unironic uwu

The most important aspect of RGU, to me, as a story that centers on grooming specifically, is that it does not shy away from the fact that its victims can "enjoy" many individual moments of the process. The entire point of grooming is to make the victim okay with what is happening, to convince them that this is what they want too. When grooming is successful, they do, even if their feelings change later with more awareness. It's normal to be curious about and enjoy eroticism as a young person, but abusers will take advantage of that. They will try to convince you that your desires are the same as their desires.

Its so important because this aspect is weaponized against victims by those who should be helping them as well as the groomer themself. It's why Anthy is a "witch" according to the world. Utena tells Anthy that for a moment she felt betrayed by her, as if they were rival women competing for the same man. Akio tells Utena she's just as bad as him because she didn't reject his advances. Akio tells Utena that this is what Anthy *wants.*

Countless young people have been successfuly labeled as "obsessive" or "sex-crazed" and forced to take the blame while their abusers live freely. Countless young people have been convinced that is who they are because they didn't hate every single moment spent with their abuser.

:)

Until a writer gives you one. You can have a very well written female character that has flaws, and her flaws make her unlikable. If a woman even strays slightly from the perfect angel that people want female characters to be, she's annoying, bossy, mean, rude, a bad person, and unlikable.

When Jax was closeted and widely recognized as a male character, people respected how complex and well written Jax is. When the creator confirms she is a trans woman after the most obvious symbolism that I'm still baffled went over people's heads, suddenly her arc felt forced. She's unlikable. How are we supposed to defend her now? That is even if people accept the fact that she is a woman. She was beloved and still is, but only because people are in denial.

Charlie was hated in season 1, and in season 2 she was given some character depth and flaws to overcome. Everyone is now saying she ruined the show, she's annoying, she is a terrible friend, she only thinks about herself, she's a terrible protagonist. If Charlie was a male character, she would be beloved. Cinnamon bun, perfect little angel, just a little guy, could never do any harm. But she had to be written as a woman, so she's annoying, bossy, delusional, poorly written.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

which is just flat out aromisia and belittling as hell. Especially when the flag is meant to represent multiculturalism and intersectionality. The stripe is literally pink for love. A western symbol. But then if you're aro and don't like being represented by the color of love, it's only because you have a western mindset?????? That is just blatant hypocracy.

and the creator has specifically said she *doesn't* give permission for people to change the shades of the colors unless the whole entire thing is getting changed at once, so you can't edit it to make it more accesible, cuz the "final" version right now is eyeburning almost on par with the usual intersex flag.

i don't feel like making an instagram account just to bring up the innaccessability, and other people have already brought up the aromisia, and I don't know how substack works.

Apparently there were tons and tons of surveys and polls about this. If that's true, how is the final version *this* eyeburning, and this belittling and erasing of aro aces?

I also just don't understand the purpose of attempting to reject the AVEN original ace flag, (for valid reasons. Why the hell does the white stripe officially stand for allies???) but then clearly just doing that again with two extra colors.

sigh

Once again. to the Queer community in general and especially those who make pride flags:

Please remember that disabled people exist. You should pretty much never be using full saturation, and if you want your flag to be accessible, you need to talk to lots of disabled people with photosensitivity to make sure it's not going to cause us migraines or seizures.

There's a reason the disability pride flag was almost immediately changed to be less saturated, and it's because the original *was causing seizures*

I'm just very bitter that aroaces always seem to get the short end of the stick whether it's in the ace or aro communities.

And no one ever wants to remember that disabled people also exist in these communities, and deserve to not be caused pain by trying to interact with the symbol that's supposed to represent us.

Editing to add the next day: There is no reason for any of this to be set in stone. This flag has already been changed from its original pastel form to this. It can change again. Nothing is stopping it from doing so if it's meant to actually be inclusive and intersectional and able to be something the whole entire asexual community can use.