professional snail imposter

commission for @vampiricapparition, his characters Jackalope and Azvameth! thank you for commissioning me 💜

More people are talking about TADC’s leaks in sympathy for Gooseworx than they are about her being silent on how she participated in racist jokes other than implying it was not “genuine” racism. Nobody seems to bring up Patricia “I am also limited in my ability to racially oppress due to being trans and disabled” Taxxon’s consistent racism, despite her becoming relevant again due to the latest incident with Hbomberguy. A lot of popular transfem bloggers on Tumblr have a history of racism too, but God forbid you bring it up.

I feel fucking crazy. What happened to “you are white before you are anything else”? So many popular trans women on here are specifically white trans women who you’re not allowed to point out have said racist shit that they still stand by, or you’re the bad person. You’re overreacting. You’re harassing a poor innocent white woman over nothing that actually matters, and you need to touch grass and learn what a real problem is. These women are allowed to wield their white woman tears by crying about how oppressed they are and how hard their lives are and how everybody is out to get them when criticized for racism, and people just BUY IT?? Not just buy it, but ENFORCE IT, harass others who DON’T buy it, accuse the ones who don’t buy it of, and I quote, LYNCHING her.

White trans women are not less likely to be racist than any other type of white person, but they’re treated like they are, and the notion they could be racist is treated as inherently ridiculous, defamatory, and transmisogynistic.

I think that some people need to come to grips with the fact that some of these women are blatantly, openly racist, and hide behind their disabilities/mental illnesses and their transness. We cannot be positioning white trans women as an authority on all systems of oppression, because white trans women are not the modern martyr for the oppressed voice. Black trans women have felt everything they have, 100 times worse. White trans women’s suffering is real, but suffering as a white woman is just so much different. And if we want the trans community to be safe for POC, we need to start actually calling racism from trans people out, instead of being the girl who cried transmisogynistic harassment campaign.

But this is the website that says a term coined by a Black trans woman to call out racism from white members of the transfem community is inherently transmisogynistic (even a transmisogynistic slur) and should never be used. So maybe I’m just talking to a (very racist) brick wall here.

1. matching pearls in pairs for earrings

2. msn butterfly

Me: so, like, people insist that Bro is Forever Bad and beyond redemption and no one is allowed to enjoy his character or else they’re excusing his treatment of Dave, but… why does no one say that about Mom Lalonde? who raised Rose while drunk off her ass 24/7? who raised her child in such a way that the child misinterpreted EVERYTHING she did as passive-aggressive mind games? (let’s not even talk about how Rose later tried to cope with the realization that her dead mom actually did love her by emulating her mother’s bad habits and blaming herself for being a “bad daughter.”)

Non-Homestuck friend: i’m wondering why people whose delicate feefees are hurt by people being horrible even LIKE this fucking comic!

Me: RIGHT? i love this fucked up comic and its fucked up characters but it’s about TERRIBLE PEOPLE being BROKEN AND TERRIBLE. they’re ALL Problematic Faves. but, you know, Bro’s the ONLY one we must boo and hiss at. let’s just ignore that Jade’s (senile??) grandpa let a toddler play with LOADED PISTOLS.

Friend: …the other examples. the children are girls.

Me: … … …i’d only been considering the genders of the adults.

Friend: nnnnnuuup. abuse is worse when it happens to their male fave.

So like…Rose’s drinking problem partially stems from Roxy’s drinking problem. Yet somehow in the retcon…this magically goes away? Like yeah I don’t think Rose would hold a grudge against Roxy for stuff her mom did, but the reunion wouldn’t be without its stress, especially with their respective issues.

But no, Rose and Roxy meet like it’s the next best family reunion with only minor comments about some issues Rose was having, while Dave and Dirk get this tense, emotional reunion scene dealing with their respective issues candidly? ‘Cause why, Dave’s pain matters more? Why was Rose’s development circumvented in such a way?

Anyway, I super agree with basically everything here. Rose had a complicated and angsty character arc going on, then we retconned and, poof, it’s gone because Vriska yelled at her apparently. (Did Vriska have to intervene more than once? Did she reason with Rose or just guilt trip her? Did Rose have her emotional needs met? We’ll probably never know.) There’s piles upon piles of text dedicated to carefully sifting through the Strider angst, while Rose and Roxy get… Dave butting in on their reunion. LE SIGH.

That’s just par for the course with most of the characters lately, but the female characters seem to be hit by it especially hard. Here’s a long-standing, difficult problem! Let’s just handwave it away and/or give it a simple solution instead of letting the character struggle with it.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that if I’m gonna complain that a male character is receiving extra angsty introspection while a female character has her depth casually shrugged off, I should probably point fingers at the author first. (Though there are still factions of fandom that I narrow my eyes at in a “you, at least, should know better” fashion.)