Alara doesn't actually hate Tumblr anymore

Auditory processing disorder has been helped by frequent subtitles, but not everything has them. So many actors and actresses look like every other, when you have propagnosia (face blindness.)

In a TV show, I am shown exactly what the characters and scenery look like, but I have to guess what people are thinking and feeling, and it's hard for me to tell people apart. In a book, I have to imagine the characters and scenery, but I am told what people are thinking and feeling (or at least what the main character is), and characters are described with names, which are usually easier for me to tell apart than faces. And on TV, if there are no subtitles to read, it's hard for me to understand, whereas I have no trouble understanding a book.

Happens:

Primarily for white male characters (can be secondary or villain characters)

For characters played by well-known/popular actors (Chris Evans, Shawn Hatosy, Cillian Murphy)

When most of the other major characters are women or POC

When the main canonical romantic relationship isn't between two white people

When there isn't a main canonical romantic relationship for the main character and there isn't an obvious M/M ship

More for medium to small fandoms (<5k fics)

When there is a small enough cast of major characters that there are not many different major ships (so, relatedly, more often for films than TV series)

Doesn't happen if there is:

A sufficiently obvious M/M ship between two white characters

An at least moderately popular M/F ship involving two white characters

If there isn't an obvious white man to be in the ship

I gotta say, while I'm pleased they're mask-off and not making up OCs with real names anymore when they want to do a blatant self-insert, like they did in the 00's and prior... I'm tired of them. I never wanted to read them in the first place and they're not always correctly tagged, so you can't avoid them on AO3 even if you exclude "Reader (self-insert)". Also it'd be more honest to say "Writer", wouldn't it?

"worst genre of rock song: rock and roll is great

best genre of rock song: there's a wizard"

I venture that it's because the legalization of gay marriage didn't really change anything (even in the deep blue areas in which I've lived, gay marriages seem vanishingly rare). And even if someone doesn't think a gay-married couple is "really" married, it just doesn't come up unless someone really goes out of his way to be a jerk to people about it

Trans stuff at least has the appearance of requiring greater social shifts

It's interesting, right, because in many ways I feel that a broadly-christian culture is better than a broadly-secular one. Actual faith (being an internal matter) aside, the way of living and relating to others/the world seems to work best for most people. But at the same time, cultural Christianity is different from actual christianity and i think it is bad for people and bad for the faith when it is socially mandated to pay lip service to a faith you might not really believe

The kingdom of God is within you, right. Social trends are gonna trend and you will be disappointed if you expect your society to do your religion for you. But then we're back at the beginning, bc Christianity's influence on societies seems obviously better than what came before and much of what appears to come after

Long winded way to say I dont really have a consistent Hot Take

I basically want to second all the rest and mention that I appreciate seeing someone else besides me say it. (Perhaps I just don't have as good a way of saying these things, but when I try to express some of them on Tumblr, in return I get a good bit of flak.) Yeah, the gay marriage debate is basically yesteryear's major culture war battle and represented how that old culture war really revolved around Christianity vs. secularism (with each waging war in a different way against Islam). Yeah, it mainly got supplanted by trans issues -- that's what both social conservatives and social liberals decided around the same time to focus on, once gay rights by and large became a done deal on the legal front and was established in the hearts and minds of a solid enough majority of Americans. I'm not sure I'd call gay marriage "vanishingly rare" from my experience (one of my current colleagues is in a same-sex marriage, and I know other academics in such as well, for instance), but it doesn't seem to be something the whole gay community has jumped to either. Yes, trans issues are different from gay rights issues in a number of key ways (this is the part I get in trouble for, and I don't want to suggest it's exactly what you're saying because it isn't), including requiring the appearance of greater social shifts (I would go further and claim, actually requiring greater social shifts).

The trans issues culture war battleground is not a proxy for Christianity vs. secularism, even though some parts of the anti-trans side comes in a conservative Christian flavor and is held by conservative Christians, and even though the liberal side seems determined to brand the debate over trans rights as the Gay Rights Debate 2.0 (and perhaps the conservative side does this as well, although I doubt it since it would be disadvantageous branding given that they lost the gay rights debate?).

Yeah, I've always said that abortion is always going to be a contentious issue and I don't see how that will ever change, because it involves a legitimately deep philosophical/ethical conundrum that can't be boiled down to getting rid of "hostility to, discomfort with, and resistance towards accommodating people who are different along some axis" -flavor conservative ideas that inevitably will eventually decline, as applies to gay rights stuff and many aspects of trans rights stuff.

Probably if (some version of) christianity were to again become dominant in the US then different kinds of Christians would go back to being at each other's throats, as opposed to being more or less friendly in the face of broader secularism

Let's say you're a person who genuinely believes life begins at conception, and thus, abortion is murder. Right? So you want to prevent abortion. Well, the first thing you'd do is prevent pregnancy in anyone who wants to prevent pregnancy. Life is precious, so it shouldn't be started in someone who won't or can't give their all to it. You would also want to eliminate economic reasons for abortion. So, strong protection for pregnant workers, paid maternal leave, universal health care for mothers and babies, and government-run day care, because the pressure of "if I have another baby I'll have to quit my job" might lead women to want an abortion. These are pretty basic causes of abortion. Unlike the murder of born people, we can actually zero in on the reason for a lot of abortion and prevent it with simple social policies.

They're against those. Not just, not stumping for them. Against.

The truth of the matter is that what they really, really want is adoptable white babies. They want white women to have more kids, and they want middle-aged Christian couples to be able to adopt from teen girls who got pregnant, so that means, bring back the stigma of pregnancy. Make pregnancy financially difficult unless there's a well-established career man backing you, and then make abortion impossible, and this will create more adoptable white babies. It'll also be a huge setback to women's rights and prevent a lot of divorces... which in their eyes is a plus. They want a world where men control women, everyone is Christian, and white people are unquestionably on top of the social hierarchy.

But those are wildly unpopular ideas outside of evangelical circles and extreme white supremacism. So, they positioned it as "save the babies". And there are probably some pro-lifers who really do have a principled objection to "killing babies", but if no part of their motivation is wanting to make sure women get punished for having sex with the wrong men, then they'd probably be in favor of making it easier to avoid pregnancy, thus preventing a lot of abortions.

Is this an actual thing built into the fabric of our universe or just a lot of weird coincidences?

I mean the second part of that question is WAY above my pay grade if true, and on top of that I would have no way to prove it. The "Outer Beings" as Gwen likes to call them (they dislike the term "Higher" in relation to beings they don't worship) are very opaque in the way they run things and if they ARE bluntly referring to their "intentions" for a person by what they get named that sounds more like an article of faith than something I can defend with the methods I was taught.

That being said nominative determinism is like, a real thing. Or at least it's a real theory that we have a name for beyond needing to assume a turn for the fantastical

(A picture of the Rainbow Raider. Didn't know what else to put here and he is VERY silly)

For those of you unfamiliar, the idea of nominative determinism is based around the theory that people unconsciously seek professions or occupations that match the meaning of their name. Or at least a meaning adjacent to how their name sounds. The original, half joking, letter submitted to the journal New Scientist in 1994 used the example of a book on polar exploration being written by an author named Daniel Snowman. This idea expanded further and further as sort of a proto-meme in the scientific community as more and more examples were discovered.

Though of course when the subject was applied to the world of superheroes, which tends to be more flashy than the world of scientific journals, it took off as a much more MODERN kind of meme. As you said, in the world of supervillains we can name a few dozen examples of costumes criminals whose names seemed to have set them up for a life of costumed robbery or worse. Although I would keep in mind that the principle of nominative determinism probably ALREADY applied to most of these people BEFORE they went into supervillainy. Victor Fries was already a world renowned cryogenics expert before becoming a criminal, Bivalo was a color blind painting prodigy (which means that whoever is handing out these names seems to have a very cruel sense of humor).

What's also worth keeping in mind is that nominative determinism gives a LOT of leeway and is just as much a product of linguistic pareidolia as anything real. Like, there's just as much room for Dr. Quinzel to have become either a motorcycle designer, an opera performer or a birthday clown before she became a costumed criminal with a coincidental clown theme. And by that same token it could just be all in the head of the viewer. If, hypothetically, Batman's last name turns out to be "Bates" and we all point and laugh, is it because that actually means anything or just that "Bates" happens to be a really common name for white American families.

And, like most truisms of this kind, it's got a huge cloud of confirmation bias wafting around it. Gotham City has MILLIONS of residents and a few million more within working distance of the city. There are probably dozens of people with some variation on the names Rob, Robert or Robin Banks, a good chunk of them are probably related to each other. And if you checked I'm sure most if not all of them would be entirely normal people doing entirely normal work.

My last name is Sweeney, a name most often associated with a fictional barber serial killer from a famous British stage musical and, in order:

I have had the same haircut since I have had hair TO cut and the idea of styling or otherwise maintaining my hair sounds like annoyance personified

I don't even REMOVE spiders from my home anymore, let alone kill them, which tells you something about my capacity for violence.

The only person I would ever be a threat to with a straight razor is myself as I tried to figure out how to use the damn thing or which way to hold it.

I can't carry a tune in a bucket and my last stage experience was when I worked the camcorder for my high school theatre class.

Strictly speaking, no, because kryptonite would be harmful to both him and the performing rabbi. It would violate pikuach nefesh.

ON THE OTHER HAND

(Isn't there always an other hand in Judaism?)

It could be argued that even if Superman looks fully human when nude (dear Supes if you're reading this I am so sorry), he's not human, and therefore is not actually a man, and therefore is not subject to the mitzvah of circumcision. Just to be clear, in Judaic terms that doesn't mean "oh, you're just confused, you're not really a man." It just means "for the purposes of adjucating and interpreting religious law, you're something else." There are actually cases like this described in Talmud (albeit with humans), constituting a total of eight sexes (often condensed to six), so there is legal ground to start from.

ON THE OTHER HAND

This leads to an extremely thorny question about whether one's gender is a matter of expression or biological circumstance. Orthodox Judaism currently holds the latter to be true; that is, whatever genitalia you're born with, that's what you are. Reform holds the former to be true, which takes us back to the original question (if Superman identifies with the human male gender, is he then male, or something else, and if male, how do we perform a bris?), and Orthodoxy might literally have to have an argument about how to sex Kryptonians.

it took me asking three more times before she finally told me she wanted me to leave the fans where they are instead of moving them to my room or something. and I said oh! I had no intention of doing so but thank you for letting me know what the expectation is.

Sorry, wormnoodless, you’re a heretic.

Though half-God, half-Man doesn't bother me nearly as much as "Jesus is just a little video game avatar God is piloting around." The Son did not create the world, that was the Father. They are Three-In-One but also distinct entities, and behaving as if the Father, who is kind of an asshole, is identical to the Son, who... okay, can be an asshole sometimes (ask the fig tree) but is overall about forgiveness and don't sweat the letter of the law if you can keep to its spirit, are the same being... I mean, Anne Rice pointed out that Jesus' sacrifice is totally meaningless if he's literally the same being as God. That makes his life on Earth like a video game he was playing, not an actual life.

Also, utterly despise the Prosperity Gospel. This is like making Magneto a mutant-hater. It is literally the opposite of the entire point of Jesus' life and mission.