Puukko Kaaos

but then you watch it again and close your eyes whenever she appears and just listen to her voice, you can hear the words and emotions and sadness of an average, tired woman who has accepted that no matter what she does, she’ll always just be seen for how she looks. That the way she has been animated and the way she is seen and interpreted by the world is beyond her control, and there’s not a thing she can do about it.

And suddenly the men aren’t very sympathetic at all, because you realize that while they LOOK, they haven’t at all been LISTENING.

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

individual posts for these campaigns are generally ignored. i suspect they’re just background noise for most people at this point. please don’t ignore this, you have the opportunity to throw someone a lifeline and do some real good. even if you don’t have any money, a reblog is free and can help get more eyes on these campaigns. none of them are on tumblr, to my knowledge. nobody sees these campaigns unless people reblog posts about them or make their own posts.

all campaigns are vetted by the organizers of gaza funds. for full transparency, a list of campaigns is available to view on their site.

ahmed atallah: 10 days since last donation

mohammed ahmed: 9 days since last donation

raghad's family: 8 days since last donation

ahmad abuabdou: 8 days since last donation

yasmin's family: 7 days since last donation

shatha zeyad: 7 days since last donation

campaigns in danger of becoming critically stagnant:

dr. isam: 6 days since last donation

ghazi mekawi: 5 days since last donation

hassan abdullah: 5 days since last donation

bessan khalaf: 4 days since last donation

rania alneder: 4 days since last donation

this list comprises the majority of my active gaza funds spotlight campaigns. i am actively spotlighting 18 campaigns. six of them are critically stagnant, and five more are in danger of becoming critically stagnant. if nothing is done today, one more will become critically stagnant, bringing that number up to seven.

these families cannot afford to wait! are they not worthy of support because they are not personally begging you for it? please do something!

remember, even if you don't think you can give anything, you have a platform, so use it!

thank you in advance for your consideration.

tags for reach under the cut (you can always let me know if you'd rather not be on this list)

This video shows my reality right now…I am living these moments in every detail: the rain flooding the tent, the ground drowning beneath my feet, and the cold sinking deep into my bones. I try to save what little we have left, lifting our belongings off the wet floor so they won’t be ruined… and with every move, I feel the weight of life on my shoulders.After losing our home and everything we owned, this tent has become our only shelter. A thin cover that can’t withstand the rain or protect us from the freezing cold. Yet despite everything, I try to stay strong… I try to protect my family as much as I can, even though I myself am on the verge of collapsing.

I beg you, don’t hesitate… I truly need every 5 dollars you might think is small, but for us, it’s a real lifeline.

This might be the dumbest idea I've ever had or the smartest idea idk u tell me. This idea comes from this yt video I watched a while back about why gay ships happen/why are they so popular. Basically, the video theorized that part of the reason that particularly male-male ships are so popular is because of a lack of well-written female characters in media. With canon male-female relationships often being unliked/unpopular, because the female character is written entirely to be the generic female love interest, therefore the relationship lacks chemistry and fans look to ships with well-written characters that have good chemistry (which are typically male characters because well mainly sexism).

Soooo from here I came up with this "litmus" test:

Step 1: Pick a fandom/media to test.

Step 2: Open ao3 and find fandom (I'm just gonna go ahead and assume u know how to use ao3 because ur on tumblr).

Step 3: Go to "filters" then "relationships"

If the relationships that pop up under the "relationships" tab are all male-male relationships then nope no good female characters. If there are some male-female relationships maybe 1 or 2 good female characters. If they are majority or all male-female relationships then congratulations you've found a fandom with good female characters (points if these relationships are not canon or these characters don't meet in the show/movie/media). Lastly, if there is 1 or more female-female relationships then you've hit the jackpot!

Ofc this is not a perfect system, and there are definitely exceptions to this rule, but I think it's a good sorta tester if ur bored or want to find smth with good female characters. Some exceptions are if there are just 2 male characters that have really good chemistry or smth that's focused around a same-sex relationship (basically stuff like that which I feel most can infer).

Bonus (under the cut)

you as a potential reader have the power to filter out tags and avoid what you don’t like, since you’re reading for yourself first and foremost

a reminder that ao3 was created as an archive. not a social media.

ao3 is run on fans’ donations. it’s a nonprofit organization, run by fans, for fans. it has no ads. no capitalism or algorithm bullshit.

ao3 allows works that depict all kind of taboo, morally questionable, disgusting, socially unacceptable subjects, no matter how graphic, how explicit it is being portrayed (that’s what tags, warnings and ratings are for!).

Grey Wolf taking a roll call and gretting responses from seemingly the entire forest.

to clarify, this didn’t happen to me. I found it on twitter and it made my blood boil

by the way, if you talk like this to a stranger in real life, you might get a black eye. I don’t condone violence, but sometimes if you fuck around, you’ll find out. it’s one thing to joke like this with your friend, someone you’re close with. but a stranger? know your boundaries.

Sure, you were in the top 5% of Being A Good Person, but then we kicked out all those Bad People, and now you're only in the 45-percentile of the ones who're left, and suddenly -you're- a Bad Person.

There's no escape from this except to spiral into tighter and tighter definitions and rules of what you need to do to keep ahead of the ever encroaching boundary between Us Good and Them Bad.

There's nothing wrong with policing your demographic borders if you need to do that, but at all times remember to ask yourself: Is what you need to do to count as One Of The Good Ones the same today as it was a year ago? Or would someone who passed a year ago get purged today? Because that's not a good sign of things if so.

This kind of shit's been heavy on my mind lately.

and some of them are her