your heart is a muscle the size of a rat

Is it “just as bad” to sit next to a guy who won’t stop blathering on about how God Is Real as it is to sit next to a guy who won’t stop blathering on about how God Isn’t Real? Do both these people obsess over the wrongness of the other and make little TikTok and Facebook debates where they insult each other for being stupid for believing whatever it is they believe? Are they basically the same people in different flavors?

Yes. They are “just as bad” as one another and they are both individually insufferable, because, hey man, can I just eat my fuckin’ sandwich in peace without you lecturing me about this AGAIN?

But OP is right, only one of these people is aligned with a group that has, historically and currently, held enough power to, oh, I don’t know, burn people at the stake and lobby for restrictions of rights and commit the entire Spanish Inquisition in which we roasted people alive inside of a bronze sculpture of a Bull that made their screams from inside of it sound like a cow mooing (that’s real, it was called the Brazen Bull and the first man to die in one was the man who designed it, look it up).

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May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

So in an ask one duder mentioned mlp cast as mobians so I thought it'be funny to try

Mind: I'm not much of an mlp fan, so i'm sorry if like uhhhh I didn't get it all that right

if the book wanted to just be like. a straightforward condemnation of pedophilia, then humbert wouldn't be the narrator. but it's not a book about child sexual abuse being bad -- like that kind of goes without saying, you don't really need to argue it -- it's a book about the ways humbert justifies his abuse to himself, and to the audience. it's a book that's largely about how stories are told, and the way personal and cultural narratives can be used to justify even the worst imaginable behavior. humbert doesn't describe himself abusing a child, he describes himself being 'seduced' by a 'nymphet'; he likens his relationship to that of dante and beatrice or petrarch and laureen to establish historical legitimacy and lend a sort of tragic romanticism to it. it almost feels like the book is less focused on the story itself, and more on the way humbert spins it. he isn't written to be an obviously hateable monster, he's written to be erudite and tragic and funny, and that's because the book isn't trying to teach you that child abuse is bad, it's demonstrating the ways that being erudite and tragic and funny can be used to normalize and justify something that you already know is bad. imo it's largely a book about the ways that someone can construct a mythology to convince themselves of anything, and how if we don't think critically about what we're told then we can fall into the same trap.

it's also absolutely a story about reading past the lines to figure out what's actually going on. like it's funny that the book has become such a touchstone for discourse about Media Literacy bc I really think that 'media literacy' is like. one of the core themes. like the book kind of requires that you ignore the way humbert writes to make out what he's actually describing; the worse his behavior gets, the more flowery and beautiful his writing becomes. the story the book tells if you buy into humbert's mythology and the story it tells if you don't are dramatically different.