Yesterday a Reylo, Today An Anti

Hey anti-Reylo fam, I’m switching over to your side. I’m sure some of my Reylo followers are going to be pissed (pls don’t hurt me, I still get why you ship it since I was there just yesterday).

As these clips of Kylo and Rey keep popping up, I’ve noticed an eerie resemblance between Kylo’s mannerisms and those of my abusive ex.

I think part of why I shipped it was because, subconsciously, I knew there was that connection and I wanted it to work out in this situation – sort of a vicarious happy ending… but, the more I’ve looked into meta-analyses on both sides (a productive way to spend finals week) I can’t bring myself to ship it anymore. Maybe my feelings will change once I see TLJ, but as of now, I am finally seeing Kylo as the manipulative man that he is, trying to get his way by using a young girl.

After TFA I shipped Finnrey, and now I’m like “wait why did I stop? How did I get swept up in this?”

Anyway, SW fandom, I hope that everyone can still enjoy TLJ even if it isn’t what we wanted. I get that people are attached to the series and characters, but let’s not be vulgar with one another.

I completely understand the urge to work out a bad past situation vicariously, goodness knows I’ve tried it before and in real life no less. I hope you’re able to heal in a way that gives you peace and happiness.

psa: “you don’t mean anything to anyone, rey. except to me.” is textbook emotional abuse

Is there a general consensus on whether pedophilia only includes adults with underaged people/children, or does it also include two adults with a large age gap? As someone in their early twenties whose never dated or been in a relationship I wonder if there is something wrong with me finding men from their late twenties to their mid forties attractive.

Pedophilia as a disorder refers to primary or exclusive sexual attraction in adults and teenagers who are at least 16 years old to prepubescent children, so by those criteria it does not include attraction between adults. People might try to fulfill pedophilic fantasies with adults, of course, for instance by seeking out partners who are as young as possible or very young-looking.

In any case the reverse, finding older partners attractive, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with pedophilia. Large age gaps can be troubling for other reasons, though, most notably power imbalance resulting from different levels of experience. There’s a lot of abusive stuff happening outside of the diagnostic bounds of pedophilia, and a lot of ways a relationship can go wrong.

I don’t think your attraction is wrong, still less a disorder. I’m just saying be careful if you decide to act on your attraction. The Scarleteen article Why I Deeply Dislike Your Older Boyfriend, though aimed mostly at cis female adolescents in relationships with older cis men and cis male adolescents, is a good description of some of the pitfalls that may apply to new adults and relationships with other genders as well (cissexism at link).

loopy777:

attackfish:

I have had to block a few people for responding to my Ursa post with all the ways Azula really isn’t at fault for her actions, and Ursa is awful. Hilariously, one of the people writing this also wrote that there was no point in writing meta asserting Azula’s culpability for her actions, because everybody thinks she is. Okay.

Anyway, other than Azula’s supposed blamelessness, there is a common theme to these reblogs, and that is the idea that Ursa and Iroh focused on Zuko, and if they had given Azula equal effort she could have been saved like her brother.

Iroh obviously did focus his efforts on Zuko. He went into exile with him after all. But the show and a little logic makes the reason for this apparent. Before Iroh even arrives home from the front, Azula makes it clear that she does not respect him, in fact she scorns him and is happy at the prospect of his death:

AZULA: If Uncle doesn’t make it back from war, then dad would be next in line to be Fire Lord, wouldn’t he?

URSA: Azula, we don’t speak that way. It would be awful if Uncle Iroh didn’t return. And besides, Fire Lord Azulon is a picture of health.

ZUKO: How would you like it if cousin Lu Ten wanted dad to die?

AZULA: I still think our dad would make a much better Fire Lord than his royal tea loving kookiness.

Azula is even crueler after Lu Ten’s death:

AZULA: By the way, Uncle’s coming home.

ZUKO: Does that mean we won the war?

AZULA: No. It mean’s Uncle’s a quitter and a loser.

ZUKO: What are you talking about? Uncle’s not a quitter.

AZULA: Oh yes, he is. He found out his son died and he just fell apart. A real general would stay and burn Ba Sing Se to the ground, not lose the battle and come home crying.

ZUKO: How do you know what he should do? He’s probably just sad his only kid is gone… forever.

This is of course Ozai’s influence. Azula hasn’t seen her uncle since she was six. However, it does go to show that Azula is not receptive to any overture Iroh might make upon his return, while Zuko is. Ozai has done an excellent job of isolating Azula from his brother’s potential influence, and ensuring that she will listen to her father, and dismiss any advice or affection Iroh might give as worthless. The only way Iroh would have any real hope of building the kind of relationship with Azula he would need to be able to help her, would be to extract her from her father’s influence and power for a very long time, something he does not have the power to do. Iroh focuses on Zuko because Zuko lets him in. Zuko isn’t getting the glut of affirmation from Ozai that Azula is, so Iroh has something to offer him that he wants desperately. And then Ozai banishes Zuko, giving Iroh exactly the opportunity he would never get with Azula.

Ursa meanwhile does not in fact focus all her attention on Zuko. We actually see her trying to curtail Azula’s cruelty, and just as importantly, trying to reinforce pro-social behavior and healthy interaction with her brother:

AZULA: Mom, can you make Zuko play with us? We need equal teams to play a game.

ZUKO: I am not cart wheeling.

AZULA: You won’t have to. Cart wheeling’s not a game, dumb dumb.

ZUKO: I don’t care. I don’t want to play with you.

AZULA: We are brother and sister. It’s important for us to spend time together. Don’t you think so, mom?

URSA: Yes darling, I think it’s a good idea to play with your sister. Go on now, just for a little while.

Critically, before Azula approaches, her mother, she says to Ty Lee, “Watch this.” This shows Ursa’s attempt to encourage her daughter’s good behavior is not a one off. It’s a pattern that Azula can predict and manipulate.

However, Ursa is unable to overcome Ozai’s influence because he is always there to praise Azula and tell her how unjust her mother is every time Ursa tries to stop her cruel behavior, and because she had no access at all to Azula, or for that matter Zuko, after she turned eight.

The idea that Iroh and Ursa are responsible for Azula’s choices and emotional problems, and that they unfairly favored Zuko over her, and this is why Azula and Zuko turned out the way they did, presupposes the two of them having magical healing abilities that they used on Zuko and not on Azula, instead of acknowledging the ways in which Ozai’s power and favoritism shut off any opportunities they had to help Azula as a child.

Those manipulations from Ozai are directly responsible for Azula’s unraveling, as well. By isolating Azula, Ozai made her completely dependent on his validation, and when she felt like she was no longer getting it, we saw how she reacted with hurt and outrage in the finale. His validation was a drug for Azula, and she would have responded like a junkie to anyone attempting to keep her away from her fix.

The comparison to a drug is particularly interesting because physically addictive drugs like heroin replace the organic chemicals produced by the body such as dopamine, creating physical dependence. It’s a physical analogue to the psychological, social, financial etc. dependence abusers create in their victims, cutting them off from their other resources, making them less self-reliant and less capable, and ultimately forcing victims to regress rather than progress. Abuse is the opposite of nurture because it forces victims to contract into relying on their abusers instead of growing into themselves and their communities.

I feel so sad that people don’t appreciate Ursa’s character, especially in the comics. In the show, she was only a loving mother with a secret surrounding her. She had almost no characterization beyond that. The comics showed us a much more complex and interesting character (and I don’t think the comics contradict anything in the show), and even though she was not perfect, I don’t think she deserves all the hate she gets.

attackfish:

Almost all of the hate Ursa gets in this fandom is from fans who want someone other than Azula to blame for Azula’s cruelty. You can also find these same people talking about how Iroh is terrible and sexist, and if he had been a better uncle, he would have fixed his niece the way he did his nephew, or that Mai and Ty Lee are terrible for “betraying” Azula, and if they had been better friends it would have fixed her, or that Zuko is a bad brother and should have fixed Azula. Basically everybody is responsible for fixing Azula except Azula.

This alone is infuriating, as I talk about in my last reblog here: [Link] because it makes Azula’s mental health and actions other people’s responsibility. This is abuser logic and it’s Azula’s own. She believes she has the right to use other people to prop up her own sense of self without their consent, and if they refuse, as Mai and Ty Lee did, they have wronged her. Mai, Ty Lee, and Zuko are all victims of her abuse, and most arguments that they shouldn’t have “abandoned” or “betrayed” her focus on the fact that she needed them to maintain her equalibrium, or that she really did love them deep down, because her needs and feelings must take preeminence over those of her victims. Her needs deserve to be catered to, and her victims’ should be scorned as selfish and suppressed. Iroh and Ursa are not Azula’s victims, but the fannish logic is the same, the idea that they are selfish for not filling Azula’s emotional needs and thereby fixing her.

This logic interacts in a really poisonous way with society’s expectations of mothers, and this is one part of why the Ursa hate is so virulent. The other reason, I think is simply that she is a minor character and doesn’t have the fanbase to drown out the haters. There is of course no way to be a perfect mother, because mothers are people and people can’t be perfect. And yet the idea of imperfection on the part of a mother is one that we as a society are extremely uncomfortable with. Mothers in media are rarely allowed the same range of humanity as other characters, because we are uncomfortable with their independent humanity and the evidence that they have needs and wants separate from those related to the task of being mother. Real life mothers find their every decision critiqued in relation to how it might affect her children.

Mothers and the choices they make are credited with a near-magical ability to save or ruin their children. Back in the mid twentieth century, a frightening amount of ink was spilled blaming every conceivable psychiatric or developmental condition on mothers. If a mother was too affectionate, she would make her son gay, not affectionate enough, autistic. If she was one way, she could make her child schitzophrenic, another, she could make them mentally retarded. She had to be perfect, and if anything went wrong, we knew who to blame. This attitude did not fade away as we learned the underlying causes of many diseases. Growing up, I got to watch doctors, teachers, and just general busybodies blame my brother’s and my own problems on my mother, problems that through my parents’ persistence would be diagnosed as an immune disorder. The difference, I might add, between how my mother was treated and how my father was is stark. So Azula is manifestly and obviously screwed up. In our current societal milieu, it’s not at all surprising that fans looking for a reason would almost reflexively blame her mother. It’s what we do. The fact that Azula had an obvious abusive father does not matter.

There’s another reason Azula fans who are looking for someone to blame for Azula’s actions will look to Ursa instead of Ozai, and that reason is Zuko. Zuko was Ozai’s unfavorite child, the one who was burned and cast off, while Azula was praised and cosseted. If Zuko could overcome the “worse” abuse, what excuse would Azula have? She must have an excuse, since what we are trying to do here after all is justify her behavior. This ignores of course how toxic and damaging being the favorite of somebody like Ozai actually is, and how terrifying being one fall from grace away from being treated like Zuko must have been, something I argue in my Three Pillars Theory of Azula: [Link]. I also have in fact witnessed what the kind of mothering Ursa’s staunchest critics claim she should have given Azula looks like in the real world, and it is not pretty: [Link]

The Azula fans who hold Ursa, or for that matter Iroh, Zuko, Mai, or Ty Lee, responsible for Azula’s actions often claim they want a redemption arc for her similar to the one Zuko got, however, this is pretty clearly not the case. One of the big themes of Zuko’s redemption and recovery arc is that he had to acknowledge fault. He had to acknowledge that yes, he was hurt and hurting, and thought he was doing right, but that he had hurt other people and needed to make amends. People who want to blame other people for Azula’s actions want to absolve her of the very responsibility Zuko learned to shoulder. Another major theme of Zuko’s redemption and recovery arc is that nobody could “fix” Zuko, which is to say nobody could do the emotional work of coming to realize both that he had been wronged by his father and should not try to please him, and that he had hurt people in the name of pleasing his father and in the name of Fire Nation imperialism, except for Zuko himself. Nobody could make amends on Zuko’s behalf, or heal his hurts. Zuko had to do that himself. Iroh could advise and support him, but he couldn’t do it for Zuko, or make Zuko’s choices for him. Most of the Azula fans who want somebody else to blame also want to give her somebody who will love away her damage and pain and make her a good person, which isn’t the way it works, and also is deeply deeply ironic, given that one of the biggest things Azula has to work on is her sense of entitlement to use others to fulfill her emotional needs.

Another charge I often see against Ursa is that she played favorites and this hurt and damaged Azula. I’m not sure I buy that, given that Azula was acting in toxic ways from a young age and was clearly not responding to the kind of empathy and kindness Ursa used to bring up Zuko.

But let’s say it’s true that Ursa favored Zuko (moms are human, as with any group of people some people click better than others) and this was hurtful to Azula. Guess who else blatantly and openly played favorites, to the extent he was willing to KILL the disfavored child? Guess who was in Zuko’s and Azula’s lives much longer than Ursa or Iroh? If Ursa’s favoring Zuko pushed Azula over the edge, why wasn’t Ozai’s clear favoritism towad Azula enough to irrevocably damage Zuko?

It’s almost like Ursa is blamed for the slightest fallibility while Ozai’s horrific abuse of his children is overlooked. It’s almost like attempts to blame Ursa for Azula’s actions are a poisonous stew of misogyny and abuser logic.

Speaking against racism in all its forms is obviously a moral obligation for all decent people, but I also have an emotionally driven, selfish reason: My abusive father is racist and antiblack as hell.

(Discussions of antiblack racism below.)

One of the big blowups I had with him as a teenager was, of all things, over whether Black people can be beautiful. We were watching some inane holiday special on television where they invite foreigners who live in Korea (this genre has since exploded into year-round programming), and on this particular holiday one of the guests was a U.S. servicemember who wore Hanbok, the traditional Korean dress. She had short, very curly hair and dark, smooth skin, and she was one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. Looking back this was also puberty asserting itself in queer little me.

I said she was cute and looked really good in Hanbok and my dad… got really weird about it? He insisted Black people weren’t attractive, some of them could be but they weren’t for the most part and this woman wasn’t and so on. Maybe he thought she was too dark-skinned to be pretty, idk and I don’t want to know.

I got very upset because, well shit, of course, but for another how could anyone decide for me whom I found attractive? The argument escalated, and at the end Dad “settled” it by telling me he didn’t like my tone of voice and giving me a few smacks with a stick.

So that’s how I got hit for saying a Black woman is beautiful and being upset at racist comments about her. That sting of injustice stayed with me ever since, though it’s not comparable to what Black people themselves go through on a daily basis.

By speaking out I push back, little by little, against the humiliation and shame I felt on that day and so many others. And I hope that soldier I saw on television that day is having a kickass life and being her beautiful self every single day.

I Figured Out Why I Hate Love Never Dies So Much

in-the-dark-my-heart-heard-music:

Love Never Dies is not a terrible musical; the plot is a wreck and the characters are very unlikeable, but the music over all is rather good and the actual story (excluding the fact that it’s the POTO characters involved) is an interesting story. It’s a passible musical that shouldn’t be as hated as much as it is. Maybe just forgotten. So why is it so bad? Why do Phantom fans, even Phantom fans who want Christine and Erik together, hate it so much?

Because it destroys the morals of the first show/book/movie. It wrecks the characters we know and love, and has the audacity to say this is what happens AFTER the Phantom of The Opera.

It destroys what we love.

It takes an adorable love story, and tarnishes it. It makes the decision long ago, that Christine was on the brink of tears for, pointless. It says that’s not her true feelings and makes her go to Erik before her wedding night, claiming she made the wrong choice. (Which personally, I hate, as it furthers the stereotype that women are indecisive even if that’s not what it’s trying to represent). It trashes the innocent love between Raoul and Christine and poisons it with the hatred of a Christine/Erik shipping fan. And that’d be fine, if it was a fanfiction. But this was a musical, and technically cannon in the eyes of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cannon.

It makes all these pitiful characters…. cannon.

It takes an innocent character such as Meg, and obliterates her by making her fall in love with Erik (whom even with Christine was a stretch considering age). It makes her cruel and selfish, even though it tries to develop her character more. It takes the well loved Madame Giry and makes her the bad guy. The. Bad. Guy. It makes her evil and determined to only help herself after only helping Erik, ignoring her only child. It takes the kind motherly figure we knew, and makes her the ugly parent we’d never want. It takes Raoul, a character many consider a fop (though I personally adore), and magnifies his small unlike able character traits to such a degree that even Raoul-Haters can call out the improbability that that would ever happen. That he’d become as hatable as he did. And it takes Erik, poor Erik, and rips what little humanity Erik had in the first place clean out from under him.

In the Phantom of The Opera, Erik had nothing. He had no friends, no family, nothing to call his own besides the legacy of the Opera Ghost. You could easily feel bad for him, he has nothing. He is allowed to be selfish and devilish because he needs to be in order to survive. In Love Never Dies, however, Erik has everything. He has friends, like him, who look out for him. He has money and power and a successful business. He has his own legacy, not just the Opera Ghost, and a girl who’d kill to be with him. And what does Mister Y do with all his new found wealth? Nothing. He continues to obsess and fetishize over Christine even though he knows her heart is somewhere else. He cannot let go, which is fine. But when Christine does reappear it becomes very hard to root for his abusive and devilish ways when you know that if he fails, he still has an empire.

It takes characters I love, that we love, and tarnishes them. Whether book fan or musical fan or movie fan, it decrees that none of those character choices matter. It makes the characters so out-of-character, so far stretched that I end up detesting our main star (Erik), and feel pity for those we are supposed to hate (Raoul and Madame Giry). It breaks my heart, after I spent so much time obsessing over the original.

That is why I hate Love Never Dies.

vampirehunterfinn:

Finn has trouble sleeping. He lies down on his bed and feels the hours crawl by as his eyes stay stuck on the ceiling. Sometimes, he likes to imagine things, closes his eyes and invents stories to pass the time. Other times, he just lies on his bunk, listens to Poe’s steady breathing and tries to drift off.

When Finn actually sleeps, for the minute snatches of time that his mind goes under and he’s unconscious, he has nightmares. Visceral scenes that trap him in its punishing grip and force him to relive terror after terror.

He always wakes an hour or two after, body shaking and a scream held back by his closed mouth. It twists in his stomach, a knot that doesn’t untangle until hours later; when he’s surrounded by his friends and feels his nightmare get pushed to the back of his mind.

Finn has trouble sleeping. Takes to lying down on his bunk until Poe is asleep and he’s able to sit up and do anything and nothing. He’s able to sit and draw if he wants, creating while also letting his mind wander. Sometimes he sits up and looks out the window; stares up at the moon and the stars and imagines what it’d be like to live up there; undaunted and unbothered.

Sometimes Finn sleeps too long. Body crashing and pulling him under. This only ever happens after the war; after his body and his mind understand that the danger is stymied (not gone no…Finn’s not to sure it’d ever really be gone). His body crumples in on itself; refusing to go off of fumes.

He sleeps too long; hours blurring together until Finn wakes to Poe’s barely concealed worry and his daughter’s overt worry.

“You need to rest more,” they tell him and Finn knows; he knows. He’s just not too sure how exactly to go about undoing this bit of abuse he’d suffered underneath the First Order.

(It’d taken him a long time to call it abuse; painstakingly long hours with his therapist, Na’im, to call it something other than “conditioning” or “training.” It doesn’t help anyone, least of himself, Finn finds, to call it anything but the truth. They hurt him, tried to twist him into something they wanted.

“It’s a testament to your strength,” Na’im tells him, “that you survived.”

Finn thinks about Slip’s blooded face; thinks about the fury in Nine’s voice when they’d seen each other, and wonders what they’d all be like if they’d had a chance to grow up without war.)

Finn has trouble sleeping; sleeps too little, not at all, or too much. But he’s alive and he’s trying to get better. And he counts that as a win.

chiefrosepetal:

furiousgoldfish:

terrifying your own child into submission makes you an abuser.

watching your child cry and screaming at them to stop and invalidating their pain and reasons for crying makes you an abuser.

staring at your child in disgust and contempt after they displease you makes you an abuser.

threatening to your child to take away their basic resources if they don’t give you exactly what you want makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to feel ashamed for not living up to your ideals makes you an abuser.

using slurs, hateful names and insults on your own child without any regard to what it does to their mental health makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to chase impossible expectations and making them feel like they’re worthless for not achieving them makes you an abuser.

acting like your child is a burden and a waste of space and blaming their illness/disability/depression on it makes you an abuser.

behaving like your child will never amount to anything and isn’t worth any resources and nurturing makes you an abuser.

making your child feel like they’re never good enough makes you an abuser.

if your child’s heart is hurting because they know no matter what they do and how hard they try they will always be a failure in your eyes, you are an abuser.

if your child can’t look at themselves without self hatred because they had to look at themselves from your perspective and all they saw is disgust and hatred, you’re an abuser.

If your child is struggling to believe they have the right to live and to be cared and loved, if they can’t stop hearing your hateful voice putting them down and using their every action to prove they’re worthless, you’re an abuser.

If you watched your child in pain and ensured them they deserved it, you’re an abuser.

If your child can’t love themselves from how badly you hated them, you’re an abuser.

Guys, this NEEDS more reblogs.

People go through this all the time regularly, I can hardly name a family in my town whose children don’t tell me stories like the ones above.

Emotional abuse is a real problem these days and the children in those households don’t know that it’s not normal, or at least it shouldn’t be normal, until they are older. If they ever find out at all, that what they went through wasn’t right.

It is not a tool of effective parenting.

And to those children and teens who are going through this today, you are not alone. I know feels like it but you aren’t. You have to do what is best for you sometimes, if distancing yourself from your parents makes it better, do that. If talking to your best friend about it makes you feel better, please do that. This won’t last forever, you will grow up and move out and see that the world loves you.

You are beautiful and strong and I believe you can make it through this.

Asshole. Damn asshole. You make us look bad. All the Rey/o asked is for us to not refer to the pairing as an illness that kills people but whatever, go on and embarrass us for acting like a child. Good job you heartless human.

This is the exchange this ask and the prior ask are referring to, by the way.

I mean, we all have our wishes. All that abuse survivors who are antis ask is that Reynos stop romanticizing abuse…

All that fans of color who are antis ask is that Reynos stop replacing Finn with Kylo Ren…

All that decent fucking human beings ask is that Reynos stop justifying actual war crimes (and yes, false moral equivalence counts)…

And what were they told? That they were oversensitive. That other survivors/fans of color/people (who are not so oversensitive) did not feel the same so they were Wrong. That they should filter the #reyno tag (ignoring the fact that there is no good way to do this on mobile).

In this context the reyno shipper’s request was not based on shared empathy or humanity. It was emotional exploitation, pure and simple, a demand for one-sided consideration where none had been given in the other direction.

So yeah, you bet your ASS I was an asshole about it. Empathy is a two-way street, and I have very little to spare for someone who has consistently and wilfully refused to give any.

But you know what? I didn’t tell her she was oversensitive. I didn’t tell her her concerns were invalid because I felt differently in a comparable situation. I didn’t tell her to filter the anti tag. I do not take kindly to the kind of exploitation she was attempting, but I agreed to her request. Which is more than shippers including her have ever been willing to do for antis.

It took me so many years and so many hurts to see through and stand up to emotional manipulation, and I am never going to be less than brutally honest–and yes, an asshole–when I see it happen.

If you don’t like that, the unfollow and block buttons are free. Buh-bye!