bungle me scrungles 😎

i haven’t talked to anyone on tumblr in literal years i think? but it still holds such a place in my heart. it’s where i first met some of my best friends including my roommate of now three years, and my best friend of going on... god, at least eleven years.

and in the more recent years, it is where i found komi (or, komi found me? whichever way that went LOL) so it stays close to me. i don’t go on here in fear i’m not really creating something everyone wants but i might as well zip over here now that other various places i’ve poked my face in have been shutting down/aren’t really what i’m looking for

I don’t really create content anyway and prefer to keep my friend groups smaller. even when discord servers i like hit that 200 person mark it makes me feel like i’ve got to shut my mouth or get out of there.

are you suddenly no longer gay because you’re single? do you have to be in a relationship to be trans?

is the comfort you found talking to other queer people suddenly a straight people moment because you don’t want to grind your crotch against each other’s?

would you ask your mom and dad if they’re REALLY married since you have never seen them making out sloppy style in front of you?

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

But when you critique the story you need to stop suspending that disbelief and look at the story through another lens, just like @queeranarchism says.

And you can be critical of stories. They are reflective of the values of the author. But you can only see those values clearly when you look at the story as a story.

Example: J.K. Rowling really shows her fatphobia in the Harry Potter books by portraying a lot of unlikable characters as fat, and emphasizing their fatness at the exact moments when she wants you to dislike them. Aunt Marge is the obvious example. Aunt Marge ‘sausage fingers’ get described as she is abusing Harry in order to amplify the sense of disgust that you have for her. It’s clear that J.K. Rowling is using ‘fat’ as a stand in for ‘bad’. Fuck JKR.

That’s a valid critique of a story.

When you do not suspend disbelief, what you get is discourse between people who go “Harry Potter is a fatphobe because he is clearly judging Aunt Marge for her fat. Everyone who defends Harry Potter is wrong. Fuck you fatphobes!” and people who go “Harry Potter did nothing wrong! Aunt Marge is clearly an abuser. Anyone who brings up fatphobia here is protecting an abuser! Fuck you abuse apologists!”