the same thing as being authoritarian.
Authoritarianism is a psychological and political phenomenon predicated on a set of correlating beliefs, not just one belief on one issue. Someone who believes abortion is infanticide may choose to dogpile and harass people who have had or try to get abortions, which is textbook authoritarian behavior. Another person with the same belief might choose to discuss their opinions in the appropriate fora and respect personal boundaries, which is not authoritarian behavior. Does the latter give tacit support to the former? That really depends on the specifics of their relationship to the anti-abortion movement and how they deal with the authoritarin strain in those who share their belief, and not on the anti-abortion belief itself. That’s why the statement that all anti-abortion people give at least tacit support to authoritarianism is a dumbass one.
Anti-shippers can also be authoritarian. Again, not in every case, and it’s hard to quantify because there is such a sharp split–at least in the case of anti Reylow, which is the only anti-shipper community I’m involved with and actually know–between what antis who operate with known identities do and what antis do on anon.
This is where the idea that wrong or inhumane ideas are inherently authoritarian fails so hard–because a good idea can be taken in horrific directions, too. It’s the difference between “This ship has very problematic elements and many shippers portray it/argue for it in ways that justify and romanticize those elements, so we’ll argue with these terrible justifications“ and “This ship has very problematic elements SO STOP SHIPPING IT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW OR I’LL TORMENT YOU INTO STOPPING, LEAVING, OR EVEN HARMING YOURSELF.”
They start from a similar place, arguably a good place of recognizing how media portrayals both reflect and affect people’s perception of what is acceptable or not. The conclusions are vastly different, however, starting with the intervening belief that anyone has the right to repress someone’s free expression, by intentionally inflicting distress on them at that. Maybe there’s a plausible case for saying that these were always bullies–or authoritarians, whatever–looking for a justification and in this case anti-shipping was it. It’s not a terribly important distinction, however, because the anti-shipping starting point is still the same and we’re looking at people’s opinions here, not psychoanalyzing them. That’s why saying only harassers are true antis is as disingenuous as no-true-Scottsmanning the harassers.
Good news, tungle.hellsite, the first positive update we’ve had in years lets you write text posts with MAXIMUM GAY! Absolutely RAGINGhomosexuality on main!
A pregnant person’s body is not an arbitrary distinction. Infanticide is murder and abortion is not because the latter has a justifying reason–the pregnant person’s refusal, for whatever reason, to keep providing their body to the fetus’s survival. Protecting children is an admirable goal but you can’t force people, the vast majority of them women, to give fetuses the use of their organs and to undergo the pain and risk of childbirth.
While I don’t think every person who opposes abortion wants to control women, it’s also disingenuous to say the desire to control women’s bodies has “nothing” to do with anti-abortion beliefs. Anti-abortion beliefs are correlated with sexism (link), and mainstream anti-abortion beliefs have a strong theme of punishing women for having sex. And yes, women can absolutely have internalized sexist beliefs.
It’s also not the best argument to compare abortion rights which protect a person’s bodily autonomy, to drug laws which regulate the public availability of substances deemed to be dangerous. A better analogy would be, if anti-abortion people believe so strongly that a right to life overrides bodily autonomy they should also be okay with compulsory organ donation, or at least blood and tissue donation.
And why the weird silence on the tens of thousands of embryos in fertility clinics being discarded, i.e. killed? Shouldn’t the biological mothers of these children be compelled to implant them in their uteruses and give birth to all of them? Or be made to donate them to anyone who offers to implant them and carry them to term? Or maybe governments could compel people with uteri to implant and give birth, if there are no volunteers. Here’s an idea: We can put people in jail for getting or attempting to get abortions (murder or attempted murder according to anti-abortion people), and then make them implant and carry unwanted embryos to term as part of their, ahem, prison labor.
If anti-abortion people find these ideas horrific, why the arbitrary distinction? Isn’t an embryo in a freezer as much a baby as one in utero?
Yeah, it’s a classic silencing tactic. Reylows, or at least those of them who are anti anti, have repeatedly said this themselves–that even antis who don’t harass shippers or even interact with them shouldn’t be talking critically about the ship or shippers, period, because fandom should be about positivity. This is where the pretense that it’s about harassment falls away and it’s revealed that some shippers simply don’t want their ship or their behavior to be criticized, period. That kind of intolerance with dissent seems almost authoritarian or something lol.
It’s a good (or bad?) case of expanding a term beyond any semblance of usefulness. Whatever happened to debating an idea on its merits? We have to inaccurately call something “inherently” (lmao) authoritarian now, as opposed to just saying it’s, like, wrong? Authoritarianism is a highly useful concept for understanding phenoma like Trumpism, cults, and yeah, sometimes online harassment mobs. It’s a serious disservice to dilute it into just another label flung willy-nilly at opponents.
L.J.'s Obsessions 