seriously though I know we’re all having a laugh about cheeky nandos, however lad culture is a big problem in UK universities, it’s a term for misogyny in disguise, it endorses rape culture and over half of students in some universities have experience with it. the NUS are trying to raise awareness of it as are most of the feminist societies in universities but people like me encounter it every day and every night and it’s not something to be taken lightly.
rape cw
On GwenvMJ 2K15
We all have opinions right, cool. You can believe WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT. Don’t really need MJ fans crawling out of the woodwork screaming their’s at me. I’ll make a deal, I’ll keep my opinions off of the MJ tag if you keep yours off of the Gwen tag. Cause god knows there are opinions there.
Thank You and Goodnight.
Any questions or Concerns Message me.
Weeeeeell….
Out of curiosity, I went to have a look at the Gwen Stacy tag. The first few pages are full of shitty sexist porn, but no negative comments about Gwen the character. On page five or thereabouts, there is a negative ‘lol I hate her’ type comment, but it makes no reference to MJ (and is also shitty and sexist). I’ve been back over thirty pages now in the Gwen tag and there’s yet to be a single reference to ‘Gwen vs MJ’, or any post comparing her negatively to any of the other women. Which is a very good thing in itself, but that brings me to-
Can you point me to this rampant Gwen-bashing that MJ fans are doing in her tag?
Okay, one thing I absolutely hated in Age of Ultron was the prima nocta ‘joke’. It wasn’t in the original released clip so it must have been a late addition, and I cannot for the life of me work out why Joss Whedon thought it was funny or appropriate. Maybe he thought it was somehow clever sneaking some Latin in under the radar, but even then I can’t work out what he expected-
“Wait, what’s prima nocta?”
“Oh, it’s the word for the old English law which dictated a noble had the right to rape a woman on the first night of her marriage!”
“What in the actual fuck, Joss.”
sarah531 replied to your post: to everyone insisting that ‘you c…
I’ve felt the same about various mentally ill characters (and their treatment in adaptations etc), so you’re certainly not alone in this
i’m sick of seeing the pair of them – loras and renly – reduced to gay jokes. even the nickname ‘the knight of the flowers’ has connotations of effeminacy and homophobia (’pansy’ being an outdated insult for a gay man, etc.). seeing all the best and worst parts of them being erased to make them flat and one dimensional. like how, with source material like a song of ice and fire, can you even do that. how.
loras’ mental health and its decline after the death of renly is so, so important to his whole character. so getting rid of such essential moments as ‘when the sun has set, no candle will replace it’ and putting in bullshit like his flirting with oberyn at the wedding/sleeping with olyvar/sleeping with prostitutes/seemingly having completely forgotten about renly is NOT OKAY. there goes pretty much 90% of what we see of loras in later books in one fell swoop, and i am really fucking angry about that.
Tumblr being tumblr won’t let me submit a reply to this, so reblogging instead – I totally get that. I get so annoyed when characters are twisted in adaptations because chances are that’s the version of the character everyone will remember and it’s THE WRONG VERSION, gah.
(My Exhibit A: Harry Osborn. WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE MENTALLY ILL KID I KNOW LET’S MAKE HIM A UNREPENTANT MURDERER)
I kinda just watch Game of Thrones because it’s so trashy (and aesthetically pleasing) now? It’s definitely not treating its characters well AT ALL. I shudder to think of what (I’ve heard) they’re doing to Sansa.
Harry Osborn… is that Doc Oc (to be)? I recognise the name, and doesn’t Dane Dehaan play him in whichever movie he’s from, but I’m not familiar with who he is, to be honest.
ETA: okay no, just read the link and he’s the Green Goblin. my bad.
I can understand people doing that and I totally don’t judge anyone for watching it just because it’s pretty (and trashy). But honestly I can’t do that. I love the programme because it’s one of my favourite book series, and I love the source material because it’s so complex and the characters are so complex and 3D and shades-of-grey rather than ‘black and white’ if you see what I mean? but the show has destroyed that, in some cases, and I just. it feels completely alien to me now. I don’t know what’s going on, why half of the events in the show are happening, and the characters don’t feel like the characters I know and love any more.
Man, they wasted Dane Dehaan. He could have done actually – psychotic – but – still – kind – and – loving HOW MANY CHARACTERS LIKE THAT ARE EVEN OUT THERE Harry so well. Bah.
I’m kind of glad I didn’t read the ASOIAF books beforehand. I think if I had, I would probably have switched off at the Dany/Drogo rape scene…or the Jamie/Cersei rape scene, or….well, you get the picture
ATTENTION ALL GIRLS AND LADIES: if you walk from home, school, office or anywhere and you are alone and you come across a little boy crying holding a piece of paper with an address on it, DO NOT TAKE HIM THERE! take him straight to the police station for this is the new ‘gang’ way of rape. The incident is getting worse. Warn your families. Reblog this so this message can get accross to everyone.
I will always reblog things like this, it won’t ruin your blog or the look of it, and this could potentially save a life.
PLEASE reblog this.
I have reblogged this about three times now and I will never not reblog it
i actually heard of this happening in atlanta not that long ago. that stuff is absolutely terrifying.
Thankfully, this is a ten-year-old urban legend, and not true.
Briony: *is a lonely 13-year-old with a vivid imagination*
Briony: *sees something strange and upsetting*
Briony: *sees something even more upsetting, if not traumatizing*
Briony: *loves Cecilia*
Briony: *wants to protect Cecilia*
Briony: *sincerely believes she is protecting Cecilia*
Briony: *is manipulated by very snobbish parents*
Briony: *makes a mistake*
Briony: *later realizes her mistake, feels horrible, and spends the rest of her life trying to atone for it*
Briony: *in the end is a pretty selfless tortured person who still loves Cecilia and knows her well enough to write a book in which she describes her innermost thoughts and feelings*
Paul Marshall: *rapes Lola*
Paul Marshall: *watches by as an innocent man is imprisoned and his life ruined*
Paul Marshall: *marries Lola*
Paul Marshall: *is a shameless disgusting creepy scumbag*
Fan: OMG I HATE BRIONY. What a fucking bitch. I HATE HER. Let’s torch her. BURN BITCH BURN. Oh and did you see Benedict Cumberbatch in that swimsuit… UNF…
[via bibliophilebabe]
[1] Hi! I’m from Buffy fandom and I’ve been thinking a lot about self flagellation on problematic interests, and my fandom drowns on it. The biggest subject I see is about one of the biggest ships (Buffy/Spike), which involves a monster, a soulless amoral killer that falls in love with the slayer. They start having sex during her depression, and she feels really low because of it. -Anonymous
[2] When she tries to stop it, he tries to rape her: and this is the most unconfortable and controversial scene in all series. It makes him
see that he still is an unworthy monster, and goes to find his soul to
deserve her. It’s a really complex relationship, but those who are at
least invested in this journey are often called rape apologists, so I
see in a sad frequency people drowing in guilty because of it.
I think there’s got to be a line somewhere between ‘this thing is problematic, everyone should accept its flaws before embarking in discussion about it’ and ‘if you’re gonna like this thing you gotta be hyper-aware of its flaws in ways I do not have to be hyper-aware of my thing’s flaws.’ My main problem’s with the double standards, really.
Like, I can’t really speak for Buffy, but there are things out there where I simply CANNOT SEE how anyone with a good handle on Problematic Things would like them – but I see these things being reblogged side-by-side with social justice posts on blogs, and I used to stare at them in complete bafflement before deciding…it’s sort of not my business why someone likes a thing, even a really problematic thing. As long as they’re not forcing anyone else to like it or even look at it than that’s cool. (And what the tags are for, I guess.)
It’s such a complex, difficult issue. Man.
For the commentary meme, skalja asked for a scene from Things They Talked About In The Playground. Which is easily the most disturbing, triggering thing I’ve ever written, so it’s under the cut.
Warnings: discussion of rape and victim blaming.
From the personal diary of H.M. KOVARIAN, 50/15/5145
At
some point I went through all the Doctor Who wiki to try and work out
when exactly A Good Man Goes To War was set and if I had any leeway with
the timelines and whatnot. I think I got the year either right or not
overly wrong.
The ceremony was a stupid idea.
Manton
gave a little speech, directed at his soldiers, about how it is the
highest honour for a woman to be a mother. About how marriage isn’t
marriage without kids (that directed, I know, at me- he knows what I
did),
Hey, Moffat, I stole your line! A year or so back, in your intro to the Good Man Goes To War bit of the Guide To The 2011 Series, you talked about how marriage can’t be considered real marriage unless you’ve had a kid. And really pissed me off. So…er…congrats. More on you later.
about how we must show Amy the utmost respect now. And her husband, too, if he arrives and proves to be an ally. (There has been talk about this possibility- it seems incredibly unlikely even to me, but we do not know what sort of man Rory Williams is.)
I really like the Legend
Of The Last Centurion thingy they played with a bit in Series Six. I
like the idea of Rory pretending to be an ancient, vengeful creature
when he’s really…not.
Anyway. He dreams of a new Mary and
Joseph with a little female Jesus- a dream soon to be dashed, I fear.
More so than they have been already, for things did not go as planned.
Manton gave his speech, and then he gestured to Amy Pond, up above them
all in her prison with her baby. She was dressed in white, like a ghost,
and she looked so small with the crowd beneath her.
If this
fic had a subtitle, it would be, simply, ‘Who undressed Amy’? Because
when she was kidnapped, there’s no way she was wearing that white gown
thing she gave birth in. Someone must have undressed her while she was unconcious. (Fun fact: That maaaaay be why I reacted so strongly to this.) Even before we knew that other stuff happened at Demon’s Run – something that left Amy barren – we knew they stripped her.
They raised their hands to her. Some of them clapped. Amy looked down
on them. I have read Manton’s primitive fairytales- the ones with which
he controls his lackeys- and Amy Pond looked in that moment much more
like a warrior of god than any of the soldiers down below.
With a
thousand men and women staring up at her, she raised her hand to her
chest. She undid the buttons on her gown, one by one, with her sleeping
baby in her other hand- and slowly but surely she disrobed entirely,
stood naked before us.
We all of us saw it, the scars and the
stitches crisscrossing on her skin. We were all of us forced, for less
than half a minute, to see. Her body altered by childbirth, legs
unshaven, breasts limp- eyes cold and calculating. She stared at me.
I got chills when I wrote that. Amy really does have no agency, no hope whatsoever here, and yet she still finds
a way to fight back against her captors, even if it’s just by showing
them the true price they’re all paying. It’s just…it just seemed so
in-character for her. Amy Pond knows a lot of things, but mostly I think
she knows how people’s minds work. She knew Kovarian would see her and be ashamed. It was the only triumph she was gonna get, and she took it without a second thought.
I looked back, of course, at the thick red lines. I could not be
ashamed of my own handiwork, of the collateral damage, of the egg I
broke. But eventually, like almost all the others did, I turned away
from Amy Pond. I have seen places on and in her that even her real own mother had not…
Madame Kovarian (who earlier in life, it is noted, gave up a daughter with red hair) slips up a little there.
it seemed obscene for her to be showing to men what only women had seen-
Madame Kovarian terrifies me in this because she geniunely believes she has a right to Amy’s body. Why? Because a) she needs it for a higher purpose and b) …the even more terrifying reason…she thought Amy had, through having sex, through being promiscuious, relinquished her own right to it. This is what Madame K says later to her: “Think of what you were before we found you. A vacant, pretty face who dressed like a slut and sold her mouth to men! You were a nothing then, and you are a nothing now. A human incubator.” Madame K is utterly and totally a misogynist and the worst kind of victim-blamer: Amy Pond is not the correct sort of woman, so she deserves everything she gets. It’s horrible…
…and
I’d be lying if I said some tiny part of it wasn’t influenced by
fandom. I love Amy. Adore her, and relate to her a lot. It stings when
people call her things like “just a pretty face” “not a character” “ a
wank fantasy” and so on. Some people say things like “Moffat obviously
hates women, because he wrote Amy as a slut.” I shouldn’t even have to
talk about what’s wrong with that, and yet…I did talk about it, because I
think that might even be what the fanfic is about in some sense. Or at
least what sparked it.
Who owns the body of a woman who’s not real?
I know the Amy I’m writing about in this fanfiction isn’t, can’t be, the exact same Amy Steven Moffat wrote into a glass tube. (Aside from anything else, I thought about the implications of her kidnapping and pregnancy, and he didn’t.) I mean, this Amy swears; original Amy is on a children’s show and can’t. The characers who surround this Amy can say the word ‘rape.’ And that’s just for starters.
But…characters
are always real people to the people who love them. So I was writing
Amy as if she was a real person: not created by Steven Moffat, not
created by anyone, just a person who walked into my life with all those
particular, horrible experiences. If someone had said those things to
the real-life Amy, that woman who doesn’t exist, they would have been…a
profoundly terrible person. Amy’s not real, so it’s all a moot point.
But at the moment I wrote Kovarian’s dialogue, I wasn’t thinking any of
that. I was thinking, “How dare you judge this person by what happened
to her, instead of what she is.” Amy says almost that exact thing, at
the end of the story.
Dr White reached for a control pad and
turned the lights off in her cell. I do not know if he punished her- I
don’t think he did, and certainly not in that way, I watched the
security cameras even after dark. But she did not get her DVDs, I know
that much.
The punishment MK was thinking of is exactly what you’re thinking, too. (I dunno if I went too far with that line. Maybe I did. I suppose this is at its core a story about misogyny, but I don’t know.)
Things They Talked About In The Playground is absolutely the most – important? – fanfic I’ve ever written: it influenced my original work massively. I’ve loved Doctor Who since I was sixteen, I’m twenty-six now, it’s been with me for a massive part of my life.
But mostly through my adulthood.
I used to work in a school playground; kids absolutely talked about Doctor Who. I hope they will for many years to come, but I am certain that some of them, especially the girls, will watch the Amy pregnancy arc later on and wonder – Who undressed her? Who spread her legs? My story gets a bit meta at the end. MK tells Amy children will talk of her in the playground, but there’s a real playground, real children, in real life. Amy herself sums up what was pretty much the reason I wrote this story:
“They still might talk about this in the playground,” she said. “When and if the story ever gets told. And they’ll wonder, eventually, they’ll wonder. They’ll wonder who stripped me. They’ll wonder who cut into me. They’ll wonder what went where, when that was done. They’ll wonder. And what will their parents tell them, when they ask?”
I want to teach my future kids to be critical of the media they consume. I’ll most likely be that parent. I may not – beyond “judge people by what they do, not by what was done to them” – know what to tell them.
But I’ll be so glad that I taught them to ask.
underappreciated characters meme > A character you love who is unfairly blamed for things going wrong
Briony Tallis – the teenage girl who’s considered the villain of her story and one of the vilest bitches in all literature. Her crime? Geniunely, if perhaps for complicated motives, thinking she was sending a rapist to prison.
(The actual rapist gets off scot-free, both in the book and amongst its readers.)
Penny Arcade and the Slow Murder of Satire
That Mike Krahulik would revive his position on Dickwolves, calling his pulling of merchandize from his store “a mistake,” came as a move that almost no one has found particularly surprising. The shock has worn off, though it’s as shocking it was two years ago when Dickwolves first became an issue, and as shocking when Krahulik vented absolutely stunning transphobia on twitter, that no one affiliated with Penny Arcade has challenged the apocalyptically poor job of community management from its figurehead. With nothing but silence from the other half of PA, Krahulik’s writer and business partner Jerry Holkins, Penny Arcade has placed itself in a position that would be unimaginable for any other organization of its size. Certainly, PA is too big to fail singlehandedly from such a PR disaster, but that does not explain the general lack of response or seemingly any effort made to address the problem internally (or at least project the appearance of solving it).
Likely no one is stopping him because it is difficult to stop someone who thinks of themself as a hero, and Mike Krahulik most likely sees himself as hero. This has been a common defense for many comedians and self styled satirists. They claim to tell things like they really are, that they can’t be afraid of controversy if they are speaking truth, and that for them to not speak their mind would be censorship.
This involves a deliberate misunderstanding of criticism. Criticism is not saying “you should not be allowed to say that” but “if you knew X you wouldn’t have said it in the first place.” The deliberate part of the misunderstanding comes from being unwilling to face the possibility that their brilliant, true, funny insight about the world was dull, mistaken, and not very funny. Often, this accompanied by the defense that the joke, is, after all, just a joke; those who take it too seriously are misunderstanding humor itself.
Yet, Penny Arcade is extremely proud of itself for ridiculing corrupt companies, criticizing failed promises, or simply having good taste in video games. You can probably already see the contradiction: Penny Arcade gets to be taken seriously whenever they wish it to be taken seriously. Otherwise it is simply japes.
He’s not the only one, and Penny Arcade, like many satirists of this generation, are complicit in the assassination of a once respected genre of humor. Like their contemporaries, Family Guy and South Park, Penny Arcade believes that it can make claims and state opinions through humor, but those claims and opinions only exist when they want them to. All the brilliance of satire without any of the responsibility or risk that comes with committing to an actual statement.
Penny Arcade is a reflection of how “satire”—which, by refusing responsibility, is no longer satire—has begun to devour itself. Humor, just like anything else, isn’t meaningful unless it risks enough to actually say something. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are perfectly willing to make a statement by expressing regret at pulling Dickwolves merchandize (I believe Holkin’s lack of response implicates him until he expresses otherwise) yet, curiously, do not believe that their comic could also have made a statement about rape. The self-proclaimed iconoclasts of contemporary humor have become, in fact, shills for the status quo, selling their shameless endorsement of it as edgy and subversive. They cast oppressed groups as establishment bullies and their legions of fans as plucky rebels—even as video games have become widespread mainstream entertainment. Their humor says nothing new, and it cannot be clever because it involves no reassessment on any level of anything they or their audience already thinks. They are not standing against censorship, but against the idea that their own opinions and ideas, their very form of expression, might be something that should be taken seriously. A stance against criticism is a stance against the legitimacy of their own art, which they are sacrificing to deflect responsibility. Not so different from the industry the posit themselves as critics of when they say “it’s just a game.”
Penny Arcade isn’t just an unfunny comic strip, it is FUNDAMENTALLY lacking in humor. If you want a joke better than “why did the chicken cross the road” you have to put something at risk. “Just” a joke, like “just” a game puts an entire form of artistic expression on the sacrificial altar—all to avoid saying “I’m sorry.”
I was thinking about this last night and my difficulty with people who wish the whole thing would blow over because it was a bad joke anyway don’t understand the concept of shifting punchlines. The original comic was admittedly a joke in bad taste but when rape survivors came forward and expressed their feelings about it the PA team shifted the punchline to the rape survivors. Everything they have done or said about Dickwolves since then wasn’t referencing the original joke it was referencing survivors as a punchline. That people who survived abuse don’t deserve the respect of not having that abuse thrown in their faces and that’s its funny when someone does it and they get upset. This shifted punchline shows a lack of empathy and basic respect for other people’s lives that isn’t really humor and certainly isn’t good humor.
There’s a shit-ton of irony involved here, if you think about it. I remember seeing the “dickwolves” strip when it came out—basically the joke (as far as I could tell) was, “Your ‘hero’ is so focused on achieving specific, arbitrary goals that you never think about real concepts of suffering and heroism in the game’s setting.” (“I only need to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete.”) You take out the really ugly rape “joke” in the middle of it, and that strip is actually saying something interesting. I mean, my immediate reaction was, “Ugh, didn’t need to go there,” but I can also see how the strip was supposed to work—and could work, if the second line in the second panel was changed to something more like the first line.
So the “shifting punchline” aspect mentioned up there is exactly where this started irretrievably going to hell. Because in aggressively, nastily doubling down on that one element of the strip, come hell or high water—rather than saying, “That was ugly and unnecessary and we didn’t need it to make the point we were trying to make, we’re sorry“—the Penny Arcade guys became the jackass “hero” on the arbitrary quest that they were satirizing. They only want to defend ~free speech,~ all right? Quest complete.
