At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

people in the notes are making the fair point that this person seems to be confused about what happened during the AIDS crisis

but then you've got this highly liked comment on the same post, asserting that parents should be the default medical decision-makers for an incapacitated person

A married spouse legally outranks an adult person's parents when it comes to US law. If you are not legally married, then your default in the US is going to be your parents. Probably followed by your siblings (IANAL). If you want someone else to handle your affairs if you are incapacitated, you have to designate a power of attorney.

(This also works vice-versa. My father was unmarried when he died, so legally, the default next most legitimate decisionmakers were his children. If he didn't have children, or we had been unable to handle things, his siblings could have stepped in.)

But like, of COURSE you would need LEGAL DOCUMENTATION designating your medical power of attorney if it's not your current spouse?? The law doesn't care about "soon to be ex." The law doesn't care about what might someday happen in the future. The law can't know if you are *going* to divorce, or if you change your mind about divorcing. They care about the paperwork that is actually on file. As they should!!!

Like this applies to all “invisible” disabilities in the sense that just bc you can’t see what’s wrong doesn’t mean nothing is wrong or they aren’t disabled but it’s especially the case for chronic migraines

Migraines are NOT just headaches. It’s not just “oof ow my head hurt :(”, Migraines are WHOLE body affair. It’s getting weepy and irritable hours before the pain hits, it’s starting to get clumsy and feeling body aches just before the pain starts, it’s getting stiff because of the aches and sensitive to light and sound because of how heightened senses get.

And when the pain gets, sometimes it is the general image of someone locked in a dark room in bed, which is genuinely awful bc you can’t do anything. You just have to lay there and stew in your pain and no medicine touches it and everything hurts, worst of all your head and there is nothing to focus on other than the pain because any light hurts and any sound hurts.

But sometimes the pain isn’t bad enough for that, or sometimes you have to work or go to school with nails in your head and it’s impossible to focus. Your depth perception gets wonky, you’re clumsy, you slur or stumble over your words because so much of your brain is occupied only by pain. You can’t miss another day of work, you can’t miss the money, but you’re messing up orders or you’re misunderstanding instructions.

And then there’s the after. Postdrome, the migraine hangover. Where the emotional and irritability returns, and you have issues with your stomach, very often leaving you unable to eat or drink without puking. Your neck is stiff, your head feels heavy, your brain is so fogged up that you can barely string together a coherent sentence. Your body aches much worse than before, and you’re exhausted, fatigued to hell and back, and that lasts for 1-3 days after the actual migraine.

Migraines are a multi-day condition that affects EVERY aspect of your fucking life. And medicines that treat the pain very often only lessen the symptoms that occur before and after.

Age 23 vs 48, lmao. Back when I box dyed my hair a dark auburn. To be fair, I think all of us who lived it as young adults glowed up from the year 2000.

26 vs 48. Same coat, only it finally fits properly in the shoulders! I think I had just seen Matrix Reloaded and that was me playing around as my OC. 😅

26 vs 48. I'm still kind of scrawny at 20+ lbs heavier, but clothes fit so much better now.

Dom: lets try this new kink called i will shoot you with a gun. Here we go

Sub: what

What BDSM is actually like

Sub: lets try this new kink called you will shoot me with a gun. Here we go

Dom: what