shame³

bro i LOVED the calyrex adventure so fuckin much

creb i love you and don’t doubt for one second peony’s been huffing mad fumes

But the buzzword card match game is easy. It's so EASY. All you have to do is cruise a website, looking for the BAD word/trope/image you picked up in someone else's post, and SCREAM. It requires no actual understanding or background knowledge. Just the adrenaline of rage and false authority. It requires almost no effort. It's instant gratification and looks like power. It costs no real labor or money, but since it's emotionally tiring, it appears as if it does. It's so, so easy. It feels real. And it feels great.

But it's not real. It's a farce that makes us feel righteous without actually organizing or equipping us; it makes us feel like we're doing a lot when we are really doing almost nothing to fight for a better world.

This is how you get large numbers of context-deficient "activists" running around online spaces, constantly congratulating themselves for calling people fascists because they quickly looked at a post and identified the word COTTAGE or GREMLIN or WITCH, it lit up their brains with Superiority Complex Juice, and they decided this was clearance to start raging on behalf of a marginalized group's history... usually a group they do not belong to and a history about which they genuinely know nothing. You all show your entire cookie-seeking ass with this shit, but you GIVE YOURSELF the cookies!

But real knowledge takes time. Understanding takes time. Activism takes time. It's not easy. It's not immediate. It's not glorious. It's not self-righteous. It's work. Actual work. Not just something that makes your hands shake because you sent anon hate after reading a tumblr post and deciding this gave you the authority to e-peen crusade on behalf of a marginalized group you've adopted to boost your ego/anger.

This post -- and what I'm imploring us all to reconsider -- has nothing to do with being nicer or "civil" (lol). This is about effectiveness and getting real, tangible, observable shit done. Be as mad and loud as you please, as long as you understand that shouting isn't always your best tool, even if it feels good. But you must also be realistic with yourself about WHOM your anger truly serves and what it truly accomplishes. If it's only accomplishing social media clout, it's not effective. You're not there yet. You're falling into the sand trap of pseudo-activism, which is the enemy of real progress, real activism, real allyship, and real understanding.

If you recognize yourself and your online behavior and your brand of anger in this post, know I'm genuinely not vagueblogging about you. This is a huge issue in online social justice spaces. But please do reconsider your style of "activism," please do real research rather than let tumblr callout or history posts (that any navel-gazing pseudo-activist could shit out into the internet) galvanize you, please do your own analytical work, and please stop non-critically copy/pasting arguments and language just to go on the attack. Please stop mistaking one marginalized person's opinion for a universal badge that gives you permission to speak with authority on behalf of that entire marginalized group's issues. Please embrace the tougher truth that you've got to put in real thinking work to be an ally of any sort, and that means developing your own opinions, and that means risking being wrong and reassessing what you think.

And please, for the love of goodness, know that activism requires ACTION (labor-time or money) that ACTIVELY works to make a real person's life better in a measurable way. Social media is performative by its very nature, even if not all performance is malicious or bad. It's still not ACTIVism.

For anyone who is interested, here is a link to download two hand-drawn fonts I made, based on the alphabet used in Sword and Shield! Free to use, credit appreciated but not required

Some notes:

-There’s no consistent pattern to the way the alphabet is used in-game, so the way I assigned them to the English alphabet isn’t canon. 

 -That being said, you’ll probably need to use the key if you want to type a word with a canon spelling, like a gym leader’s name

-As you may notice, the galar alphabet has 26 unique capitals, but only 15 lowercase, so some characters are used to represent more than one English letter 

 -Not shown in the key, but both fonts also include numbers and several punctuation marks