connor

deep human voice: I'm not mama, mama's over there!

fawn, plaintively, continuing to approach: mee!

deep human voice: there, little guy! you're teeny-tiny!

fawn: (continues to approach)

deep human voice: here, let me-- we'll put you next to my coffee cup, so we can see how little you are.

fawn: (wobbles forward, lies down next to a travel coffee tumbler set down on the road. the tumbler has pictures of cute woodland creatures on it)

some context from Twitter preceding this historical and entirely uneventful moment

looking at it now, i can tell you the treasure trove of Problematic Content™ it has. the rampant sexism (despite all the authors being women??), lack of care for continuity or exploring the world outside of our protags, one-dimensional villains, indigenous stereotyping/appropriation, even more sexism, the age gaps and incest-y relationships that the authors either don’t notice, refuse to acknowledge, or defend for some fucking reason, the INSANE ableism and heteronormativity… it’s a MESS.

i’m still glad i read it. i still reblog fanart of hollyleaf and leafpool, still point at cats and give them warrior names, i still think fondly of the island in the lake behind my friend’s house that looked exactly like the meeting spot in the books, still joke with friends about which clan we’d be in or our favorite characters would be in

as a kid, i didn’t notice all the issues, but there were others i could spot. i could spot the accidental incest and say “that’s weird, i don’t like that.” i didn’t notice the sexism in the way the female characters were always shoved aside and ended up becoming Doting Mothers™, but i did notice the ableism of assuming cinderpelt and jayfeather couldn’t be warriors despite their disabilities not being something that would stop an irl cat from finding a way to hunt or fight. and i was able to say “i don’t like these parts, and there would be a way to do them better.”

contrast to when i was in… fourth grade? third? i remember i was in public school, and i borrowed a book from the library that offhandedly mentioned a ouija board. i asked my mom how to pronounce this strange new word and she immediately took the book from me until it was time to return it. this didn’t teach me what my mom wanted me to learn, which was “we don’t fuck with demons in this house,” it just taught me that i couldn’t go to my mom with questions about books i was reading because she would take them away.

it was way better for my young, learning mind to say “what is wrong with this, why does it feel wrong, and what could they have done better” than to just take the Problems™ away

1984 is a story about a single person living under an authoritarian dictatorship where everything is under the control of the Party. Your privacy, your house, your soul, your mind, your body, your feelings, your job, your possessions, all of that is controlled by the Party. It is a book rife with things that people would deem “problematic”–the surveillance state, the torture, the concepts and existence of both the Miniluv and Minitrue, the treatment of Eastasian and Eurasian prisoners, the Two Minute Hate, Hate Week, hell, even Emmanuel Goldstein can be deemed “problematic” thanks to the undertones of antisemitism.

Guess what? A lot of those problems are by design, because 1984 is a dystopian story where absolutely fucking everything is shit, and it’s designed as a cautionary tale about life in a dictatorship and a surveillance state.

who wrote the fault in our

stars loves the taste of

want to spread a resource: https://www.darkpattern.games/

dark pattern has articles on gameplay patterns that are used to manipulate how you play a game and/or how much money you spend on it.

there are also lists for games breaking down what patterns they feature/dont feature

check it out, make sure your friends arent falling into a pit of gambling and despair.

Want to support developers that continue adding content to your favourite games via battle passes? BAD.

Developers put time and effort into creating things you enjoy but want to offer them for free so they opt to get paid via ads? EVIL.

You, as a player, want to relax and play something you enjoy but you just happen to enjoy grinding? VILLIANOUS.

Just want to play an RPG? Congrats, by this site’s definitions, you’re being manipulated!