chaos baby

The issue comes when people try and claim theyre NOT canonically aroace. Its fine to be like "This character is aroace but im making them X for this fic". Weird but fine. It is not okay to say "actually character is not aroace theyre actually X canonically idc about the source material". The second one is erasure, plain and simple.

Most important to address is the hypocrisies. IF YOU WOULDN'T DO IT TO GAY OR LESBIAN CHARACTER WHY ARE YOU DOING IT TO AN AROACE?

That needs to be addressed; do you value aroace people less? do you see our identity as less worthy of respect or acknowledgement? is there a reason you would change a canonical idenitiy when its an aromantic or asexual idenity, but you would loose it if someone shipped your favourite yaoi with a woman or yuri with a man?

Edit: After recieving plenty of anon hate, first off, we pissing on the poor here?

"Well actually it was europe who raced to conquer africa" - see the start of the post, I know that, I said so myself.

"Oh so europe learned racism from america!?" Not what, I said, strawman argument, next.

"But what about how europe is being racist to "insert people"!?" First of, I never said all racism in europe was gone, there is still racism found all over the place. But unlike in the US, a vast majority of this is by individuals found largely in isolated rural areas (again, note, not all, but most), as opposed to the straight up institutionalized racism backed by the US government and a a significant percentage of the common folk.

Aka, Europe, while not flawless, has largely left the worst parts of racism behind. There is still plenty of things to fix, but the trend is on a whole (but not neccesarily for all specific aspects) decidedly improving.

Unlike in the US where the number of hatecrimes per year has been on the rise since around 2013 (with france here being a notable outlier in europe where the number has also gone up lately, so again, not perfect). Next, despite only making up about 13% of the US total population, nearly half the people in state prisons are of color. On pretty much all levels, when adjusting for population, white people proportionally hold a vast majority of the higher paying jobs, and white people on all job levels make more money than non-white people.

And then of course there is ICE. A state funded militia which regularly mistreats, and both accidentaly and purposfully kill people bases on straight up racial profiling. Which, yes, gets a lot of pushback by a big portion of the US, but also gets applauded by many, and importantly, the state fully backs them up.

The US is also a big player in forcing other nations hands in backing Israel. They certainly don't hold all the blame, but we know they have directly and indirectly held economic threats against EU member states to keep them on Israel's side. And in modern times if the US weren't present to start a war in the middle east, they nearly always butted in to fuck up the rebuilding process afterwards, which is a whole other tangent but let me tell you, while again, Europe started it when they rushed to split up the Ottoman Empire, no other nation has caused as much damage to the middle east in modern times as the US

So I'm sorry, but to all the people (or the one/ few repeating anons) who have been spamming me after I posted this. I stand by it. Europe has plenty of problems, economic disparity, generic dislike of immigrants regardless of where they are from, political issues (comparatively trivial compared to the US, but still) and plenty more. But when it comes to racism, for the most part, no matter where you're from you can go to most places and be fine. There will be small things, and certainly specific cases where you see bigger issues. But on a whole, racism is a lesser problem. Still a problem, but not a significantly impactfull everyday problem.

Unlike in the US, where you fought a war over race, had massive historicall landmark protests over race, yet still to this day struggle to the point that normal news from the US make the fucking union newpaper look tame. So yes, compared to Europe, the US is the fucking problem.

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

I redrew this picture of the cast as the characters

🎶 let's go to the beach-each let's go get away 🎶

Maybe for a while, if that's okay

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