So people shouldn’t write about rape ever, including to show how traumatic and awful it is? Of course these works can be criticized, like Lolita has been criticized for confusing framing. But if by speak against you mean criticizing the very creation of works featuring pedophilia and rape? Then yeah, you’re drinking the crazy juice hard there my friend. Rape and abuse are parts of the human experience and should be explored through art, provided warnings are given so people are not exposed unawares. A work can be criticized for how well and responsibly it treats the subject, but to say these sensitive subjects can’t be written about or explored? That’s not a rational position and it’s actively harmful.
You didn’t even read my previous reply it seems. I did not “use” anyone, I didn’t hide behind anyone (if I had you wouldn’t have found me lol, the Wolf protected my identity and I’m the one who said it was me), and I would have had no compunction against moving on this myself if it weren’t for the sensitive racial issues involved.
Don’t lie and backtrack, you would still have been mad if I had made the post myself. Your major complaint in the previous ask was that Wolf and I had opened up Black fans to racist harassment, which would have been true no matter who wrote the post. So yes, you did in fact complain quite vocally about a sexual predator being exposed, and your history does not make that any less wrong.
And if racists do try to use this exposure against Finnreys as a whole, or to paint Black men in general as predators, guess what? They can’t, not without looking even stupider than they already are, because it’s a Black man who took it on himself to expose the predator. It’s almost like Wolf taking lead instead of me hopefully mitigated rather than aggravated any potential damage, how about that!
Depends on what the “community” is. A lot of vastly different people object to the ship/shippers for different reasons and we have a varied range of opinions. Probably the one thing all antis agree on is that they are against the idea of this ship becoming canon. Some are of the opinion that it shouldn’t be shipped even as a fanon/crackship/darkship, which does not describe me or most of the people I know. Some antis dislike shippers’ racist, misogynistic, abuse apologist, war-crimes apologist etc. etc. arguments and content, and I think most of my anti posts are in this vein. Some believe shippers deserve to be harassed and suicide baited, a stance no decent person agrees with. I think the essay Fiction, Reality, Fandom, and Adulthood: a media academic and CSA/incest victim’s account (link; incest, CSA, grooming, self-harm, and abuse warning) perfectly represents my stance on the issue. A quote:
I don’t think it’s too much to ask people to have a degree of responsibility for what they put online, especially in a community so full of young people. That doesn’t mean dictating what people create: it means accepting that you have influence over other people, and if you’re not willing to admit that, maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be posting online.
They’re trying to erase the existence of the rape victims of Japanese soldiers in World War II because they think the reminder of their crimes might make Japan a little bit cross
Duterte, the absolute coward, is more worried about women criticizing him than actually honoring the women this country needs to remember
Please don’t let these women be silenced.
I stand in solidarity with the Filipinas who suffered as our grandmothers did. You are our grandmothers, too.
I mean on the one hand, yeah, drawn and written child porn doesn’t demand the sexual abuse of actual children the way video and photographic child porn does. On the other I’m still iffy on the possible effects of treating children, even in fantasy, as acceptable objects of desire. It’s not a direct one-on-one correlation, nor is pornographic material the only thing to blame for our shitty sexually exploitative society, but I worry about saturation and normalization.
After going HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY at the conclusion of Chapter 3, I’m starting a new thread because the first one was getting too long. Damn, the author is not pulling any punches. Everything in the notes can contain spoilers, so be sure to filter ’#broken earth spoilers’ if you haven’t already!
So I’m pretty sure Syenite is Essun from her time in the Fulcrum, roughly 20 years ago. Either that or Sy is a different character who matches Essun’s description almost exactly, both of them tall mixed women disparaged as “midlatter mongrel.” If they are the same character then I wonder at the fact that Essun is described as having only 2 children, since she comes across as pretty fertile and would have been even more so in her 20s. Either she ran before she was forced to have children, meaning she would have been on the run for 20 years (impressive!), or the implication is that Essun had 2 children but had also given birth in her former life as Syenite. I doubt orogenes in the Fulcrum really have an opportunity to bond with their children, to say nothing of the unhappy ways said children were conceived, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Essun counts only Nassun and Uche, whom she had willingly–more or less, she did mention not wanting children and I doubt any choice was perfect in the life she led–and whom she bonded with, as her children even if Syenite had given birth. Essun also thinks of herself as a different person than who she was before, whether that’s Syenite or someone else, making the break even cleaner.
I’m here blogging partly because Syenite’s scene with the ten-ringer is so uncomfortable and I needed a breather. (I wonder if he’s the earth-breaker from the opening? He certainly has the power level and the seething hatred from a lifetime, no GENERATIONS, of abuse.) The lives of Fulcrum orogenes is such a parade of horrors, my god.
“None of them looked like survival fetishists or would-be warlords.” Nice shade on post-apocalyptical clichés there 😂 I like the widespread in-world acknowledgment from a setting well-versed in apocalypse–literally, they have a whole manual–that the rational thing to do in catastrophe is to band together in well-ordered communities.
So if Damaya -> Syenite -> Essun, Schaffa has given some heavy foreshadowing of her life as Essun. Also the methods the Fulcrum use to start breaking the orogenes is all SORTS of skin-crawlingly awful but the worst may be the equation of brutality with love. That pretense may fall away eventually, but to imprint that lesson in the wet clay of a child’s mind, a child whose old ties were ripped apart and is reaching out for love like a young plant yearning for the sun… The dysfunction and trauma are baked right into the Fulcrum’s methods from the start.
I’m pretty sure she based the Fulcrum slightly off of Indian Reservations so yea don’t expect too many happy moments.
Oh I expect things to get much much worse. I thought a lot of chattel slavery, actually, especially the breeding and rape and mutilation, plus the fact that orogenes really are slaves of the state. And I think the author is drawing similar parallels, too, in that there’s actually a slur for orogenes–rogga–and even the term “rogga-lover” for people who treat them as human beings. The major orogene characters whose looks we know are explicitly Black, and in the case of the ten-ringer his very dark skin and kinky hair are cited as examples of his ill breeding. That’s in “stills” or “Muggle” terms though; he makes it clear he is the product of careful breeding between top orogenic lineages, with the implication that the best and purest blooded orogenes were, by genes or chance, dark-skinned Black people by our terms. It’s not a direct one to one parallel, obviously, since Black and Native people don’t have the power to move the earth with a thought (..right?).
Ugh the reality of the node maintainer is… I guessed it, from the time Alabaster mentioned there being a doctor and no Guardian at a node, but the full reveal is still horrifying. It seems to be implied that the child and Alabaster are related, too, which would be rather likely if the child were Fulcrum-born–and most from the Fulcrum are. The kid might even be one of his bio children.
Also it’s ironic that Alabaster will probably go on to do on a bigger scale what the node maintainer tried to do, and which the A-Man himself stopped with all his incredible might. How much worse do things get that he is brought around to the node maintainer’s way of thinking?
I can’t be the only one to think that the way the orogenes are treated in the Fulcrum is very reminiscent of the Mages and Circle of Magi in the Dragon Age series, and the Guardians are a lot like the Templars. Even the moral dilemmas and dangers that became the rationale for abusing and violating the orogenes/mages are similar. In Broken Earth everything is upped so much more, though; the Tranquil of DA are kid friendly stuff compared to the visceral horror the node maintainers’ fate provokes. Between the stretches of second person PoV, the intricacies of orogeny and the social workings of the comms, I’ve been thinking BE reads like/would make a magnificent video game and these similarities just heighten that feeling.
Alabaster also touched on a thought that had been bothering me throughout, and the discussion of the orogenes’ inborn instinct to stop earthshakes just strengthens my suspicion that orogeny is not a curse but an adaptation for humanity’s survival. If not for orogenes the earth would have swallowed all civilizations long ago. They are the reason larger civilizations thrived along the equator, simply because they were brought there and provided their protection in that region in larger concentrations.
You know what should be and maybe once was? Orogenes should be treasured and honored members of every comm, instinctively providing their protection from shakes. Instead what happened? People were taught to fear and hate orogenes, and if not outright killed they were taken away to the center to be enslaved and abused and raped and mutilated and tortured.
And yes, orogenes can be dangerous because they are so powerful, but what exists there is a cultural problem, not a problem inherent in orogeny. Why wasn’t the bullying against Damaya stopped, why did she get in trouble for standing up to her bully and why was she told it’s because he likes her? Why wasn’t her bully taught a better way to relate to his peers?
If orogeny weren’t desperately hidden as a shame and a curse, but rather everyone were taught, gently and humanely from the lower creche, about the power of the earth and both the gift and danger of orogeny, about how to regulate their emotions and how to treat each other kindly so the power would not spring up unawares with frightening and tragic consequences–then the danger would be contained without the “need” for violent control.
That kind of teaching would benefit everyone, since it’s clear from the presence of sessapinae that the difference between orogenes and stills is not one of kind but degree. (I’d say people with very sensitive sess are probably borderline orogenes and could produce orogene children.) Each comm would benefit from orogenes, and society as a whole would be so much more humane.
But of course, such an arrangement would bring down the empire that surged to unnatural and unsustainable heights by hoarding and enslaving orogenes. If each comm learned to shape itself into managing orogenes and turning their powers to the comm’s protection, Yumenes would have come literally crumbling down centuries ago. It would exist and even thrive without the Fulcrum but it could not build so ambitiously and wondrously, and it would have to content itself with being just a big, prosperous, down to earth city.
And we can’t have that, can we? Not when there’s so much value to suck out of communities and so much profit to be had out of the slavery and trauma and misery of others. That’s what this was about the whole time, the concentration of power at the center, more and more and MORE for the have-too-muches. What a gigantic fraud. What a heartbreaking waste. What an unbelievable crime.
I’m with the node maintainer and later on, probably, my man Al on this. Bring it all down. Bring the fuckers’ beautiful vaulting roofs down on their heads. Not a one of them is innocent, not even the babies, any more than there can be a clean person in a mire of bloody mud. If it cannot be changed, break it. Break Father Earth’s bones, because boy did he ever have it coming.
Edit: Oh so they’re treating it as fact that the child was Al’s? That’s nice. Just stab us all in the gut over and over again. I guess that level of power had to come from somewhere.
After going HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY at the conclusion of Chapter 3, I’m starting a new thread because the first one was getting too long. Damn, the author is not pulling any punches. Everything in the notes can contain spoilers, so be sure to filter ’#broken earth spoilers’ if you haven’t already!
So I’m pretty sure Syenite is Essun from her time in the Fulcrum, roughly 20 years ago. Either that or Sy is a different character who matches Essun’s description almost exactly, both of them tall mixed women disparaged as “midlatter mongrel.” If they are the same character then I wonder at the fact that Essun is described as having only 2 children, since she comes across as pretty fertile and would have been even more so in her 20s. Either she ran before she was forced to have children, meaning she would have been on the run for 20 years (impressive!), or the implication is that Essun had 2 children but had also given birth in her former life as Syenite. I doubt orogenes in the Fulcrum really have an opportunity to bond with their children, to say nothing of the unhappy ways said children were conceived, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Essun counts only Nassun and Uche, whom she had willingly–more or less, she did mention not wanting children and I doubt any choice was perfect in the life she led–and whom she bonded with, as her children even if Syenite had given birth. Essun also thinks of herself as a different person than who she was before, whether that’s Syenite or someone else, making the break even cleaner.
I’m here blogging partly because Syenite’s scene with the ten-ringer is so uncomfortable and I needed a breather. (I wonder if he’s the earth-breaker from the opening? He certainly has the power level and the seething hatred from a lifetime, no GENERATIONS, of abuse.) The lives of Fulcrum orogenes is such a parade of horrors, my god.
“None of them looked like survival fetishists or would-be warlords.” Nice shade on post-apocalyptical clichés there 😂 I like the widespread in-world acknowledgment from a setting well-versed in apocalypse–literally, they have a whole manual–that the rational thing to do in catastrophe is to band together in well-ordered communities.
So if Damaya -> Syenite -> Essun, Schaffa has given some heavy foreshadowing of her life as Essun. Also the methods the Fulcrum use to start breaking the orogenes is all SORTS of skin-crawlingly awful but the worst may be the equation of brutality with love. That pretense may fall away eventually, but to imprint that lesson in the wet clay of a child’s mind, a child whose old ties were ripped apart and is reaching out for love like a young plant yearning for the sun… The dysfunction and trauma are baked right into the Fulcrum’s methods from the start.
I’m pretty sure she based the Fulcrum slightly off of Indian Reservations so yea don’t expect too many happy moments.
Oh I expect things to get much much worse. I thought a lot of chattel slavery, actually, especially the breeding and rape and mutilation, plus the fact that orogenes really are slaves of the state. And I think the author is drawing similar parallels, too, in that there’s actually a slur for orogenes–rogga–and even the term “rogga-lover” for people who treat them as human beings. The major orogene characters whose looks we know are explicitly Black, and in the case of the ten-ringer his very dark skin and kinky hair are cited as examples of his ill breeding. That’s in “stills” or “Muggle” terms though; he makes it clear he is the product of careful breeding between top orogenic lineages, with the implication that the best and purest blooded orogenes were, by genes or chance, dark-skinned Black people by our terms. It’s not a direct one to one parallel, obviously, since Black and Native people don’t have the power to move the earth with a thought (..right?).
After going HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY at the conclusion of Chapter 3, I’m starting a new thread because the first one was getting too long. Damn, the author is not pulling any punches. Everything in the notes can contain spoilers, so be sure to filter ’#broken earth spoilers’ if you haven’t already!
So I’m pretty sure Syenite is Essun from her time in the Fulcrum, roughly 20 years ago. Either that or Sy is a different character who matches Essun’s description almost exactly, both of them tall mixed women disparaged as “midlatter mongrel.” If they are the same character then I wonder at the fact that Essun is described as having only 2 children, since she comes across as pretty fertile and would have been even more so in her 20s. Either she ran before she was forced to have children, meaning she would have been on the run for 20 years (impressive!), or the implication is that Essun had 2 children but had also given birth in her former life as Syenite. I doubt orogenes in the Fulcrum really have an opportunity to bond with their children, to say nothing of the unhappy ways said children were conceived, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Essun counts only Nassun and Uche, whom she had willingly–more or less, she did mention not wanting children and I doubt any choice was perfect in the life she led–and whom she bonded with, as her children even if Syenite had given birth. Essun also thinks of herself as a different person than who she was before, whether that’s Syenite or someone else, making the break even cleaner.
I’m here blogging partly because Syenite’s scene with the ten-ringer is so uncomfortable and I needed a breather. (I wonder if he’s the earth-breaker from the opening? He certainly has the power level and the seething hatred from a lifetime, no GENERATIONS, of abuse.) The lives of Fulcrum orogenes is such a parade of horrors, my god.
Nerdy Fact #1501: The producers of Star Trek included scenes of overt sexuality to deflect the focus of NBC’s Broadcast Standards Office censors from other controversial aspects in certain episodes, like blatant allegories of the Vietnam war and racism.
a little tasteful sideboob and no one will notice we’re telling the government to go fuck itself
Nichelle Nichols flashing some thigh to distract the censors from the five minute pro-choice monologue. 👌
Okay so, I fucking love Star Trek, I’m watching through the original series rn cuz it’s awesome and was ahead of it’s time for the 60’s, but I always kinda just roll my eyes at all the male gaze-y stuff because hey it was the 60’s and Star Trek has progressed since then and their most recent series, Discovery, has almost no male gaze-y shit and it’s so awesome and all the female characters wear awesome practical uniforms that are just as practical and unsexual as the male uniforms, unlike in the original series, pictured and discussed above, where all the female characters wear little mini dresses with their asses just about hanging out and pantyhose, while the male characters wear practical and unsexual uniforms. And that’s exactly what it was, male gaze-y shit, and I’m honestly disturbed that thousands of people in the notes are hailing objectifying women and exploiting their bodies to be able to get a message across for the male writers. There’s literally hundreds of other ways they could have distracted the Network besides objectifying and exploiting the show’s actresses, but that’s what they went with and look there’s thousands of people on Tumblr hailing and praising that choice as so progressive and positive, that was made by the *male* writers and producers, not the actresses. They could have used vulgar language, they could have had the male uniforms be speedo bottoms with their asses hanging out and visible dick outlines, but they went with sexually objectifying women.
I mean can we talk about how fucked up it is that everyone in the notes is quick to throw women under the bus by praising sexually objectifying women and exploiting women’s bodies so long as it’s “for a good cause?” The misogyny is real. I see so much of this in “progressive” spaces, throwing women under the bus and being cool with misogyny so long as it can help progress other causes.
Don’t get me wrong, I won’t hold problematic things about the show from the 60’s against the show because again, their modern uniforms are practical and unisex and not male gaze-y, and the show in the 60’s regardless of problematic aspects was still way ahead of it’s time. But let’s praise the original series for the parts of it that really were progressive.
Still, this is my biggest problem with mainstream Tumblr feminism is how it loves to hail and praise sexually objectifying women as progressive and positive. There’s a reason the 60’s original series sexually objectified women but the modern series coming out right now, Discovery, doesn’t, and that’s because sexually objectifying women actually isn’t progressive. The current series, discovery, even manages to portray women with *real* sexual agency who actively express desire and want instead of just being an object to be desired and wanted and manages to do it without objectifying them.
Reblogging for “I see so much of this in “progressive” spaces, throwing women under the
bus and being cool with misogyny so long as it can help progress other
causes” cus that’s some true shit.
Nichelle Nichols did say that, at the time, they experienced the mini skirts differently from how they are perceived today; but they did have a lot of shit happen to them behind the scenes, unfortunately.
So did Grace Lee Whitney. Your point?
Because this isn’t just about what they wear, it’s about how they’re shot too. Not to mention the damn scripts. Because both were extremely male gazey, sexualized, not to mention hinting subtly and not so subtly at rape a lot of the time.
We don’t need to go any further than Andrea in the picture above, but I could give you a list if you want. Should I make it alphabetically by episode title or chronological, and in the case of the latter would you prefer it in the chronological order of air dates, or stardates?
Because yes women can show a lot of skin and not be sexualized, both Wonder Woman and Black Panther shows that to great effect. It’s surprising to realize how much skin many of the women in those movies show exactly because it’s not sexualized. The shooting in TOS was, very much so. The reason why the person above describes the mini skirts the way they do is because that’s how TOS shows them to us. Not to mention the ton of other extremely skimpy costumes that women always wore.
Was there ever a fully dressed woman on TOS? Gem, maybe. But then her point was that she was very naive and fluttery mentally in a non-sexual way. Funny how that came out in her costuming.
I assure you that even if they had chosen to dress the female cast in very little they could have made the shots in a non-sexualized way. Later cinematic efforts proves as much.
But then, all those shots were meant to be sexual. It was meant to be a distraction for the censors so they didn’t interfere with Gene’s and the script writers’ political messages.
But heralding that, using the sexualizing of women on screen – and I’d add sexualized violence against women – to get past the censors, as progressive is exactly what the commentators here are criticizing. That shit? That’s just bad writing
This is like “what’s wrong with leftist dudes” in a nutshell.
L.J.'s Obsessions 