#celestial text

i know a lot of us (myself included!) are hesitant to point out and address racism because we feel it's not our place, don't want to speak over POC, etc., but unfortunately that just results in the burden falling solely on POC. if we ignore racism when we see it, even if it's coming from a place of not wanting to do the wrong thing, we're contributing to the problem. the fact that we can choose to ignore racism is white privilege.

if we don't point out and address racism, we're putting the POC in our community in the position of either needing to tolerate seeing it, or needing to address it themselves. generally, when people are told that something they said or did was racist, they either deny it and act like the person pointing it out is being too sensitive (which is, itself, racist), or go overboard with apologies and self-flagellation (which makes it about them). both of these reactions put even more burden on the person pointing out the racism.

if we want to make this community safer for POC, we have to actively try to do that. it is unfair to the POC in this community for us to sit back and expect them to do all of the work to make this community safer for themselves on their own.

from the MOGAI ABCs prompt list:

1. Alterhumanity - are you alterhuman? how does this affect your life and identity?

[please note] — we're using refraction's auxiliary pronouns (it/its) throughout this post for the sake of clarity.

yes, we're alterhuman! collectively, we just generally identify as alterhuman and speciesqueer. most individual members are nonhuman or otherwise alterhuman / speciesqueer.

for myself, max, this affects my identity a lot; most aspects of my identity are influenced by my being a dog and a vampire, and many aspects are influenced by my connection to the moon. to give a few examples: my attraction feels vampiric; my affection is dog-like; the way i experience being genderfluid and genderflux feels comparable to the moon cycling through phases.

for refraction, this affects both its identity and life a lot. it is a fictive of The Distortion from The Magnus Archives, and as such, is a concept rather than a person. many of its identities are connected to things like lack of identity, unreality, uncertainty, paradoxes, etc.

the main way that this affects refraction's life is in its speech; since refraction is a concept, it does not use first person pronouns, as it feels those are too tied to the idea of personhood. it opts to use first person aptnouns instead.

our alterhumanity also affects our relationships, both in-sys and externally! due in part to my dog alterhumanity, my partner and i are in a dog + owner nichelink. due to my connection to the moon and refraction's connection to the sun, it and i are in a sun + moon nichelink. many of us experience some kind of alteraffectis attraction and are in relationships that involve that attraction.

there are so many more examples i could give, and so much more detail i could go into, but this is already quite long! (and, frankly, i'm running out of words.) introspection is fun, i'm excited to answer more of these.

this is not solely the result of any particular incident or issue within the community. i've just been really frustrated with the community in general for a while (months, at least) and have reached a point where i need to step back because interacting with the community is bringing me more stress + frustration than enjoyment.

extranthaeic -> transmultine

without getting into too much detail, our mother had a medical emergency a couple weeks ago, and there was a non-zero chance of her dying. in the process of treating her for that medical emergency, doctors discovered an unrelated serious health condition that will require her to have major surgery relatively soon. the condition itself is very dangerous, and the surgery for it also has a non-zero risk of death.

since the start of our archiving, we have been reblogging from users with various stances on all kinds of discourse topics, including reblogging from radqueers. we have no plan to change this. however, we're wondering if y'all would appreciate us tagging posts made by radqueers.