Woman. Demon. Empress.

i'm in Ireland and the search for that bastards name is still blocked and hidden... the legnths the british go to defend and protect their instruments of colonialism and violence is beyond belief. no justice for the victims and yet every measure taken to protect David James Cleary and his fellow murderers.

mmm Good Girl~

Within a 10-15min walk, I could get to 2 different larger malls that had facilities such as a library and connects directly to the subway station, a light rail station and a bus interchange.

I could literally wake up at 2a.m. and walk to the 7-Eleven to get a slushie and a sandwich if I wanted. That was how convenient it was. I didn't need to spend hours commuting to and from the doctor's if I didn't feel well enough for work.

Grocery shopping is a part of many people's daily routine. We go to the market or supermarket on the same day we plan to cook.

And this is common here. We're a small city state, true, so the closeness of everything is kinda forced on us, but even so, neighborhoods are planned in such a way that everyone can easily access a variety of goods and services without too much hassle. And we do use little carts! They're useful and practical things!

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

I have said versions of all this before, but not On Tumblr; which is a problem inasmuch as this is a complaint about the parochial insularity of the Tumblr mechsploitation scene. So, futile as it may be, here it is, theoretically visible at the source of the issue: the terrible shortcoming I see in the Tumblr mechploitation scene is that, for the most part, actually writing, reading, or engaging with mechsploitation only happens in other places — what happens on Tumblr is "jacking off about puppygirls."

Everyone's allowed to jack off about puppygirls, of course, should they so wish, but this shouldn't be mistaken for things it isn't, such as e.g. "reading things" or "understanding a genre" or "knowing what the fuck you're talking about."

Mechsploitation is often mistaken for a subgenre of science fiction, from which Tumblr "fans" often talk about sanitising the horrifying elements. This is a fundamental media literacy error: mechsploitation is a subgenre of horror. You cannot sanitise the horror out of horror; furthermore, the horror in mechsploitation is explicitly fascism. The horror is the horror of fascism breaking its sincere opponents — if not into genuine agreement, then at least into a drugs-and-torture-obtained simulacrum of enthusiastic participation in fascist violence.

Whenever someone says "haha what if mechsplo but nicies to puppy :)" they are saying: it's icky that this horror genre is horror. The breaking people, the bad ends, the intentional feelbad, any of the kinks too edgy for Me Specifically — all that can go, superfluous. Let's take out the horror and breaking and drugs-and-torture and simulacrum and just have the enthusiastic participation, because that's nicies! Puppygirl's nice white affluent middle-class ass Simply signed up to kill the subaltern rebels in the imperial military when a recruiter came round to her school. Uncle Sam says: Off the leash, uwu-rah! :)

And if that criticism is too pointed for your taste, consider: mechsploitation without the things that make it mechsploitation probably isn't "reverse mechsplo" or "mechsplo but". It's probably just "milSF with mechs in," something that substantially pre-dates mechsploitation and has estabished genre language for talking about it. Neither it nor mechsplo is served by trying to define the negative space of Everything That's Not Mechsploitation in terms of mechsploitation; the attempt makes you look, at best, like you should Read Another Fucking Book.