hold tight to whatever gets you through the night

link to the podcast, this section below is from timestamp 24.35

“andy weir provided a packet to the creature shop that was like a packet of eridian biology and stuff but there wasn’t much about eridian culture or eridian sociology and i made a bunch of choices going in because i just needed to have like a ‘who am i?’ right? 

[…] and i made a decision that rocky’s species, that eridians are really social animals that in fact are like a beehive or a pod of dolphins - it’s a unique and really integrated ecosystem of everybody doing their [specific] part. and the fact that rocky had to fly that ship for about 45 years - longer than grace has been alive, i wanna point that out - he’s been alone on that ship, having to run that by himself and- ryan and i would talk about that, one day we sat down and he was like “so what’s the movie from rocky’s perspective?” and i was like “oh it’s like ‘alien’, […] like he’s in a ‘contagion’ movie by himself and he has no idea what’s going on.”

he’s basically in castaway by himself which of course ryan is too but like, one reason why we never cut to the past of rocky is like, i think it was really horrifying! i don’t think rocky has slept in however many years and so a thing i was really struggling with is this idea of like “rocky must watch sleep” because how do you make that a need as opposed to like, a cute idea? and i just had to make the decision that […] he has a lot of unprocessed trauma around the things that he doesn’t understand and how much he is blaming himself because he’s the guy who fixes, he’s the guy who fixes and there was something really freeing about deciding that rocky was a deeply emotional, deeply anxious, deeply horrified person - being - that is trying to move through that in some way and how that affects the early scenes with him until there’s a point in the story where you can see we’ve physically softened rocky’s behaviour, because he’s finally feeling more safe and ok but all of that lore, all of that information [was essential].

Like this take may sound woke and seem to make sense to you, but apply any critical thinking and you'll realize this puts you in the same camp as the homophobes, transphobes, and all other bigots.

You don't get to police what other consenting adults do in their bedrooms. You don't get to make people feel ashamed of how they get off. No one does. No matter how much you dislike it. No matter how justified you feel about it. Those folks who want to genocide us for being queer and trans feel just as justified, they feel just as much that it makes sense, they feel just as much that it is their right to take their personal discomfort out on people who are different from them. Which is all this is just with a progressive veneer.

I think it is interesting that there is an assumption here that my advice to practice critical thinking in regards to racial dynamics, one, has the goal of making people “feel ashamed” about their kink, and two, that it equates to a desire to police and enforce what people do in their bedroom. I think it’s interesting that white people, when told that they might be saying something racist or perpetuating harm out of ignorance, assume that the nonwhite person talking to them has the intention to shame and police them.

To be clear. I am a mixed race petplayer. I am both a pet and a handler. I have used the word mutt in my petplay in the past, and while it’s not my preferred term, I am very open to using it!

However, I have observed in the petplay community, a massive skew towards whiteness. I’ve talked to other racialized kinksters who tell me that they have avoided petplay, not because they have no interest in the pet dynamic, but because the way that the widely white participant base are so ignorant to the nuance and complexity involved when a bipoc person is compared to an animal when squared with our racial background.

White petplayers have an obligation to understand that when they say things like “filthy mutt” all of the racialized people around them, especially the mixed race people, are going to have our hackles raised in a way that another white person might not. They have an obligation to consider how they’re using words that are used as racial slurs around and directed at real people who come from real racial groups with real histories of oppression and violence rooted in calling us certain terms and comparing us to animals.

- Hiring sign language interpreters

- Ensuring venues are step free

- Making dedicated sensory safe spaces

- Providing free masks

- Including braille or audio described signage

- Using plain language in speeches